The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years

A thoroughly delightful, crisply edited film.

The substance is enchanting.

The documentary rightly keeps coming back to the music and the band's delight in making it. Good move. It truly is a joy forever.

As “Eight Days a Week” springs from color to black-and-white, and as frenzied action is intercut with stills, we get a delicious sense of doubleness. The Beatles now belong to an honored past, stuck there like an obelisk, and yet here they are, alive—busting out all over, time and time again. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe there are no more stones unturned when it comes to the Beatles. Maybe The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years is not especially revelatory or earth-shaking. But the band was.

The result is the kind of movie that can be counted on to put a smile on the face of even the casual Beatles fan. In other words: a good laugh.

It comes as little surprise that Howard, a nimble and proficient storyteller in non-fiction and fiction like, hasn’t a natural documentarian’s drive for information: This diverting, brightly assembled boomer nostalgia trip won’t open the eyes of any existing Fab Four fans, however much it pleases their ears.

Related media: I grew up long after they broke up. I have seen some documentaries about them, but there are just so many documentaries. I have also read up about them on Wikipedia, but again, there are just so many things to read up on. > What's it like?: The first two-thirds is the usual documentary-style coverage of the Beatles's Touring Years: 1962 - 1966. The remaining one-third is the post-credit 35 minutes of restored and remastered footage of their 1965 concert at Shea Stadium. > Tip: This documentary really out-did Marvel films in the post-credit department. It had 35 minutes of material after the credits had fully rolled. If you had left the cinema after watching the average content of the first two-third, you'd be kicking yourself. Leaving this chunk of the documentary to after the credits, without any indication that there is more coming up, is ridiculous on the part of the director! > Pros: The post-credit 35 minutes of restored and remastered footage of the 1965 concert at Shea Stadium is what truly made the film. It was great! > Cons: The first two-thirds was decent but not very interesting if you already know a lot about the Beatles. How would the the different age groups rate it? > Children: Average Teens: Average Young adults: Average Medium age adults: Good Old adults: Good My rating: 4/5 (no half scores). It is worth spending your money and watching it in the cinemas.

Ron Howard directed this look at the Fab Four from their first recorded performances thru their last show at Candlestick Park. The footage (some of which is being shown for the first time) captures the magic and energy that the foursome generated…not to mention the endless screaming crowds. It also contrasts their early charming "mop top" beginnings with the less enthuiastic experiences that ultimately ended their live concerts. It's crisply intercut with interviews from the Beatles and famous fans that adds a personal perspective to deepen the appreciation of their impact on the world. If you're like me, you'll sing along with every song and revel in the joy that their music still brings. (Look for Sigourney Weaver as a fan in the Hollywood Bowl crowd.) NOTE: This is being simultaneously released on DVD & Hulu, but without 30 minutes of the re-mastered Shea Stadium concert that plays in the cinema.

What’s it about? Beatlemania. What did I think? Four boys. Four years. That’s all it took to take the Beatles from the grimy basements of Liverpool to the center of a claustrophobic global touring hurricane. This was the birth of teenagers losing their minds in epic proportions over the cult of celebrity, and the most revelatory moments are the screamed, sobbing reactions to the barely-out-of-their-teens-themselves Fab Four. The heady rush of the first tours quickly turn to jaded dissatisfaction: by the mid-’60s the mop-tops had become caged animals in the circus, and their final tour gig ends with them carted away in a literal meat locker. Beatles for sale, indeed. Movie-goers (and only movie-goers, I'm told) are treated to the previously unscreened ‘65 Shea Stadium concert after the credits, yet this film merely skirts the Beatles lore and footage available in the Anthology series. But then, that damn thing lasted nearly 12 hours.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]