I just saw this movie Sunday night and I loved it!
Warning: Minor spoilers.
I really had no idea what to expect. I knew that there were Beatles covers in the film, and that the story line seemed to be your standard boy-meets-and-loses-girl one, with the sixties as a backdrop. What I didn't realize is that it was a musical, and had all these inventive dance and imagery routines for the songs. For the first ten minutes I wondered what I had got myself into (and my innocent friend, who knew less about the film than I did).
Then they did the "With a Little Help from my Friends" number, and it was so playful and fun. THEN they did "It Won't Be Long" as a girl group. SOLD. I was completely onboard from that moment. We were both laughing as our heroine and her friends come in, answering "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" in their high voices. The Beatles totally should have been a girl group. My love blossomed from that point on.
From the selection of songs and the sequencing, it was clear to me that this movie was a labor of love. The way certain vocal embellishments in these well-known songs were given to a character to express his or her emotion at a particular moment was brilliant; nobody who didn't pore over their Beatles catalog could have come up with it. ("Come Together," "Hey Jude" and "All You Need is Love" spring to mind). I enjoyed all the various cover versions; hearing these songs performed afresh with such different voices and arrangements gave me a whole new appreciation for the songs.
I thought the idea of using Beatles songs to tell the story of the late sixties was clever. The point was not to come up with a dramatic plot. The whole film was an exercise to illustrate that the Beatles catalog could be used as soundtrack of the times. I think it succeeded brilliantly.
I don't know if this film is still playing where most of you are, but I wanted to share my delighted response with you. Cheers!