If there weren't already more exhaustive and authoritative takes on the Beatles, I'd give this a higher score.
Also, if you really dig the Beatles's story, this flick puts a bad taste in your mouth in the first five minutes. Howard thinks he can do his actuality voodoo to graft Ringo properly onto the Beatles in Hamburg. He made the calculation that fans would shrug that off as artistic license... but it does reek a bit. He didn't even have to mention Stu and Pete by name: All he really would have needed to do is mention that Ringo joined on pretty quickly when the new demands of studio recording, back in England, necessitated a more professional percussionist. That's a great part of the story, an homage to Ringo, not onerous to bear, and certainly a weird thing to jettison in the interests of squeezing the matter into the 100min runtime.
Now, I'd direct you to the Beatles Anthology, which covers their career exhaustively, authoritatively, and in greater detail and is a trove of key audio and video.
That said, I was a bit astonished at some of the really cool and unique bits Howard got his mitts on that I hadn't seen before. And I have to admit that, after the above-mentioned hamfisted edit, Howard makes some fine compositional choices for his finished product. He targeted a particular segment of the pageant which was the Beatles, and made a decent go of it. Gotta hand it to ol' Opie.
Also, if you really dig the Beatles's story, this flick puts a bad taste in your mouth in the first five minutes. Howard thinks he can do his actuality voodoo to graft Ringo properly onto the Beatles in Hamburg. He made the calculation that fans would shrug that off as artistic license... but it does reek a bit. He didn't even have to mention Stu and Pete by name: All he really would have needed to do is mention that Ringo joined on pretty quickly when the new demands of studio recording, back in England, necessitated a more professional percussionist. That's a great part of the story, an homage to Ringo, not onerous to bear, and certainly a weird thing to jettison in the interests of squeezing the matter into the 100min runtime.
Now, I'd direct you to the Beatles Anthology, which covers their career exhaustively, authoritatively, and in greater detail and is a trove of key audio and video.
That said, I was a bit astonished at some of the really cool and unique bits Howard got his mitts on that I hadn't seen before. And I have to admit that, after the above-mentioned hamfisted edit, Howard makes some fine compositional choices for his finished product. He targeted a particular segment of the pageant which was the Beatles, and made a decent go of it. Gotta hand it to ol' Opie.