Movie review: The Beatles: Eight Days A Week — The Touring Years

REVIEW: With Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years, director Ron Howard makes a cursory doco of the first half of The Beatles’ career.

THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK — THE TOURING YEARS (M)

Director: Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind)

Starring: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, John Lennon.

Rating: 21/2

Always stopping the show ... until the shows had to stop.

The Beatles were a hit-making, youth-quaking, never-to-be-repeated musical phenomenon.

The famous pop quartet from Liverpool functioned as a major recording act for just over eight years — 1962 to 1970, to be exact — and only played live until 1966.

With Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years, director Ron Howard has dashed off a cursory doco covering roughly the first half of the band’s career.

A scene from the documentaryu film The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years. Picture: Supplied / StudioCanal Films

Gently tapping the sides of a cast-iron chronology familiar to even casual Fab Four fans, the film starts with the global outbreak of incurable Beatlemania, and ends with the decision to never set foot on a stadium stage again.

If you’re after new revelations about what it was like to be a Beatle back then, this isn’t the place to look.

The boys were livewire quote machines at press conferences. Girls screamed wherever they went. A constant whirlwind of new albums and singles blew the charts away every month. Girls screamed even more.

And if The Beatles weren’t locked inside a studio, they were on the road playing their hearts out. Even if the girls screamed so loud that no-one could hear a thing.

The must-see factor is quality performance footage of The Beatles with today’s quality sound mixing and syncing. Picture: Supplied / StudioCanal Films

Whether via fresh interviews (Paul and Ringo) or sound bites salvaged from the archives (John and George), all four Beatles are on hand throughout with polite commentary on the craziness of the era.

Unfortunately, so too are an inessential collection of talking heads such as Sigourney Weaver and Whoopi Goldberg, continually celeb-splaining the blandly obvious.

The only genuine must-see factor is plenty of quality performance footage, further boosted by better sound mixing and syncing than seen before.

The Beatles: Eight Days A Week opens tomorrow (Friday) for a strictly limited season

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