Hippie, hippie shake

THE opening scene of Julie Taymor's new film, Across the Universe, is set on a bleak-looking beach.

Beatlemania: Jim Sturgess in Across the Universe

Across the Universe (M) 4½ stars National release Death Proof (MA) THE opening scene of Julie Taymor's new film, Across the Universe, is set on a bleak-looking beach. A young man, who we soon discover is named Jude and who is played by Jim Sturgess, looks down the eye of the camera and begins to sing the Beatles classic, Girl, my favourite track from the Rubber Soul album.

From that moment I was hooked, but not everyone is: a lot of people don't like this film. They seem to think it's shallow and corny and cliched; but if, like me, you believe that the Beatles wrote some of the greatest pop songs of the 20th century and if the 1960s was your era, you may just enjoy this movie as much as I did.

Taymor, one of the US's leading stage directors of big musical entertainments, from The Lion King to The Magic Flute, has made just two films before: her impressive, ambitious Shakespeare adaptation Titus (1999), based on Titus Andronicus, and Frida (2002), her biography of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.

She is completely at ease, it seems, with both the large canvas and the intimate detail. For her new film she has written a story, adapted into a screenplay by veteran British writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, that incorporates into its narrative 33 Beatles songs, from early works such as I Wanna Hold Your Hand, which is touchingly performed by a character called Prudence (T.V.Carpio) as a plaintive ballad of unrequited gay love, to I Want You (You're So Heavy), which cleverly forms the backdrop to a sequence in which another character, Max (Joe Anderson) is facing the prospect of being forced to join the military and to fight in Vietnam.

There is a story, though it's a pretty slim one. Jude, a boy from Liverpool, wants to find the American father he never knew.

Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) is a middle-class American girl whose fiance is an early victim of the Vietnam War. Jude and Lucy meet in New York and enjoy a love affair, but they are parted by the authorities.

Max is Lucy's brother (yes, he's seen with a hammer in one sequence, but it isn't a silver one) and is partly responsible for radicalising his sister in a sort of commune that includes JoJo (Martin Luther McCoy), a guitarist, and Sadie (Dana Fuchs), the spiritual leader of the group.

Hippies, Vietnam, the draft: all the elements are there. The film carries allusions to movies made at the time, such as Arthur Penn's Alice's Restaurant (1969). But the main source of enjoyment stems from the inventive way Taymor stages the musical numbers. Max introducing Jude to his mates with A Little Help from My Friends; Let It Be after the death of Lucy's fiance segues into a street riot; If I Fell in Love with You as Lucy speculates about a relationship with Jude; and a psychedelic sequence in which Bono does a spirited rendition of I am the Walrus.

These are all wonderful sequences, but they're capped by the presentation of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, which accompanies recollections of the assassinated leaders of that turbulent era. As an exercise in '60s nostalgia, Across the Universe has no peer.

***EARLIER this year a film called Grindhouse opened in US cinemas, but it performed so poorly that it is not being screened in Australia.

It was an attempt by those incorrigible film buffs and lovers of trash movies, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, to recapture the spirit of the kind of good-bad action movies that played in rundown cinemas and drive-ins in the 1970s, the era before digital magic redefined the way stunts and special effects are achieved.

Grindhouse consisted of two films in a double bill, both running about an hour and 20 minutes, plus trailers for a number of (fictional) forthcoming attractions. The films were scratched, pieces were missing where the celluloid had broken and been repaired, there were gaps in the sound; it was all very authentic. The Rodriguez film, Planet Terror, is a zombie pic; Tarantino's film, Death Proof, is a road movie.

When the distributors decided Grindhouse wasn't worth screening outside the US, the different elements of the movie were separated and Tarantino (unwisely) added 27 minutes to Death Proof. Audiences unaware of the film's genesis may be baffled by the scratches and bleeps, or by the animated "Our Feature Presentation" that kicks it off. They may also find it tame by today's standards, though it's easy to overlook the skill with which it's been made. The extended car chase that ends the film was achieved not by digital effects but by dangerous stunt driving, and if nothing else Death Proof will be remembered for introducing us to the amazing Zoe Bell, a stunt artist from New Zealand who was Uma Thurman's double in Kill Bill.

The wafer-thin plot features Kurt Russell as the maniacal Stuntman Mike who -- for unexplained reasons -- gets a kick out of crashing his "death proof" vehicle at full speed into cars driven by young women. The first part of the film takes place in Austin, Texas, where a local broadcaster, Jungle Julia (played by Sydney Tamiia Poitier), and her girlfriends become victims of Mike.

After this, a quartet of stuntwomen, including the remarkable Bell -- who plays herself -- face a similar situation; this section unfolds in rural Tennessee and makes a direct reference to one of the most celebrated of 1970s road movies, Vanishing Point (a film that, at one time, was banned in Australia).

Tarantino writes colourful dialogue for his actors, but what the women in both parts of Death Proof have to say, at considerable length, isn't all that riveting. No explanation is given for Mike's behaviour: he's just a very bad guy. But the chase scenes carry a considerable impact and the film certainly evokes a distant cinema genre with affection and accuracy.