TWST is a profound head scratcher. Andrei Ujică's found footage film looks at the Beatles arrival in New York City and the surrounding area up to their performance at Shea Stadium and it is oddly lifeless. How the great filmmaker could make a film this dull boggles the mind, more so when it it playing two of the biggest film festivals in the world.
The film is a mix of documentary footage mixed with some fictional characters (inserted via drawings). It's a film aiming to to recreate a moment in time and make it alive for today by mixing by mixing old footage and the words of some people who were there and some new material.
Unfortunately it just sort of lies there.
The problem with the film is that out side of the voice over and the inserted drawings a great deal of this material is material that we've either seen or seen a version of. Specifically if you are a Beatles fan you've seen this before. This is especially true if you are from New York. While the film stitches a great deal of the footage of the arrival of the group to NYC and the insanity and press conference together it's nothing particularly exciting. Its a lot of people screaming and the Beatles cracking wise. Why are we being shown this? I'm not certain.
Once the press conference is over the film switches gears and we get sequences in the city, at Jones Beach and else where, and while we get some voice overs that attempt to stitch the material together into a faux narrative, nothing really sticks. There is little excitement. Worse some of the constructed conversations feel fake. While I can blame Ujica's not being from New York in the 60's for some of the clunkiness of the dialog, the truth is the words feel artificial and not anything anyone would say. For example the girl's discussing shooting of the World's Fair Pavilions footage is structured not so much to be the actual talk of two young women, but rather to explain what we are seeing.
None of it is bad as such, but rather it's incredibly dull...and worse it never seems to give us a reason as to why we are seeing this. Honestly I have no clue, none, as to why we are seeing any of this.
Personally outside of getting to hear the radio broadcasts of WMCA, WABC and others I really could have cared less.
A boring bust.
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