I saw it recently. It was nice. Gave a good layman’s version of what Brian Wilson accomplished, even if you don’t have the musical chops to understand how innovative it was.
I saw the Beach Boys in the late 80’s. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t touring with them then. What I remember the most from the show was them doing a key change acapala (spelling?). It was amazing to hear them stay together as a group as they navigated the key change. One of those impressive stunts of musicality that has stayed with me, much like Clarence Gatemouth Brown playing the violin so fast it seemed impossible that hands could move that quickly - then topping it and going even faster.
When purists complain and ask why some particular musician (especially in classical music) plays a particular piece too fast, the general reaction I’ve seen is, “Because she/he can!”
Had you noticed there’s a (kind of) recent mini-series of Beach Boys videos with those same young actors? In that sense, it reminded me of Stephen Sanchez’s videos (which I pointed out to our 10th grader, who’s a huge fan).
Just remembered that, for no particular reason last night*, I decided to listen to “Our Prayer.”
*(other than it’s a beautiful favorite)
Dano was phenominal and worth noting that he did a lot of his own singing. I also have to give John Cusak credit for his portrayal of middle aged BW. While to me Cusak looked nothing like 1980s Wilson (compared to Dano who was a spitting image of 1960s Wilson), Cusak’s use of speech, mannerisms, and tics were so on point that it allowed me to suspend disbelief.
As a whole, for a Hollywood biopic I think it does a pretty good job even if as a fan I would sometimes get frustrated as the glossing over or complete omission of certain things. I did find the use of parallel timelines to be a brave choice and it made it more interesting.
One problem when telling any sort of Beach Boys story is that there’s a lot of “you can’t make this shit up” reality throughout their career. There was just so much drama, tragedy, and overall weirdness that it would take hours to unpack all of it. If you start to include the “supporting acts” like Van Dyke Parks and others, it gets even weirder.
That was one of my biggest gripes about the Disney documentary that came out recently. The bulk of its runtime was re-treading the 1960s more or less glossing over everything that happened after Pet Sounds. There’s brief mentions of the Manson Family, but nothing about Eugene Landy, or anything about the deaths of Dennis and Carl. What it needed was an uncompromised 6+ hour Get Back treatment, not a 2 hour love fest. Unfortunately, Mike Love would never allow for this.
A truly excellent documentary series is the unauthorized but very high quality “Brian Wilson: Singer/Songwriter” that comes in 2 parts – 1962-1969, and 1969-1982. It’s often on Amazon Prime but can also be found on YouTube if the copyright bots don’t get to it first. It covers a mind boggling amount of breadth and depth in its 5 or so hour runtime.
There’s also the authorized Beautiful Dreamer documentary about Brian Wilson finally finishing Smile in the early 2000s. It goes into a lot of depth about the original creation and breakdown during creating Smile in the 1960s, along with the struggles and triumph to finally complete it in 2004:
He’s one of those actors who everyone has probably seen at least once in something…
In fact, he was in one of the best season 1 episodes of Deep Space Nine (Duet) as Marritza, a file clerk at a forced labor camp known for some awful atrocities…
He’s always been an interesting “heavy” and has always had the look, but he fully embraced those roles and delivered the goods.
We’ll break out our Missiles of October DVD and watch it… yet again. His performance as the Russian go-between twixt the WH and the Kremlin was commanding yet nuanced; such a gift for a low-budget 1970’s tv movie.
That video actually had some airplay on 120 Minutes in late '86 or early '87. (Stan Ridgway, who’d left Wall of Voodoo, had put out his solo LP The Big Heat by then, but I digress.)
Meanwhile I’d never seen this Yellow Submarinesque video before:
It was a little difficult getting thru “Don’t Worry Baby” a little earlier, but I did it anyway (twice).
