John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky

Since 1972 roughly every 10-15 years the footage collected from the Imagine album recording sessions is repackaged into a new film/documentary. So you will watch the same scenes in either:

Imagine (1972) - the original film, mostly cheesy a music special Imagine: John Lennon (1988) - a more expansive look into John's life Gimme Some Truth (2000) - more focused on the recording sessions Above Us Only The Sky (2018) - the most recent repackaging

It seems redundant to watch them all but all of them have different goals. I found Gimme Some Truth the most enjoyable because the footage itself tells the history and the focus is the music.

Above Us Only The Sky in other hand feels MORE LIKE a PR piece with the function of maintaining the Lennon's image of a pacifist and raising Yoko's profile. Not a bad documentary but too thin. It features some forgettable present day interviews with people involved with Lennon at the time. The most noteworthy appearance is of Julian Lennon, often at odds with Yoko.

I'm not a film critic but I am a big documentary fan and lived through the Beatles and John Lennon's life. (I'm 63). I learned a lot I didn't know from this documentary, mostly about John and Yoko's relationship and how she was really his muse. To be honest I mostly thought of her as the strange woman who howled unintelligibly and broke up the Beatles. But there's so much more to the story. This is a film about music, love, social change, war, art and the media (and a lot more!). I would say there are a few too many talking head interviews but none of them are superfluous and they all add to the story and commentary. Just wish I could have seen more of John and Yoko (there's a lot but the film alludes to thousands of hours of film). Mostly I was left inspired by their creativity and willingness to take on the critics and the media and blaze their own path. Their idealism and vision was so beautiful and yet the world is an even darker place today. Yet we can always Imagine and that gives hope.

A similar look at John Lennon and Yoko in life and work a year or so after the Jan 69 events of the latest film. The Beatles have broken up, John is cleaned up, happy and Yoko as the muse leads to the Imagine album. Once again the creative process is Lennon on a piano with an assortment of session musicians following along, including George. Some insight into the bitterness with Paul and the move to New York. Also a fair look at Yoko and her own history as an artist. A more traditional rockumentary with the people who were there adding context 47 years later.

Stumbled upon this film and figured it would be a lame re-hash of the previous "Imagine" documentary. To my pleasant surprise, it felt like there was footage I hadn't seen before. I enjoyed pretty much the entirety of it.

This is a portrait of Lennon in transition, newly free from the shackled of then-fraught Beatles. He seems a lot more relaxed and chilled out then just a couple years prior, and it's nice to see.

I appreciated the documentary spending some time crediting Yoko's positive influence (for once) on songs like Imagine and others. Whatever your opinions of the woman is, it can't be denied that we got a huge amount of amazing music from her time as Lennon's muse.

There's a number of talking heads without much interesting things to say. Basically just heaping praise, which dragged the film down a bit I felt. More interesting were the stories from the engineers and other musicians in terms of Lennon's recording process.

All in all, a nice appetizer for the upcoming Peter Jackson helmed Beatles doc of their time recording Let It Be.

Worth a watch.

Not different by many other biographic films, it is the portrait of the genesis of an emblematic song. Seductive for confessions and pieces of real life and seductive for the grace to define a time, for generosity of Yoko Ono Lennon and for the wise footage, it represents a remember and inspired definition of the art and its seed - the relation between so special people.