John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky

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.

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.

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.

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.

For eight years, the Beatles rewrote the rules of popular music. After they split up, they were never to reach the same heights as individuals. Except, perhaps, for John Lennon's 'Imagine' album, his first record after the break-up. The album was recorded at his home studio, a process that was mostly recorded on film. That film, coupled with the obligatory sequence of talking heads, has now been recycled into this documentary. Why is it good? Well, because Lennon was (at his peak) brilliant, which makes the insight into how he made his music innately more interesting than the average film of this type. But it also makes a strong case for the (positive) influence that his wife Yoko Ono had on him, and suggests persuasively that the album was very much a product of their shared life, although once it was completed, they abandoned their English country home forever. It's a very human picture of a genius; there's (almost invetably) a measure of sycophancy to it, but it's still well worth watching.