Month: December 2000

For me, the Beatles have always been part of the cultural background — ‘Yesterday’ is, alas, Muzak piped over supermarket loudspeakers — and yet this 36-year-old film still feels fresh and spontaneous. Captured forever here in a filmic bottle is pop-culture lightning, not only Beatles magic and energy but the spirit of the early 60s that sustained it.

Years before anyone had ever heard of Spinal Tap, there were the Rutles. Eric Idle got by with a little help from his Monty Python and Saturday Night Live pals to create this mockumentary, originally a 1978 NBC-TV special exec-produced by Lorne Michael, part satire of and part tribute to the Beatles.

‘I’ve a naughty little tale to tell,’ the Marquis de Sade informs us as Quills opens. It’s actually the opening line to the latest bit of juicy pornography he’s writing, but of course it applies to the story Quills tells, a fictional account of de Sade’s final years spent in a French insane asylum. As promised, Quills is bawdy and often surprisingly funny, but more frequently it’s like a dark and disturbing flip side of Shakespeare in Love, exploring the inner and outer demons that torment and inspire writers and the necessity of leaving writers to exorcise those demons on their own, no matter whose sacred cows get slaughtered.