YESTERDAY

Publicity posters for Yesterday (© Danny Boyle/Perfect World Pictures/Working Title Films/Decibel Films/Dentsu Inc./Universal Pictures)

Imagine (see what I did there? No? You will!) that you're a struggling pop singer/songwriter and hardcore Beatles fan riding your bicycle one night when you collide with a truck, and at the very same moment the world's entire electricity supply inexplicably turns itself off for 12 seconds all over the globe simultaneously. You wake up somewhat bruised, battered, and missing two front teeth but not seriously hurt in a hospital where your #1 fan and best friend, who is also your manager, is there to greet you and make light of it all. Everything seems the same, until you happen to sing and play on your guitar the world-famous Beatles song 'Yesterday' to your manager and some other friends, and are totally bewildered when none of them claims to have ever heard it before, or to have ever heard of the Beatles!

You go home, google the Fab Four frantically, and are stupefied to discover that there is no record whatsoever of their very existence, let alone their music, and, speaking of records, all of your Beatles LPs, singles, and CDs have vanished from your music collection. Not only that, also gone from your world with no trace that they had ever existed are Coca-Cola (shock, horror!), cigarettes (shock, horror!), Harry Potter (shock, horror!), and Oasis (every cloud... 😃). Only you know of the Beatles and, significantly, only you know their songs, their tunes, their lyrics... What would you - a struggling singer/songwriter but uniquely aware of arguably the greatest collection of pop songs ever written by a single band - do?

That is the tantalising but also mind-blowing premise of the movie Yesterday, which, appropriately enough, I saw at my local cinema yesterday [i.e. 30 August 2019, the day before I wrote the original, shorter version of this present review]. A wonderfully quirky and thoroughly enjoyable fantasy romp directed by Danny Boyle and with a screenplay by Richard Curtis, it stars Himesh Patel as said singer/songwriter Jack Malik, Lily James as his manager/best friend/unrequited love interest Ellie, and Joel Fry as his hilariously useless but ultra-loyal roadie Rocky.

It also features Ed Sheeran as, yes indeed, Ed Sheeran, who 'discovers' Jack, and Kate McKinnon as Debra Hammer, the truly voracious L.A. agent that Ed introduces to Jack and who turns him into a global mega-star but has an acerbic line in vituperative insults so vitriolic that they would make even the late, great Joan Rivers blanch and blush in equal amounts. There are wonderful cameos too from the likes of Sarah Lancashire, James Corden (as himself), and a marvellously comic performance from Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar as his devoted yet incorrigibly disinterested parents.

All sorts of plot twists and turns occur along the way, including a meeting with a still very much alive but wholly reclusive 78-year-old John Lennon (presented as a veritable Lennon facsmile courtesy of a thoroughly brilliant yet mystifyingly uncredited performance by Robert Carlyle), a romantic sub-plot, plus, obviously, plenty of Beatles songs.

What more could anyone ask for, even though the unconscionably evil persona of uber-agent Hammer would make even Maleficent look like Cinderella??

 

Finally: be sure to click here if you'd like to view the official trailer for Yesterday.

And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!