This is the first trailer for Nowhere Boy, based on the memoir by John Lennon’s half sister, Julia Baird.  I’m sure everyone’s sick of slick music biopics by now, but Lennon seems like an obvious subject, even if Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, et. al. flicks got made first.  It’s got a few other factors going for it as well that give me hope it won’t be the usual hokey tear/penis jerker.

• It narrows its focus on John’s early schoolboy days when he met Paul, rather than all the later stuff that’s already been written about ad nauseum
• No big-name actors trying to win an Oscar
• No Beatles songs in the trailer, so at least you know it’s not a cheap ploy to sell more Beatles records
• Made by British people, and British people are smarter. Sorry, it’s true.  That’s why God made them uglier to even things out.

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Okay, now I’ve never heard of these dudes before, but I guess there is this band called The Beatles and apparently they’ve had a couple of hits over years…I guess. It’s hard to tell if they’re popular or not, because I recently bought Now That’s What I Call Music 30 and none of their songs were on it. Pussycat Dolls were on there for sure, but not these dudes called The Beatles.

Anyway, news today is that Robert Zemeckis and Disney are in talks to remake Yellow Submarine into a 3-D bigscreen feature. Don’t choke on the bong water, Spicoli, you read that correctly: a 3-D version of Yellow Submarine; an experience that sounds both amazingly awesome and yet horribly terrifying, all at the same time.

Disney and Robert Zemeckis are looking to catch the wave of Beatlemania, floating a new 3-D “Yellow Submarine” for the bigscreen, with merchandising in tow and prospects for spinning off both a Broadway musical and a Cirque du Soleil stage production. [Variety]

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