YESTERDAY directed by Danny Boyle (UK, 2019)
Can this really be the same director who brought us Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and 28 Days Later?
Aside from one of the most unconvincing and sexless love stories ever brought to the big screen, the audience is asked to swallow whole the most lamely contrived plot devices (and holes) in the name of blurry-eyed nostalgia.
If this had all been pitched as a dream, we might have accepted that anything is possible as we do when Alice falls into Wonderland and Dorothy lands in Oz. But here we are in the real world of modern England with Himesh Patel in the part of Jack Malik.
Help me if you can!
He is a struggling singer from Suffolk who is about to quit when an global blackout causes a planetary memory loss of epic proportions.
Following this inexplicable (and unexplained) event we are asked to believe that :
1. Nobody remembers The Beatles.
2. Cigarettes and Coca Cola don’t exist
3. Harry Potter was never written.
4. John Lennon lives to enjoy a contented solitary retirement in a house by the sea.
5. A mediocre ginger-haired singer-songwriter plays a show and fills Wembley Stadium.
All of these are plainly absurd although since the fifth just so happens to be true, I suppose screenwriter Richard Curtis would resolutely defend his corner.
The Ed Sheeran cameo is especially grueling for self-respecting music fans although it could have been worse since rumor has it that Coldplay’s Chris Martin was first choice for this role.
This truly dreadful movie makes even the soppiest of Disney fantasies look like works of gritty social realism.
