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Wednesday, July 3, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

Have you ever wondered what 
would happen if a select assortment 
of pop culture phenomena ceased to 
exist, only for a handful of people to 
remember them and have to figure 
out what to do with that memory?
I haven’t either, but “Yesterday” 
builds a premise around that hyper-
specific conflict, specifically as it 
pertains to The Beatles and the lone, 
previously unsuccessful musician 
who remembers them, Jack Malik 
(Himesh Patel, “EastEnders”). It 
was a calculated risk — reportedly, 
10 million dollars’ worth — to bank 
an entire film on such a particular 
dilemma. Why not another band? 
Better yet, why not pose the same 
question of another historical phe-
nomenon: something of graver con-
sequence, like a war? But it’s not my 
place to postulate about what they 
could have done; I’m assessing what 
they did. While they ran with their 
initial risk, the makers of “Yester-
day” played it safe otherwise, and left 
us with a harmless but perfunctory 
romantic comedy.
Humor has the potential to make 
laughable concepts appear intelli-
gent. Shows like “Seinfeld” got away 
with it for years. Such an application 
of humor is vital for a film like “Yes-
terday,” to get us past the peculiarity, 
if not absurdity, of its scenario. In the 
movie, however, the humor was hit 
or miss, depending partly on who 
you are. Just as some of the jokes on 
the original “Office” bewilder fans of 
the American adaption, “Yesterday”’s 
British brand of humor may not reso-

nate with the Yankees in the crowd 
who aren’t bloody interested in the 
BBC. It relied heavily on situational 
comedy and deadpan delivery, both 
of which Patel had the perfect, non-
plussed face for.
Regardless of who you are, how-
ever, the bulk of “Yesterday”’s humor 
will feel like it’s missing something, 
and that’s self-deprecation. It’s what 
made Ed Sheeran’s (“Bridget Jones’s 
Baby”) cameo so surprisingly hilari-
ous with all the jokes about “ginger 
rap” and subpar lyricism he had to 
dodge, and Kate McKinnon’s (“The 
Spy Who Dumped Me”) brutally 
honest assessments of record execu-
tives’ intentions wickedly funny. 

Curiously, “Yesterday” relegated this 
kind of humor to the sidelines, when 
its absurd, world-without-Beatles, 
butterfly-effect-be-damned 
main 
storyline needed it most. We can’t 
be expected to take you seriously if 
you’re not self-aware enough to laugh 
at your quirks.
An exercise in self-deprecation: If 
I were in Jack’s place, one of the few 
remaining keepers of The Beatles’s 
music, I’m afraid whatever musi-
cal genius John, Paul, George and 
Ringo offered the world would be 
lost. That’s not what screenwriter 
Richard Curtis (“Mamma Mia! Here 
We Go Again”) had in store for Jack, 
however, and this element of the film 

makes a bold, albeit probably inadver-
tent, comment on musical genius. By 
allocating Jack the same proportion 
of success The Beatles enjoyed from 
their work, the film implies songs are 
habitable rather than the product of 
unique genius, a nice jolt to the West-
ern conception of creativity. There’s 
a clumsiness to even this maneuver, 
however, as the remakes of Beatles’s 
hits are touristy, forgettable covers at 
best, and, on top of the musical medi-
ocrity, no one in the movie ever paus-
es to interrogate what, if anything, 
makes Beatles lyrics timeless.
That is another one of the film’s 
biggest faults: With classic cinematic 
mistrust of audience’s intelligence, 
it either brushes over or hastens to 
answer all of the questions it raises. 
The one original question it stammers 
out, it hastens to answer in no uncer-
tain terms for us. Jack’s ethical dilem-
ma, as to whether he should pass off 
another’s work as his own? Solved. 
The romantic void Jack must cope 
with as his fame accelerates expo-
nentially? Filled. Don’t you know, his 
best friend Ellie (Lily James, “Baby 
Driver”) has been in love with him all 
his life, and her confession suddenly 
flips a switch for him. Yes, “Yester-
day”: The clumsy comedy comes with 
clumsy love story on the side. Not 
what you ordered? Once again, me 
neither.
“Yesterday” does very little harm, 
but also little notable good, tak-
ing few risks, aside from building 
a movie around a world where the 
Beatles didn’t record their own songs. 
You’re probably better off queuing up 
Abbey Road and asking yourself what 
your life would be like without those 
songs, than seeing this film’s mini-
mally inventive take on that question. 

‘Yesterday’ lacks originality

JULIANNA MORANO 
Summer Managing Arts Editor

FILM REVIEW

UNIVERSAL PICTURES

On June 25, Courtney Barnett 
opened for The National at Hill 
Auditorium. Hill is a big venue, 
and people were still filing in 
when Barnett took the stage. 
She began with “Avant Gar-
dener,” a song whose title is so 
endearingly clever that I wish 
I’d thought of it myself. 
I’ll say now that I wasn’t a 
huge fan of Barnett before hear-
ing her live. Something about 
her speak-singing felt overly 
stylized, and her lyrics seemed 
too crammed with Dylanesque 
forced rhymes. Live, she was a 
whole new ball of wax. Barnett 
is smaller than I expected, pix-
ie-like, with a long mullet that 
made me fantasize about get-
ting the same haircut. She sort 
of looks like Shailene Woodley. 
Either way, she came across as 
both intimidatingly cool and 
familiar, like someone you’d 
strike up a conversation with at 
a co-op party. 
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly 
what was so incredible about 
Barnett’s 
performance. 
Her 
voice isn’t lovely, exactly; she 
mostly yells or speaks along 
with the music. She’s an excep-
tional guitar player, but that 
alone doesn’t explain it. I think 
it’s her enthusiasm, the unapol-
ogetic excitement with which 
she performs. Her whole set had 
the energy of that scene in “Back 
to the Future” where Michael J. 
Fox plays Johnny B. Goode. She 
hopped around the stage, her 
feet constantly shuffling and 
moving. As she sang, Barnett 
dipped her guitar into a never-
ending series of maneuvers, 
as if she were the professional 
partner in a “Dancing with the 
Stars” tango and her guitar was 
the celebrity. At one point she 
leaned forward, left leg rising 
behind her like a figure skater, 
as if she’d become Tonya Hard-
ing on season 26 of “Dancing 
with the Stars.” My point is that 
Barnett was completely mes-
merizing. The only person she 
even remotely reminds me of is 

a young Melissa Etheridge, who 
I’ve never seen live but whose 
early concert videos show the 
same kind of physicality. Bar-
nett’s head-banging was no less 
thrilling. 
The National came onstage 
a few minutes after Barnett’s 
giddy farewell (“Thank you!” 
in a ripper Australian accent). 
Anyway: The National. The 
large screens on each side of the 
stage flashed pixelated videos 
as they set up, which reminded 
me of those old ads about movie 
piracy in which illegally down-
loading a movie is compared to 
stealing purses and televisions. 
Unfortunately, The National’s 
performance was as ineffective 
as those warnings. 
They began with “You Had 
Your Soul With You” from 
their most recent album, I Am 
Easy to Find. It sounded good 
in a tight, controlled way — the 
opposite of Barnett’s freewheel-
ing, experimental sound. The 
next few songs were also from I 
Am Easy to Find: “Quiet Light,” 
“The Pull of You,” “Hey Rosey.” 
They all sounded overproduced 
to the point of flatness, and the 
instruments were so loud that 
I could barely hear frontman 
Matt Berninger’s voice. I could 
decipher a few words thanks to 
Berninger’s habit of acting out 
the lyrics in a series of jerky 
motions that looked uncannily 
similar to the five movements 
from “The OA.”
Once, Berninger walked out 
along a side aisle and pinned an 
uncomfortable-looking 
audi-
ence member up against the 
wall, plucking the man’s base-
ball cap from his head and sing-
ing plaintively to him. The guy 
laughed nervously and darted 
away as soon as Berninger 
moved on. This episode, like 
so many in the show, was both 
indulgent and bizarre. I don’t 
quite know why Berninger’s 
physical exhortations were so 
irritating, but maybe the raw, 
unassuming quality of Barnett’s 
performance primed me with a 
low tolerance for theatrics. 

Barnett outdoes 
National at Hill

MIRIAM FRANCISCO
Daily Arts Writer

CONCERT REVIEW

Read more at michigandaily.com

Yesterday

Universal Pictures

Michigan Theater

