ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO (A) - I ordered the new Yoko Ono biography from the library, and it was available for pickup on December 8th, the 45th anniversary of the death of John Lennon. The anniversary fell on a Monday, just like the date in 1980, when late at night my sister poked her head into my bedroom to tell me that Howard Cosell had announced the shocking news on "Monday Night Football."
Forty-five years later, I spent the week reliving that surreal experience of my senior year (which also involved the election of Ronald Reagan). I skipped ahead in David Sheff's book to the run-up to and aftermath of the assassination by Mark David Chapman. And I also dove back to the New York of Lennon's era thanks for the truly mesmerizing deep-dive documentary "One to One" from Kevin Macdonald ("The Last King of Scotland") and editor Sam Rice-Edward, with writer Clare Keogh. It is a fascinating immersion into the early '70s -- not just an examination of Lennon and Ono during their militant period but a granular sampling of American culture during a turbulent time. It all leads up to Lennon's only true post-Beatles solo concert, the One to One benefit for special-needs children, performed in Madison Square Garden in August 1972.
The filmmakers masterfully curate both familiar and obscure cultural moments from 1972 and 1973, mostly in New York. They brilliantly edit rarely seen footage -- including from Lennon's home life in a Greenwich Village apartment -- into an intoxicating montage. Even the most devoted Lennon fan will find something new here. The exhilarating filmmaking makes the music -- drop-ins from the couple's One to One concert, including "Cold Turkey" and "Come Together" -- again feel fresh and urgent.
We listen in on the phone calls that Lennon obsessively recorded -- whether it is planning an anti-war national tour with rabble-rouser Jerry Rubin, or Yoko explaining to their manager how to dispatch underlings to gather up flies for her latest art project. We see archival footage of the couple soaking up the vibe of New York City at its grungiest. The filmmakers re-create the Lennons' small Village apartment, with a droning TV prominently featured (Lennon was addicted to the tube).
The seemingly random archival footage -- gleaned from new reports, TV commercials and truly obscure sources -- replicate the maelstrom of the era. The events fly by chronicling Vietnam, hijackings, the Yippies, an election year, Watergate, street crime, FBI surveillance, political assassination attempts, Geraldo Rivera's expose of a mental institute for children. That last story inspired Lennon and Ono to stage the One to One concert as a benefit. Macdonald pairs the live performance of "Imagine" with clips of mentally handicapped children frolicking in a park at a huge picnic. During "Instant Karma" ("We all shine on") we see clips from Vietnam (bombs falling, dead bodies, Hanoi Jane) interspersed with footage of Nixon dancing with his daughter at her wedding.
The spiral into the minutiae of 1972 and '73 is dizzying. We meet the infamous man, A.J. Weberman, who went through Bob Dylan's garbage. (Dylan is generally portrayed as a capitalist sellout by this point, though still the godfather of the antiwar movement.) We see Lennon and Ono attending the first International Feminist Planning Conference in Salem, Mass., blurry super-8 images of the gamboling couple and local haunts whizzing by. There is Allen Ginsberg reading his poem about bathroom hygiene. Later, he is om'ing with Walter Cronkite from the floor the Democratic National Convention. It is all edited to mimic Lennon channel surfing between news reports (the bank heist that inspired "Dog Day Afternoon" for example) or ads or show clips.
Lennon and Ono make their peace pitch to middle America, hanging out on the talk-show circuit with Mike Douglas and Irv Kupcinet. On a recorded phone call, Lennon starts distancing himself from the anti-war radicals; he was always a bit of a coward when things got dicey. Wherever they went, he and Ono were baring their souls in their pursuit of an elusive utopia. This collage of sights and sounds captures a very specific time and place, an era that is now so long ago. It was the first unraveling I would witness as a kid, during a decade that ended with gunshots.
THE LOST WEEKEND: A LOVE STORY (B-minus) - May Pang, who famously kept John Lennon company in Los Angeles in 1974 after Yoko Ono kicked him out of the Dakota Building, oversees this insider peek into the ex-Beatle who was spiraling out of control. It suffers from cheap production values but it's full of heart and filled with exclusive photos, drawings and videos from that time.
Pang was barely 20 when she started working for Allen Klein's ABKCO, the Beatles' publisher at the time, and in 1973 she moved on to work full-time for Lennon and Ono, who had just moved to the Dakota Building from Greenwich Village. (She did a lot of production work on Ono's avant-garde films.) Lennon was drinking and philandering, and the generally accepted story was that Yoko kicked him out and ordered Pang to accompany him, apparently not caring if they slept together. (Ono had her own fling during this time.)
Pang's narration comes across as naive but earnest, and her story feels like more truth than myth. This was both Lennon's drunken "lost weekend" but also a fertile time for him -- making the "Rock 'n' Roll" album with Phil Specter and writing and recording "Walls and Bridges," one of his best. He wrote "Fame" with David Bowie and scored his first solo No. 1 single with Elton John's help -- "Whatever Gets You Thru the Night" was inspired by a late-night TV preacher's sermon.
As Pang notes, it was Lennon's first real opportunity to explore America, and we see him bopping around the Southwest as well as relaxing by the Pacific Ocean. Pang narrates (and provides video evidence of) Lennon's reunions with son Julian and ex-wife Cynthia and a "Rock 'n' Roll" jam session with Paul McCartney. She witnesses the debauchery with the Hollywood Vampires -- Harry Nilsson, Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, Bernie Taupin, Micky Dolenz and Ringo Starr. We see clips of his "Mind Games" TV advertisement and his first L.A. interview with Elliot Mintz for local Channel 7. We learn that Lennon adored his cats, one black and one white, named Major and Minor, after the piano keys. She was on the rooftop in New York for the famous rooftop photo session of Lennon in his sleeveless New York City T-shirt.
The production level throughout the documentary is on a par with a VH-1 special. She cannot afford the rights to Lennon's songs, so we get Eddie Money and the Raspberries instead. Julian Lennon is a key contributor, and his stories are quite touching when twinned with Pang's determination to fashion this as an old-fashioned love story. Despite the obstacles in her path, she succeeds.
BONUS TRACKS
A grinding live version of "Come Together," with Lennon replacing "over me" with "Stop the war!":
A snippet of Lennon, discussing performing live as a Beatle, from an interview on "Kup's Show" on WGN in 1972:
A gorgeous, haunting piano ballad from Ono, released in January 1973 -- shown in "One to One" along with grainy black-and-white footage from Salem, Mass., and a car trip back to New York City -- "Looking Over From My Hotel Window":
This one rolls over the closing credits of "One to One," "Bring on the Lucie (Freda Peeple)":
Lennon wrote "Surprise, Surprise" for May Pang in 1974:
And Julian Lennon contributed to "The Lost Weekend" soundtrack with the shimmery "Saltwater":
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