"The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years," the long-awaited documentary dedicated for the Beatles and their music, is definitely a treat for their fans around the world.
Directed by Ron Howard, who is best known for box-office hits like "Apollo 13" and "A Beautiful Mind," "The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years" features the four-year touring life of the band from June 1962 to August 1966, performing 815 times in 90 cities in 15 different countries.
It showcases classic Beatles and recovers long-lost performance footage, which was lovingly restored to cinema quality. These alone makes the film worth watching.
Los Angeles Times reports that Howard did extensive interviews and gathered contributions from familiar faces such as Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and Larry Kane, who as a young journalist accompanied the band on their first two U.S. tours.
Paul McCartney discussed "The Beatles Are Greater Than Jesus" incident and pointed out that John Lennon became "a sort of a broken man" because he was forced to apologize for it.
On the other hand, Ringo Starr admitted he had difficulty trying to keep time. "I could not hear anything. I'd be watching John's ass or Paul's ass, his foot tapping, his head nodding, to see where we were in the song."
The film also made use of formerly taped encounters with John Lennon and George Harrison.
Billboard quoted Harrison as saying that the addition of Ringo Starr as the band's drummer was the piece of the puzzle that the Beatles badly needed. "Once we got Ringo, we started to do it better and more professionally."
Overall, the documentary exposes how exhausting all the group's touring was, and how it led to their decision to abandon the road and focus on making music in the studio. "Eight Days a Week" displays how it was not only a good decision but also an inevitable one.
