Help! | Page 8 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I’m glad that there’s a thread for Help ! here because it’s hard to find someplace that actually talks about it.

tl;dr – Movie is good, it tickles my funny bone in just the right way.

I enjoyed Help ! more than AHDN simply because it fits my style of humor more — absurdity is much more my bag whereas AHDN ‘s humor is more lowkey. (To be fair I enjoy both movies a whole heck of a lot.) There’s a lot to enjoy about Help ! particularly how everything is framed and the coloring of the film. I’m glad they got a real director to do it — in addition to the Beatles movies Lester also directed the legendary Musketeers movies which might be the finest pair of movies ever made. Now that I’ve seen AHDN , Help ! and can compare them to Musketeers I see the DNA of Musketeers’ physical comedy. (According to Wikipedia, Three Musketeers was originally considered for a Beatles movie which is probably why the comedy is dialed so high…the more you know!)

It helps that Lester is a real film director that studied things like visuals and shot composition. Sometimes when I want to horrify myself I try to imagine the Beatles as a modern boyband and what a hatchet job their movies would be if they were created in the modern Disney-esque way with a yes-man director and rushed CGI. (Say a prayer for CGI artists in Hollywood please! It’s not their fault that Disney treats them like dirt and refuses to give them the resources and time they need to make a polished product!) What a horror show that would be! Can you imagine how awful it would look?

But instead Lester gave us beautiful shots like this:

I seriously can’t get over how beautifully centered everything is. I’ve watched a lot of bad comic book movies so I definitely notice when a film crew takes their time to compose a simple, beautiful shot. Even something as simple as this is lovely:

John and Ringo are in black and they take up the majority of the space on the right side. this provides a good balance to the black chair on the left. Ringo being in the bed in the floor helps ground both him and John visually in the shot — it gives the visuals a sense of weight. What can often happen, like in a comic book movie where a lot of scenes are only filmed from the waist up, is that the characters are not rooted visually so it feels like they’re floating in space. Not so in this movie.

Even something like this:

Has the same visual philosophy. The heroes being in dark clothes is pretty genius actually because they immediately pop out from the colorful background. (AHDN had to use different visual techniques to keep them framed in each shot.) The visual placement of John on the white bench and George/Ringo/Paul’s suit on the white bed is very deliberate. I think Lester is using a “rule of thirds” shot here where the frame is divided into three parts. Having the boys on either side and leaving the middle clear creates a distinctive visual. Here’s the same shot with my crummy dividers:

Even here keeping George’s feet planted is a good move — again, rooting the visuals on the ground. To be sure this is very simple stuff but I appreciate seeing this in the 21st century.

This shot is also a good example of the color stuff that I like:

This is why keeping the boys in black was such a good idea. The film is flexing its new color muscles (using the comic books was an inspired choice they pop so much) and of course keeping John in Paul’s white bedroom was a great idea for this. There’s a riot of color in the background but it’s carefully framed by the lights on the organ and then John is a distinctive visual in his black clothes. He immediately stands out, he’s impossible to overlook.

We see the “rule of thirds” approach here again:

Again, simple stuff but I love seeing it appear. The little flashes of color at their wrists makes me happier than I can say. The visual symbolism is striking — the boys are stuck in a drab police chief’s office where everything is beige and boring…but there they stand in their stark black clothes with their true colors quite literally showing on their sleeves! I love it.

I should do a direct comparison between this fight scene and the Musketeers fight scenes one day. Overall I think the Musketeers scenes are obviously more visually striking and more competently executed since that was intended to be action movies from day one, but I do think that Help ! contains many of the preceding ideas for those movies here especially the visual comedy.

Of course we get another great example of our “rule of thirds” shot:

I swear I’ll stop prattling on about this, I just love highlighting it. Mad Max: Fury Road was made with the same technique! One of the reasons why that movie looks so great.

I love how this scene is constructed. The background is so wild visually but the simple clothes on the boys once again make them pop out, impossible to miss. 

This is also the scene where John steals that big sword in his jacket and does that weird little rabbit hop across the room as he scurries back to Ringo’s side to convince him to cut it off. I wish I knew how to gif because that little hop John does had me screeching the first time I saw it. Whenever I rewatch this movie I rewind it so that I can watch it over and over. He was such a weird little man! I love him!

It doesn’t help that all four of the boys are incredibly beautiful in this movie. Absolutely ridiculous, such beautiful men. 

I’ve run out of things to say so I’ll end this post here but I think I have another one in me about Help ! This is a very interesting movie and I want to write something overanalyzing the story and how it pertains to Beatlesmania and what the boys were experiencing at the time and how their legacy has endured. I’m hungry right now though so it will have to wait another day.