dbdumonteil The title is no misnomer.As George sang in the track from the eponymous album,"by the Lord Sri Krishna's grace (....) my salvation from the material world" .At the time many people laughed at Harrison whom they dismissed as unhip and holier-than-thou.Scorcese's movie is exactly what George would have wanted:a long and winding line of thought of an icon who,little by little ,ditched the material world :an adulated entertainer in the glorious years of the Beatles (to whom he contributed a good handful of classics) ,a peak of musical and spiritual inspiration with his mind-boggling " all things must pass" (which remains,along with "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" ,my favorite solo album).In the seventies ,it seems that George was not that interested in carrying on with a career which anyway was on the wane after "material world" ,his last number one .The concert for Bangla Desh was a grand gesture (and Bob Geldof's laurels actually belonged to the ex-Beatle),but the rest of it ,the 1974 tour,the infatuation with racing cars ,the homemade productions ,the Japanese tour,even the marvelous Traveling Wilburys, were minor events .George had warned us on the overlooked B side "the inner light" in the words he set to music on a college professor's request:"without looking out of my Windows ,I could know the ways of Heaven" .His final years were probably the happiest of his life ,with a marvelous wife ,Olivia ,who shared his way of life ,and a son to carry on.Two hundred years after Voltaire,like Zadig,he cultivated his garden while continuing his spiritual quest.His ultimate album,"brainwashed" ,lived up to its name:although terminally ill,the musician produced a cheerful album,full of serenity .More than thirty years after the song,he had learned the "art of dying" ;"I've never seen such a confident patient " a physician said .Like Scorcese's take on Dylan ("no way home" ) ,"living in the material world " is never off the point .Nothing sensational,nothing scandalous,but an absorbing portrayal of a man,who,after conquering the whole world,realized he could "arrive without traveling " and "see all without looking".

David Allen "George Harrison" (2011) documentary it the best "trip" back to the 1960's era mentality Harrison never abandoned! See it and you'll experience "the 60's"...the noblest era of modern times! ---------- See this noble documentary by Marin Scorcese! It will take you back to the fabled "1960's" and everybody needs to re-visit those times, including people like me who remember it well, and also people never part of it, or who were there but left it when the calendar changed and "modern times" after the "60's" started up and continued to the present (2012).The famous movie titled "My Dinner With Andre" (1981) asked the important question "What if the '60's were the best years ever to have happened, and it's been all down hill after that?" Worth thinking about! The "'60's" were a highlight in human history of great importance, a benchmark of cultural and human excellence.They somehow got disappeared, and more to the sad point, never properly or adequately explained or communicated after the times changed, and glory of the '60's died.George Harrison was an icon of the 1960's, and his life after the '60's was devoted to ideals part of the high water mark times of the '60's.....and we see his important life in this wonderful documentary movie.....created in 2011 by Martin Scorcese.Scorcese attended NYU Film School in the mid-1960's and was a senior camera crew tech guy for the "Woodstock" (1969) documentary when Scorcese was still in his 20's. He was there for all of it, and never forgot it."George Harrison: Living In The Material World" (2011) is a memorial to the whole decade as well as to Mr. Harrison who was and is a remarkably representative person part of the 1960's.You had to be there to understand it, and remember it.No adequate documentary or other cinema art work effort ever came near to communicating what the 1960's were all about, why they were so important, and truly different than times before or since.....not until this documentary.See it, and you'll see the 1960's ideals and way of life, mentality.....so important and beautiful and worth preserving and studying.The 1960's were more than "flower power" and "social protest" times and events......those years, for some people, were a way of life never to be forgotten or abandoned.Yet, they are hard to describe......memories supported by visual and sound images need to be presented about the 1960's.This documentary is the very best effort doing that...succeeds as no other documentary about those times has ever done, to my thinking.You'll "feel" the 1960's........if you screen this documentary movie....and that's a worthwhile experience...one worth repeating often until you "get the point" and then start working to bring it back...somehow.----------------- Written by Tex Allen, SAG actor. More about Tex Allen at WWW.IMDb.ME/TexAllen. Email Tex Allen at [email protected]

Weird_and_Proud1 Martin Scorsese has put together a beautiful documentary tracing the life of the most underrated member of the Beatle's, George Harrison. With a run time of over three and half hours, Scorsese is able to explore the various layers that went towards forming Harrison's absolute identity. Through the use of personal letters, pictures, home-videos, and never-before-seen interviews, the viewer is given the rare opportunity of discovering Harrison beyond The Beatles.The documentary is essentially divided into two parts, the first of which follows the formation and success of The Beatles. Whilst the second focuses on Harrisons spiritual journey to find meaning beyond the capitalist world he found himself trapped in.Through the careful selection and juxtaposition of archival footage and documents, Scorsese emphasises the bittersweet realities of The Beatles rise to fame. Unfolding the story of four naïve British lads torn between childish excitement at their growing success, and apprehension towards the zealous fan-base it gained them. This clash of ideals is exemplified by Harrison in a letter to his parents: "Dear Mum and Dad – The shows have been going great with everyone going potty…everywhere we go we have about 20 police on motorbikes escorting us".The fervent behaviour of the fans escalated to the point that all four Beatles decided it was best to avoid any public outings. Frustrated by the confinement fame had enforced on him, Harrison became disillusioned by the material world, and seemed to experience a displacement of the self. In an interview he stated: "you see yourself in the paper but don't actually realise it's you".This displacement of identity led Harrison to pursue a spiritual path in the hopes of attaining the meaning of life through philosophy. Under Guru Ravi Shankar, Harrison learned to use Indian spiritual music to become one with a greater philosophical being. His friendship with Ravi also led Harrison to fund and organise the first ever benefit concert: The Concert for Bangladesh, which raised funds for refugees from East Pakistan following the 1970 Bhola Cyclone.Scorsese also uses the documentary as a medium through which Harrisons song writing credentials can be measured against the Lennon/McCartney partnership. "George was a loner and had to work on his own" states George Martin (Producer of four of The Beatles original five albums).It was therefore inevitable that Harrison would get lost in the shadows of the superpower that was the Lenon/McCartney writing team. Scorsese traces the anatomy of Harrisons body of (solo) work, highlighting in particular their spiritual origins. Whilst Lennon/McCartney's work exemplified masterful popular music, Harrison's engaged with his spirituality, and search for meaning in life. Scorsese incorporation of Harrison's solo work in the documentary illustrates the importance it holds to understanding his psyche.Scorsese's documentary excels in exposing hidden dimensions of Harrisons life and personality; from his love triangle with Pattie Boyd, and Eric Clapton, to his financial funding of Monty Python. Bringing together a multitude of Harrisons professional and personal acquaintances (including Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, Terry Gilliam, and Eric Idle), and artifacts from his personal archive, Scorsese creates a colourful mosaic capturing the diversity that constructed George Harrisons life, and personality.

MisterWhiplash Why did Martin Scorsese decide to make a film about George Harrison? Why did he decide to make a film about the Dalai Lama? Or The Age of Innocence? While this is another documentary about a rock-star icon, following along from Scorsese's own The Last Waltz, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and Shine a Light, it's closest in style and tone to the Dylan doc, as a profile of a man of his time and how he lived through it. Unlike Dylan, who is a mystery even to the most curious of fans (or just one of the more obnoxious, depends how you look at it), George Harrison seems to be, from accounts and interviews, to be a man of spiritual and artistic integrity who had various concerns and ideas, and he expressed them throughout his life - or, if not in the recording studio or as a producer of films, then with his garden. One may not be able to find the link between the sarcastic (if 'quiet') kid from A Hard Day's Night with an old man in a garden (or for that matter the old man having to defend his life against a burglar, as he did, in 1999), but it's all here.I may not have found Harrison quite as enlightening as Bob Dylan, but should he be? Maybe in his own simple way though Scorsese finds a more direct path or personal link to him through the spiritual side. Harrison was someone who found through the Maharishi, Indian music, transcendental meditation, some kind of path through the noise of Western civilization. The clash is what's interesting here, and Scorsese knows it too. While the director is fascinated with BIG emotions in his films (see anything with De Niro for more on that), he's also fascinated how someone operates with a calm demeanor on the surface burning with emotion underneath. Harrison was the guitarist for the Beatles and then when the break-up happened, he had to break-off and find another way. He was still a pop star, and his first solo album, the great 'All Things Must Pass' went into the top ten of the charts. But how did he reconcile a working class British-Liverpool upbringing with the teachings of Haria Krishna?Of course, the first hour of this massive three 1/2 hour films are dedicated to him and the Beatles, and it's wonderful to see the footage, hear the songs, find out some details about the songs Harrison wrote for the group (i.e. the first song he ever wrote, 'If I Needed Someone'). Then the second part is about the spiritual search, or what's close to it, mixed with the start of the solo career (and of course some of the famous tales of romantic highs and lows via Patti and Eric Clapton are included). There's a section for the film-part of his career, where as a man of faith, though not exactly (it's complicated you see) he helped pay "the most ever anyone's paid for a movie ticket" for Monty Python's Life of Brian. And then about his gardening, his second wife Olivia (and - kind of a shock to me - the candor which Olivia, who was a producer on the film and wrote the book spin-off of the film, talks about Harrison's infidelities in their marriage, something I really admired), and other things like friendships, the burglary in 1999, and his untimely passing from cancer.It wouldn't be a Scorsese movie without music, and hey, it's George Harrison so there's lots of good stuff here (sadly, for me, no 'I Got My Mind Set on You'), and there's the director via editor David Tedeschi's marvelous way of navigating the story with music. Watch the opening and how 'All Things Must Pass' goes over the WW2 footage, then mixed in with some of the more traditional music of the 1940's period to see some of the brilliance with which Scorsese does this. And the interviews are mostly illuminating and nice, once or twice piling on the adulation (perhaps as one might expect) while still giving some moments for the quirks Harrison had - such as a story Tom Petty tells about ukuleles - and some of his flaws as a man and artist. I'm not sure if for fans the film will shine a whole lot of new light, though for newcomers it should provide the bulk of know-how. What's great about the film ultimately is the thread of the story, and how the filmmaker is not afraid to jump around, or jump ahead, and expect the audience to keep up. It's not as straight-thru as, say, The Beatles Anthology. We're seeing a life in various dimensions, time-spans, and it's as if not more post-modern than the Dylan doc. It's joyous, meditative, somber, happy, funny, a little daft and a little less than perfect. I can't wait to revisit the life and work.