The entry begins:
This is easy: Brad Pitt has been talking about doing Lennon for a couple years, and he would be both box office and a fascinating entry to the Lennon sweepstakes. My favorite Lennon so far is Ian Hart in The Hours and Times, but those who underrate Pitt should watch The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The role calls for a combustible mix of hilarity and doom.About Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music, from the publisher:
Cameron Crowe should direct, obviously. Yoko: much harder to cast, but I'd vote for...[read on]
In his commanding new book, the eminent NPR critic Tim Riley takes us on the remarkable journey that brought a Liverpool art student from a disastrous childhood to the highest realms of fame.Learn more about the book and author at Tim Riley's website.
Riley portrays Lennon’s rise from Hamburg’s red light district to Britain’s Royal Variety Show; from the charmed naiveté of “Love Me Do” to the soaring ambivalence of “Don’t Let Me Down”; from his shotgun marriage to Cynthia Powell in 1962 to his epic media romance with Yoko Ono. Written with the critical insight and stylistic mastery readers have come to expect from Riley, this richly textured narrative draws on numerous new and exclusive interviews with Lennon’s friends, enemies, confidantes, and associates; lost memoirs written by relatives and friends; as well as previously undiscovered City of Liverpool records. Riley explores Lennon in all of his contradictions: the British art student who universalized an American style, the anarchic rock ’n’ roller with the moral spine, the anti-jazz snob who posed naked with his avant-garde lover, and the misogynist who became a househusband. What emerges is the enormous, seductive, and confounding personality that made Lennon a cultural touchstone.
In Lennon, Riley casts Lennon as a modernist hero in a sweeping epic, dramatizing rock history anew as Lennon himself might have experienced it.
My Book, The Movie: Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music.
--Marshal Zeringue
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