I used to own Backbeat back before I went to DVD in 1998. I started a VHS ban when I bought my DVD player in 1998 and that basically shut me out of watching my Backbeat video. Polygram Entertainment didn’t have the movie on DVD until just last year…

Well, I have it right now — rented it form Netflix.

I can go into detail about the synopsis of the film but that’s not exactly what I want to talk about. What I wanted to talk about because of a scene that just passed was John Lennon and how not only the movie portrayed him but how I know him from what I read… How different he is from myself but how much of the same he is too.

I’m into astrology a bit and I like Libras from what I have encountered. I know I can fight with Aries, I know I can have a good time with Gemini’s and Pisces’s, but it’s Libra’s that I can most identify with… I feel sort of a kinship with them even though we come from different backgrounds and different trains of thought in life – it all comes back to certain underlying personality traits to me.

John’s a Libra — Born 2 days after myself — well, but 39 years before me…

At any rate – there is a rage in Lennon in this portrayal by Ian Hart (who does an absolutely superb job. He looks like Lennon as a teen in the famous Wooten-Fete photograph) which coverts up known facts about Lennon – his insecurity, his troubled past. John’s father left him when he was young, his mother left him as well — dropping him with his Aunt Mimi.. She (John’s mother – who was immortalized in the Beatles song Julia) was later killed when she was hit by a car. John often covered this sense John’s anguish – his loneliness — is displayed well by Hart, especially in the face of the possibility of losing best friend Stuart Sutcliffe to a local girl (world famous photographer Astrid Kirchherr). The slow lose of Stu to love drives Lennon mad.

How many times have we all be jealous of losing someone to the world?

How many times have you been jealous having someone move on in life when you ant very much for them to stay?

I can identify with that quit ewell… But this isn’t the first movie that I could identify with one of the characters….

And to take John’s send off to Stuart and Astrid at the end of the movie:

Love me tender…. Love me sweet…. Never let me go…. Yiou’ve made my life complete, and I love you so…(followed by a “fuck it, lets go” )

Well, there are times you catch an older movie on the cable box when you are flipping around and you find yourself watching the film – that you probably already saw – and seeing it in a different way…. Understanding it better than when you first saw it and perhaps seeing a message in the movie, or something you didn’t see originally when you watched the film.

I had two scenes hit home with me in particular. One scene had Anthony Quinn basically summing up the business world, and another scene showed just why Danny Devito’s character is like he is… let me see if I can break it down.

Talking about the DeVito scene first, he has Penelope Ann Miller in his home and is hosting her for business dinner. She happens across a photograph of a cheerleader and DeVito’s character, Lawrence “Larry the Liquidator” Garfield, starts to explain who the girl was and you get a glimpse at what his character – a brash, arrogant, son of a bitch – has deep down inside him. He talks about being smitten for this girl when he was in high school and how she dated the quarterback of the HS football team. He talked about sending her poetry in an attempt to woo her and how she stayed with the Quarterback. He tells how he would have given her anything and done anything for her, but “All she wanted was a touchdown.”

Lawrence Garfield, being short and overweight and not able to win the girl over with physical prowess, tried with his mind and heart…. His mind and heart are strengthened with his money – but it takes ruthlessness to make money. Larry’s no idiot, and he has done what he could to educate himself not only in the business sense, but about the finer things in life. What he couldn’t achieve with his physical prowess, as I said, he tried to with his mind and heart. Maybe that’s why I can identify with him so well? Maybe because I’ve walked a mile in those shoes before and been turned away or flat out turned down?

Meanwhile, back to the second thing that hit home with me – Anthony Quinn, speaking in front of a stock-holders meeting near the end of the film, spoke of the business world and things that seem common place now in business. Maybe that was the way it was then, but I can’t remember…

Nor can I remember what he was saying now, a few hours after I watched the film… Hopefully I can get some of these quotes sometime in the near future.