"The Beatles tours were like Fellini's Satyricon," John Lennon once remarked, and seeing the director's 1969 masterpiece of decadence again, you can only wonder how they made it through alive. A bleak but visually stunning crawl through the paranoia, bisexuality and corruption of ancient Rome, it's hardly easy viewing, but stunning all the same as a lurid portrait of a world tipped over into the realms of madness.
Sean Penn has done many good things, and none of them can be found in this sentimental guff. As Sam, he's an autistic who, with the help of saintly lawyer Michelle Pfeiffer, tries to prove he's a fit father to his daughter. It's manipulative, dishonest, and wreaks carnage on The Beatles' songbook. Penn was Oscar-nominated. You have to laugh.
Like everyone else, if I crave the society of other adults, I'll have to pretend this is abhorrent. (Really, it's just so-so). Yet, if the Beeb had had the balls to spotlight the rebels in the camp instead of pushing the show into a karaoke niche none of the kids fancied, it could've been more grotesquely compelling than Big Brother's Jade in her porcine pomp. Ainslie, for one, had it in him to be an irritating iconoclast of some pluck, and even the toothsome David was drunkenly bitching like a trouper till he twigged he was actually going to win the thing and played safe.
