Coming just after his superb feature The Christophers, Steven Soderbergh has now made a surprisingly moderate documentary, dominated and frankly marred by uninteresting and pointless AI. It is about the inadvertently poignant final interview given by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on 8 December 1980 in New York’s Dakota apartment building, hours before his death.
The interviewers were Dave Sholin, Laurie Kaye and Ron Hummel from San Francisco’s KFRC radio station. On their way out of the building with the conversation on tape, they were accosted by a creepy stalker-fan; in attempt to calm the man down, Laurie Kaye gave him a brand new copy of John and Yoko’s new album Double Fantasy. This sinister man was Lennon’s future murderer who got him to sign an album – perhaps this very album – and later shot him dead. It is a chilling, stomach-turning twist of fate, although the film avoids emphasising the interview’s obviously macabre context, understandably preferring a positive emphasis. Inevitably, though, the unacknowledged irony flavours what we see and hear: a fundamentally happy, hopeful man looking forward to the future, behind whom a dark shadow is looming.
Yet the documentary’s selling point apparently resides in the blandly generic and very mediocre AI images and sequences repeatedly generated over what Lennon has to say about peace, love, music, conformism, and what remains of the counterculture as the 80s dawned. The results are simply second-rate: like knockoff animated Hipgnosis album covers or Woolworths art. The rumour had been that Soderbergh was actually going to use AI to dramatise John and Yoko talking to match the audio. However controversial that might have been – and Soderbergh must surely have pondered it – it would have been more interesting than what has actually materialised.
As it is, the film replays the lengthy and vehement conversation with John (hardly any Yoko – a relative absence not noticed here) interspersed with conventional still photo and archive footage material, and those heartsinkingly literal AI clips. At one stage we hear Yoko warning that one day we may all “finally be replaced by computers” and it isn’t clear how intentional the irony is supposed to be.
There have been quite a few Lennon documentaries recently, including Kevin Macdonald’s One to One: John & Yoko and Alan G Parker’s Borrowed Time about John and Yoko’s American life in the 70s; Eve Brandstein’s The Lost Weekend: A Love Story about Lennon’s affair with his assistant May Pang, a subject to which this film indirectly alludes; and Power to the People, about John and Yoko’s charity concert at Madison Square Garden. Soderbergh’s film has a specific interview as its premise, although apart from the reminiscences of the interviewers, it allows itself no substantial perspective or commentary other than offered by Lennon and (occasionally) by Ono.
Well, there is archival interest and historic drama in what Lennon has…
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