George Harrison biography on HBO

Gillian

Well-known member
Joined
May 2, 2010
Messages
950
Reaction score
2
Location
In the hills of New Almaden, California
Martin Scorsese has made a 208 minute biography about Harrison, airing on HBO starting Oct. 5-6 with repeats through the month.

Here is Roger Ebert's review of "George Harrison: Living in the Material World"
 
Nice. Can't wait.
 
Can't wait for this to be shown over here. George was a great lover of the uke.
 
Great. I've had all the HBO's for free for the past year as part of an introductory package with my cable company. I haven't watched one single program on any of them. When the package expired two weeks ago I cancelled them instead of paying the extra $. Figures.
 
Well, for those of you who don't have HBO....

In my opinion, you didn't miss much.

There was some interesting new footage of his early days with the Beatles' but nothing revelatory. There was a brief clip of George Formby (not even playing his uke!) and if you weren't a uke fan or British, you wouldn't know who Formby was. McCartney and Starr told the same stories they told on the "Beatles' Anthology". I'm hoping Part 1 was just setting the stage for a more enlightening Part 2.
 
Well, for those of you who don't have HBO....

In my opinion, you didn't miss much.

There was some interesting new footage of his early days with the Beatles' but nothing revelatory. There was a brief clip of George Formby (not even playing his uke!) and if you weren't a uke fan or British, you wouldn't know who Formby was. McCartney and Starr told the same stories they told on the "Beatles' Anthology". I'm hoping Part 1 was just setting the stage for a more enlightening Part 2.

Ditto. I was a little disappointed too. I'm a Beatles fan (but not fanatic) but I still didn't really get into it. It was a lot of very early history (even Stu Sutcliffe!) though I did like the Eric Clapton interviews -- he joked they had the same taste in women! Layla (aka Pattie Boyd) anybody? Hopefully the second half will be better.
 
I see ono sneaked her way onto the photo.

Ono didn't "sneak" her way into the photo. She's in the photo representing John Lennon in the same way that Olivia Harrison is in the photo representing George Harrison. What's with the Yoko-bashing?
 
Last edited:
The second installment was much better than the first. Tom Petty talked about Harrison and his ukuleles and there was a snippet of Harrison playing "The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" (on his Kamaka Lili'u:)). But that was it for mentioning the ukulele.

I'm glad the documentary didn't dwell on his cancer battle. I thought the funniest aspect of him was even though he was a multi-millionaire, right up until the end, Harrison held a big grudge against paying taxes.
 
I'm curious to know if anyone has heard of plans to release this on DVD (or even better, digitally) in the U.S.? I'm probably one of the few people in the universe who has never owned a television or been a cable subscriber, so sadly, I missed this.

It's already been released in Japan as a DVD set but I'm totally stupid about such things - can a Japanese DVD play on my American computer? Although now that I read some of these comments about it not being all that great, I'm not sure that I want to spend $200 on an import DVD even if it would play...
 
Personally, I'd wait until the documentary appears on Netflix, or bits of it appear on YouTube, and put the money towards another ukulele...or a TV.

LOL! I'll probably go the rest of my life without a tv. But another ukulele sounds good to me :)
 
Top Bottom