“The Beach Boys” in IMAX presented by Disney+

AMC Tysons Corner, VA 5/21/2024

Even though it was over an hour away and meant navigating Washington, D.C. traffic, I reserved seats and went with a good friend who has seen Brian Wilson with me and likes the Beach Boys.  We arrived about 7:00pm for the 8:00pm showing and there were about 50 people ahead of us patiently waiting in line.

It took a while to be let in; the word from the Disney+ rep was that the sound was coming over too loud and they were getting a handle on it, but soon we were on our way into the theater.

The show started around 8:05pm with a live Q&A with the directors Frank Marshall & Thom Zimny, plus Mike Love and Al Jardine. The Q&A was hosted by someone just a year older than me whose name I did not remember. Frank Marshall spoke a bit about how he had eaten cheeseburgers with Jimmy Buffett at Paradise Cove and how that led him to have a sequence to reunite the band at Paradise Cove, the site of their first album cover picture.  Additionally, the picture is dedicated to Jimmy.

At the end of the Q&A, which ran for about 15 minutes, Brian Wilson was introduced to the audience at the LA theater to a standing ovation.  Brian was seated next to David Marks, and Bruce Johnston and Blondie Chaplin were also there and introduced.  The live portion of the evening ended.  The other special part about seeing this in a theater was the poster given out to attendees at the end of the film showing.

The film started. The sound was amazing, and the new material taken from super-8 film about their early days was great to see.  I am curious to see how it looks on a “regular” HD screen as in IMAX format the old concert footage came out very grainy at times.  It can’t be helped, but the Peter Jackson restoration of Beatles footage has spoiled us to a new standard in the 21^st century. (Updated: the film looks and sounds great on my “plain” HD1080 screen.)

I thought Al’s new interview footage was the most illuminating, but it was good to see the interviews with all the surviving members. Rabid fan reaction has been mixed to the film.  It really didn’t cover any new ground, but it was wonderful to have David Marks’ input in the film. Similarly, Blondie Chaplin’s brief remarks acknowledged his (& Ricky Fataar’s) contributions.

It was frustrating to see so much of the band’s later story glossed over, but you can’t tell a story that long in less than two hours without leaving out a lot.  Much like the recent book by the band, it makes the decision to stop at 1980 except for a brief postscript.  The “reunion” at Paradise Cove gets about a minute of screen time with no audio of the event. We can only hope that it is released at some point in the future on a special edition package or separate episode.

Despite the pre-release hype this is not any kind of a definitive treatment of the Beach Boys’ story, but it is a pretty good celebration for the casual fan.

If you don’t have access to Disney+, I think the high-water mark (pun intended) would be the release The Beach Boys: An American Band which can be found readily, packaged with the Don Was film Brian Wilson: I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.  Many of the interesting interviews in The Beach Boys came from these two earlier films.