John Lennon: The Last Interview Commentary – Soderbergh thinks there are no people with AI video clips | Cannes Film Festival

Cit comes later his best appearance The ChristophersSteven Soderbergh has now created an incredibly intense documentary, dominated by ugly reality and apathetic and useless AI. It is about the last fascinating interview given by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on 8 December 1980 in the Dakota apartment in New York, a few hours before his death.

The interviewees were Dave Sholin, Laurie Kaye and Ron Hummel from San Francisco’s KFRC radio station. As he exited the building with the taped interview, he was followed by raucous fans; trying to calm the man down, Kaye gave him John and Yoko’s new Double Fantasy album. This sinister man was Lennon’s future killer who got him to sign an album – maybe this same album – and then shot him. It’s a tough, gut-wrenching experience, even though the film avoids emphasizing the obvious, preferring to emphasize the positive. Inevitably, however, an unknown humor touches what we see and hear: a truly happy man, a hopeful man looking forward to the future, behind him a dark shadow is approaching.

Yet the selling point of the record apparently resides in the bleak and mediocre AI images that are repeatedly produced in what Lennon says about peace, love, music, harmony, and what’s left of the culture of the 80s. The results are secondary – like the originals of Hipgnosis movies or the art of Woolworths. Rumors were that Soderbergh would use AI to play John and Yoko to match the voice. Even if it were a contradiction – and Soderbergh must have pondered it – it would have been more interesting than what happened.

As it is, the film also shows a long and intense conversation with John (no Yoko – no family member who hasn’t noticed yet) interspersed with ordinary and archival footage, and real AI animations. At one point we hear Yoko warning that one day we’ll all “be replaced by computers” and it’s not clear what the humor is supposed to be.

There have been several recent Lennon documentaries, including Kevin Macdonald’s One to One: John & Yoko and Alan G. Parker Borrowing Time about John and Yoko’s American life in the 70s; Photo by Eve Brandstein The Lost Week: A Love Story about Lennon’s affair with his assistant May Pang, a story the film misrepresents; and Power to the Peopleabout John and Yoko’s benefit concert at Madison Square Garden. Soderbergh’s film has a unique interview as its basis, although without the reminders of the interviewers, it does not allow for much thought or commentary other than that provided by Lennon and (occasionally) by Ono.

Well, there’s a nostalgic charm and a lot of drama in what Lennon says – especially for me in his generous, open-minded comments about new bands like the B-52s and the Clash. But this is disappointing.