Tomorrow Never Knows and Yesterday Isn't Much Brighter

There was a pretty good story to be mined from the premise of the 2019 movie Yesterday but unfortunately, screenwriter Richard Curtis didn't feel like digging it up. Instead he used the intriguing premise of his movie -- suppose a person found himself or herself in a world where the Beatles never existed -- as the basis of a rather lame romcom that used almost every cinematic cliché in the book.

It says something about the subtlety of the movie that by the time Kate McKinnon's character showed up to offer the protagonist a life of worldly success, it seemed a wonder that she did not appear and depart in a cloud of sulfur. Indeed, it seemed like the only subtle touch in the movie was how it downplayed the fact that the Anglo-Indian protagonist was in love with a white English woman -- a fact that once would have been considered very controversial but now seemed worthy of little more than a shrug.

Curtis does deserve credit for inserting a scene into the movie that so smacks of chutzpah that one marvels that he had the gall to write it. Then again, I'm not sure "credit" is really the right word I should be using in regard to a scene like that.