The Beatles: Rock Band's brilliant mini-movie

The sequence begins in Liverpool as the camera's eye descends past sea gulls, rooftops and city streets. Pasted on the brick walls are faded handbills with references to famous songs like "Rocky Raccoon" and "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite." The camera arrives at the Cavern Club (this is after Starr replaced drummer Pete Best, by the way) just as the lads from Liverpool, not quite yet the Fab Four, skinny and preternaturally cool, are finishing up "Twist and Shout." They dash offstage and begin a madcap scamper through the streets of London. It's been "A Hard Day's Night." They sprint past Maxwell's Silver Sundries. At one point they run past older and more poignant versions of themselves in the crosswalk at Abbey Road.

They hop a Boeing 707 and touch down at JFK Airport -- the mighty guitar hook of "Paperback Writer" knocks you back -- and then they are on stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater.

Now it gets interesting. The Beatles, as everyone knows, stopped playing live concerts in the mid-'60s. Among other things, they couldn't hear themselves play over the shrieking; also, the band's increasingly complicated music was hard to reproduce live. This turning point is rendered in the film by a close-up of a screaming fan and the Beatles turning tail, getting on an escalator that is rising toward a bright light: their higher artistic ambitions?

Now transformed into the Sgt. Pepper's Beatles, the studio Beatles, the characters leap off the end of the escalator into space, umbrellas in hand, drifting through a dreamy, druggy, surrealistic sequence that can't easily be described. In the end the four are just hanging on atop an enormous blue elephant/rhinoceros creature that is marching across a field toward a cliff to "I Am the Walrus."

The Beatles are now mere passengers on a fateful passage bigger and weirder than they could have ever imagined. The blue elephant rhino is fame itself. At the cliff edge it stops, on the song's penultimate chord, and the boys from Liverpool, endlessly good-humored, stretch their arms out to say, in effect, "ta-da!" Brilliant.

I don't have a trophy to hand out and I'm not exactly keeping score, but so far, this is my favorite bit of advertising this year. Or is it content? That's the beauty of this piece of cinema. I don't really care what it is. I just want to watch it again.

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dan.neil@latimes.com