Sympathy for the Devil has a bad reputation. Like most of the work produced during Jean-Luc Godard’s so-called “revolution” period in the late-60s and 70s, it rarely screens without a disclaimer advertising its difficulty. The synopsis selling last month’s screening of the film at New York’s Film Forum (as part of a month long tribute to Godard’s work of the 1960s) was just 55 words long, but it managed to contain three red flag inferences of Sympathy’s “difficulty” (italics all mine): the “camera endlessly prowls,” it’s “shot in long, long takes,” it’s “deadening and hypnotic.” A Reverse Shot blog entry led off with the poster quote: “One helluva cocktease.”
One million critics with a common case of blue balls can’t be entirely wrong, but writing off the film formerly known as One Plus One as a novelty from a filmmaker determined to be difficult (not to mention attempting to sell it by scaring the audience away) is a lot easier than actual engagement. Certainly, Sympathy is a provocation––political, formal, pop cultural––before it’s a coherent work of narrative drama; certainly, most of its most memorable moments involve juxtaposition of political critique with infantile sex farce. But the same could be said for the average YouTube video, and the kids seem to be able to eat those up without a warning label. If it comes off as impenetrable, it may just be because no penetration is needed––everything Godard wants to say is laid into the film’s surface. If anything, Sympathy for the Devil is a blatant (and, at times, blatantly transparent) cinematic flail from a filmmaker at a crisis point.
“One thing’s for certain: no other rock-and-roll band has aligned itself with more great directors than the Stones,” notes Glenn Kenny. He’s particularly fond of Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One, AKA Sympathy For The Devil.
At Indie Eye, Alison Willmore has a round-up of links related to Fitna, the short, Dutch, anti-Qur’an doc that allegedly provoked two Taliban attacks on Dutch forces in Afghanistan.
Sean P. Means is compiling a running tally of print film critics who have lost their jobs since 2006. He’s currently up to 27. Via Jeff Wells. Related: David Carr’s April 1 “wither critics” piece in the New York Times, which I had nothing to say about and thus didn’t link to earlier in the week.
Karina has been on the road, hence the slowness around here for the past few days. We’ll be back to regular speed tomorrow.
When I was about eleven or twelve, my mother took me to see a Rolling Stones concert on the Omnimax screen at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. I remember the sheer power of the size of the screen itself – us laughing about seeing Mick Jagger’s lips, each fifty feet tall. Now, year’s later, when Scorsese himself decides to make a Rolling Stones concert film, the memory of that experience ingrained in my mind allows me to compare and contrast how far we’ve come in IMAX technology over the years. And, for all our advances, Shine a Light certainly pays off, providing the full concert film experience to viewer from the new millennium.
The film starts out small. Populating only the center section of the giant screen, Scorsese begins with a mini documentary about his collaboration with the band and the process of organizing the filming of these shows. Boasting some great 16mm camerawork by Albert Maysles, this short film unto itself is a highly entertaining piece that could work on it’s own. So, to come out of that, you can imagine he has to step it up a notch. Suddenly, and without warning, the film captures the explosive intro to the concert with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” From there, it’s full speed ahead, fluctuating between quick close-ups and long takes, based on the rhythm of the music of the feeling of the performance.
One of my favorite things about Scorsese’s piece is the sound work. Not only does it come blaring at you in full force through the powerful IMAX system, but also the instruments are mixed and isolated so that you can really get the full concert experience. If one guitar breaks and let’s the other guitar fill the space, you can hear through the sound mix. During duets with the likes of Christina Aguleria and Jack White, Jagger is heard harmonizing from one side of the theater while the other respective singer is working it on the other side. The medium is utilized to full power that it should be. This is not a concert experience. In a concert experience, you would view it from a distance. When you comprise the film with so many tight close-ups, it’s more like being on stage and the sound reinforces that.
There’s a few cute pieces of archival footage cut-in as transitions between songs and I will be the first to admit: it is a little long. The 125-minute running time doesn’t bode well for those who find this kind of film repetitive. But, bloated as it may be, Shine a Light is still a powerful reminder of the strong performances the Stones are capable of and the absurd climax is also a reminder of how playful they can be too. Captured all by Scorsese with extreme gusto using a complex multi-camera set-up and a lighting design that overheats even the season Jagger himself, the film is a must-see for biggest to the smallest Rolling Stones fans.
Jurgen Fauth twitters: “Highlight of my day: Paul Thomas Anderson telling me he loves idrinkyourmilkshake.com and Daniel-Day Lewis giving me two thumbs up. Yay!”
Shane Danielson’s Shine a Light review at indieWIRE focuses mainly on how the Rolling Stones concert doc completely fails at relevancy. But if the film itself represents “a sixtysomething non-Berliner’s idea of cool” complete with “a cameo from guest-star Jack White, to drag the show all the way into 1937!”, as a red carpet spectacle it seems to have been a success.
When asked at a Berlin press conference to diagnose what’s “wrong” with George W. Bush, Neil Young declined on the grounds that “it would take too long.” Instead, he struggled to come up with something “right about Bush,” and eventually concluded, “Well, he’s a good physical specimen.”
In a single paragraph on Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, David Hudson not only notes that he had “a marvelous time,” he also manages to get Freudian: “Two rivers form ‘the Forks,’ lines directly paralleled with ‘the Lap’ - his mother’s. The pull is inescapable.”
Spout is, sadly, not at the Berlin Film Festival, where screenings began this morning. But we’ll be trolling the blogs for scraps throughout the course of the fest.
Immediately after Martin Scorsese’s opening night film Shine a Light screened for the press, I started seeing insta-reviews on Twitter and Facebook. “Shine a Light: weak sauce,” wrote About.com/IDrinkYourMilkshake.com’s Jurgen Fauth. David Hudson was slightly kinder: “Shine a Light is, well, okay for what it is - a concert movie.” I imagine we’ll see full reviews tonight or early tomorrow. Mike Jones has a report from the Light press conference, where Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts grumbled about the experience of watching the film, “I hate it.” UPDATE: Filmbrain yawns along.
The other big news this morning seems to be that two members of the Berlinale Jury, director Suzanne Bier and actress Sandrine Bonnaire, have simultaneously dropped out of their commitment to the festival. The dropouts don’t seem to be related––Bier says she has an urgent work matter to attend to, while Bonnaire has a family thing––but it does seem like a very weird coincidence. The jury will carry on with just six members, including actress Diane Kruger and editing god Walter Murch.
Morgan Spurlock, Eugene Jarecki and Ross Kauffman are amongst the filmmakers on the board of Cinelan, a new adventure launched in Berlin today that aims to provide an online distribution platform for short (under 3 minute) non-fiction films.
Variety has published an interview with Eugene Hutz, Gogol Bordello frontman and star of Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, which will be unveiled in Berlin. Brilliantly subverting the trade’s form-letter questionnaire, when asked to name his “dream project” Hutz responds, “Anarcho-syndicalism worldwide.” Swoon.
Nikal Saval has an admittedly cranky but masterful takedown of I’m Not There at N + 1. Calling Todd Haynes’ pastiche the Worst Movie of 2007, Saval scratches particularly aggressively at Haynes’ habitual referencing and naked larceny: “Haynes is drowning in his film school education, just as his audience is drowning in allusions, and not a single original idea floats by to rescue him or us.”
Erin at Steady Diet of Film has a helpful translation of what Jason Reitman, John Sayles, Adam Shankman and Joe Wright were REALLY saying on a recent episode of Sunday Morning Shootout. Useful information gleaned: Reitman, who “hates going to awards shows because he has to stop dressing like he’s homeless,” has a masterful death stare, but Sayles is not impressed.
Lots to report today on the Berlinale front, including the news that Martin Scorsese’s long-delayed Rolling Stones doc Shine A Light will finally make its premiere at the festival–and on opening night, no less. David Hudson has tworoundups.
Chris at Movie Marketing Madness points to the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light. The film was originally scheduled to open on September 21, but last week Paramount announced that they were pushing the release date back to April 2008, citing a lack of time to create a proper marketing campaign.
Strange, because this trailer would seem to cover all the bases. You’ve got the concert footage (including an excruciatingly creepy close-up of Mick Jagger and concert guest Christina Aguilera bumping and grinding mid-duet); you’ve got the archival clips of 25-year-old Mick saying he thought the band wouldn’t last set against footage of 65-year-old Mick in full-on rock star mode; you’ve got the obligatory shots of Keith Richards blowing smoke and looking like the walking dead; and you’ve got a lot (a lot) of footage of Marty Scorsese himself trying to wrangle it all into something remotely cinematic.
It’s another rock doc built around a star-studded concert, but it’s hardly The Last Waltz II. For one thing, Scorsese recently told The Guardian that he “decided not to interview anybody” for Shine a Light. In part because, as he put it, “Forty years they’ve been shot on film. They’ve been recorded, they’ve said everything, they’ve said everything backwards, sideways, upside down. I mean, what more could you know from them?” There’s also the small point that Mick Jagger apparently hates being interviewed. This trailer suggests that the film turns that lack of communication between its maker and its subject into a subplot. I don’t care at all about the Rolling Stones, but I care a lot about Martin Scorsese, and this trailer makes me care about this film because I’m interested in how that conflict might resolve itself. But if you’re just in it for Christina Aguilera’s ass … well, that’s there, too.
If it’s a labor dispute that finally gets The Rum Diaryoff the ground, then so be it. “The latest statistics for filming in L.A. confirm what everybody already knows,” writes Dave McNary for Variety. “The studios and networks have revved up production, stockpiling projects as strike fever engulfs Los Angeles.”
After at least a decade of producing softcore for teenage boys, Maxim’s getting in the business of … producing softcore for teenage boys! The men’s mag will slap their name on a Screen Gems teen comedy called Virginity Rocks!, which will tell the story of “a gorgeous transfer student who clings to her virginity and gets all the promiscuous girls in school to abstain from sex; in response, the popular guys ask the school stud to try to bed the poster girl and ending her ‘virginity rocks’ campaign.”
IMAX has announced a plan to release Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Rolling Stones documentary, on their massive screens simultaneous to the film’s September 21 premiere in “real” theaters. Insert “do we really need to see those walking corpses on a such a scale?” joke here.
“One thing’s for certain: no other rock-and-roll band has aligned itself with more great directors than the Stones,” notes Glenn Kenny. He’s particularly fond of Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One, AKA Sympathy For The Devil.
Jurgen Fauth 
Nikal Saval
