Shine a Light.

"The joke that Martin Scorsese seizes on throughout his megawattage Rolling Stones concert movie, Shine a Light, is that the band's members have been asked 'How much longer can you stay together/productive/alive?' every year since Mick Jagger was a soft-faced boy who looked barely out of grammar school," writes David Edelstein in New York. "In the old days, Jagger seemed to be taunting us - or, more likely, his stuffy British headmasters and their blue-haired wives - by parading around the stage as everything most fearsome, the cock of the walk as a huffy black androgyne. Now he taunts us with his stamina."

Updated through 4/5.

"The eloquent creases in Jagger's face testify to his 62 years, but the crazily lean, prancing and spinning body tearing up the stage is, if anything, even more exuberant than the boy I remember setting ablaze the Boston Garden in 1965," writes David Ansen, in perhaps one of his last reviews for Newsweek. "If there's comedy in it, it's the sweet smile of survival that lights up Keith Richards's grandly depraved face - he looks more and more like a Tolkien tree creature who's gathered a lot of moss. Or the ageless dexterity of Ronnie Wood's finger work - and his undying devotion to his Rod Stewart shag cut. Or the look of winded amazement on Charlie Watts's poker face after the group has polished off an incredible smoking version of '[She Was] Hot.'"

Geoff Boucher meets the band: "The music industry may be a diminished and uncertain mess this century, but the Rolling Stones, bless 'em, still don't disappoint or stray from the expected iconography; if anything, Richards seems to be going back in time with his pirate curtsy and eternal bluesman leer while Jagger, the whippet-thin rock star who once attended the London School of Economics, is the imperious archduke in full control."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Chris Lee: "Scorsese is part of a small group of acclaimed narrative feature directors who have chosen to tackle rock documentaries despite possessing a filmic skill set more suited to big-budget studio fare than showcasing fiery guitar solos and lighters-aloft audience rapture."

And Steven Rosen talks with Steve Gebhardt, now 71, who shot Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones, which documents the tour that followed the release of Exile on Main Street: "The project dates to 1970. During his stint as head of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's film operation, Joko, Gebhardt and partner Bob Fries were shooting Ono's avant-garde work Fly, about a fly buzzing over a woman in bed, in a loft where another filmmaker, Danny Seymour, was also working. Seymour was recruited to do sound for documentary filmmaker-still photographer Robert Frank, whom the Rolling Stones had hired to record their behind-the scenes antics during their tour, and Seymour turned to Gebhardt and Fries for assistance." Frank's film, of course, was the legendary Cocksucker Blues.

Interviews with Scorsese: Will Lawrence (Telegraph) and James Mottram (Independent).

Earlier: Opening the Berlinale.

Updates, 4/2: "If Altamont was the Boston Massacre of rock shows, this Beacon date is a presidential-library dedication," writes Camille Dodero in the Voice. "In San Francisco, Hells Angels and tripping hippies lined the stage; in Manhattan nearly 40 years later, the front row is full of gym members and raised camera-phones."

"Gorgeously shot by a who's-who of genius cinematographers, including Children of Men's Emmanuel Lubezki, There Will Be Blood's Robert Elswit and even Gimme Shelter director Albert Maysles, all working under the supervision of the great Robert Richardson, Shine a Light follows Scorsese's Last Waltz MO of keeping the cameras locked to the stage and zeroing in on the band's most intimate interactions," notes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly, where Matt Prigge looks back to "Six Films Starring The Rolling Stones."

"Even an average performance by the Rolling Stones isn't boring," writes Jeremiah Kipp in Slant. "If you're a fan of the Stones, the movie will be a pleasing representation of these rapidly aging superstars, but even so, the show runs an exhaustingly long time and there's some undeniable vanity in the lingering close-ups, which transform Mick and Keith's leathery skin into epic mountain crevices - especially if you catch Shine the Light on IMAX!"

Updates, 4/3: "Visually and sonically, it's spellbinding, and quite unlike any other concert documentary, or IMAX movie, I've ever seen," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "When the band initially suggested that Scorsese film them performing before a crowd of 1 million on the beach in Rio, he counterproposed New York and the Beacon (which seats a mere 2,800), and the result is a live-music film of uncommonly intimate proportions."

"These guys look beyond old, more like melting gargoyles in some F/X-heavy beyond-the-crypt horror film," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "Yes, I know it's rude to shine a critical light on the physical effects of our idols' aging. I also realize that we're all getting older, and that the most politic thing for me to say next is that, appearances notwithstanding, the Stones still cavort and rock like antic adolescents. That is true - remarkably so, actually - and it's part of what makes Shine a Light such an engaging, satisfying cinematic concert for anyone not totally Stones-averse."

"Jagger can still make astounding use of his body at 63, but his act seems like a wax statue of classic rock sexuality, as harmless as a saber-toothed tiger in a museum display," writes Shaun Brady in the Philadelphia City Paper.

"[N]o other rock-and-roll band has aligned itself with more great directors than the Stones," notes Glenn Kenny. "I'm still pretty big on One Plus One, the making of which ended with considerable enmity between Jagger and Godard. The director had initially approached John Lennon about his starring in a biopic of Trotsky, but Lennon didn't like where Godard was coming from one bit, so Godard turned to the Stones."

Updates, 4/5: "Ultimately the movie is Mr Jagger's show," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "If his long-running circus act is ridiculous when you analyze it, conjoined to the Stones' music, it becomes a phenomenal high-wire exhibition of agility, stamina and cheek." As for Scorsese, he's "a besotted rock 'n' roll fan who wholeheartedly embraces its mythology. Its scruffy guitar heroes and roustabout rebel-prophets are the musical equivalents of the hotheads and outlaws who populate so many of his films. Almost every shot of Shine a Light conveys his excitement."

"In a sense, this movie marks where Scorsese came in," notes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "I remember visiting him in the post-production loft for Woodstock in 1970, where he was part of team led by Thelma Schoonmaker who were combining footage from multiple cameras into a split-screen approach that could show as many as three or four images at once. But the Woodstock footage they had to work with was captured on the run, while The Last Waltz had a shot map and outline, at least in Scorsese's mind. Shine a Light combines his foreknowledge with the versatility of great cinematographers so that it essentially seems to have a camera in the right place at the right time for every element of the performance."

"Nobody loves the Rolling Stones as obsessively as Martin Scorsese," writes Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. "Think about the way Mick Jagger's spastic shrieks on 'Monkey Man' captured the paranoid craving of the cocaine-addicted mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in Goodfellas. Or the fateful way the guitars of 'Gimme Shelter' shimmer like an elegy over the graves of dead Irish cops in The Departed. Mr Scorsese's 1995 film Casino even used two separate versions of 'Satisfaction' to mark the passage of time. Through the years, the director has repeatedly made freshly iconic use of the band's classics, usually to ramp up the visceral impact of key scenes, but also to remind us how edgy and spookily relevant the Stones once were."

"As someone who loves the Stones, I find no joy in seeing what they've become - not, just like all of us, older, but irrelevant," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. Shine a Light is "a late-night infomercial masquerading as a concert movie, more an advertisement for vitality than a picture of vitality itself. There's something self-congratulatory, preening, about both the performance and the filmmaking."

"Where the maverick director and the debauched band were once genuine artistic threats to conventional values and attitudes in using their substantial leverage in the entertainment industry to directly challenge it, they are now simply team players, content to coast on rebellious reputations despite long, dry droughts of actually vital work," writes Michael Joshua Rowin for Stop Smiling. "Shine a Light... may be a professionally rendered document... but in many ways it's also an unintentional funeral dance commemorating the vanished vitality and subversive potential of mainstream rock 'n' roll and celebrating its current utility as a nostalgic anodyne."

Chicagoans might consider an alternative, at least this weekend, suggests the Reader's JR Jones: "The Scorsese movie easily trumps Movin' On Up as a cinematic experience, but hearing the elderly Stones pick through their back catalog isn't nearly as gratifying as all the rare footage of [Curtis] Mayfield at the full flower of his passion and social protest."

"The most successful of the concert/film's three guest spots is the one featuring seminal blues guitarist Buddy Guy," argues Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Seven years older than Richards but looking about 15 years younger, big bad grin on his face, he adds some staggering soloing and singing to the old Muddy Waters tune 'Champagne and Reefer' while Jagger takes up a harmonica and more than manages to keep up. The blues is the fount from which both these artists draw their inspiration, and watching them drink from it, one gets a palpable sense of how it's key to what makes the Stones' music still pleasurable, if no longer cataclysmic."

"Calling the Stones 'professionals' may be the ultimate insult in the rock world, where impulsiveness is valued over proficiency, but it's astonishing to see Mick Jagger perform a wrinkled standard like 'Start Me Up' as if it were the first time he'd ever sung it onstage," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Shine A Light pays tribute to the band's essential agelessness." And Steven Hyden offers a primer on the Stones.

For Jürgen Fauth, this is "forgettable if not altogether unpleasant homage to the band."

"Shine a Light may not be the last Rolling Stones movie, but it's likely to be the last one with a touch of the poet about it," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"Look, you either acknowledge the Stones' primacy and legacy in the rock world or you don't - your call," writes the Oregonian's Shawn Levy. "But someday (the evidence of Richards' longevity notwithstanding) we are all going to die, and when it happens to you, you probably won't regret the two hours or so you spent watching a Martin Scorsese film of a Rolling Stones concert. Heck you might even reckon it a highlight."

Online viewing tips. "So, what makes a great concert movie?" Annotated clips from Jonah Weiner at Slate.

Posted by dwhudson at March 31, 2008 4:00 AM