Feb 072008
You should be able to spot a least three things in this preview that most definitely do *not* rock. See if you can go for more!
For those of you who want to see this in beautiful high-def clarity, go here: http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount_vantage/shinealight/
I look forward to your responses.
HVB
For starters, Mick’s voice sounds as bad as ever in that intro to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, but that’s nothing new, so I’m just throwing it out there.
1) Keef singing “You’ve Got the Silver” unaccompanied by his axe. At least he’s not holstering a guitar, but it looks like he’s reading the lyrics.
2) Jack White’s Adam Durwitz Look is not called for.
3) At 2:09, Mick seems to be re-creating a scene from 9 1/2 Weeks, or whatever that movie was called. You know, when Basinger is dancing around in a top hat and little else. Is that the movie I have in mind?
4) At 2:12, Mick performs a little shimmy that looks like a scene from a KidsBob commercial.
5) What’s going on with Keef’s little pigtail?
6) At 2:21, Keef does his “hands-free” move, which I now realize has been a really annoying staple of his stage movements since sometime in the ’80s.
7) At 2:22, Mick performs a move straight outta that cheerleading movie they show on tv all the time starring the woman from the Spiderman movies.
In short, this looks really bad.
Well DONE, Mr. Mod! You correctly identified a number of non-rocking, somewhat frightening moments on my list. Keef emoting his way through “You Got the Silver” while reading the lyrics off a prompter was a particular low point.
But there are more to be found. I await your responses!
Here are a few more non-rocking moments that really made my skin crawl:
1. Mick’s *excellent* command of teleconference protocol. The passive-aggressive “Marty” name-drop in the middle of a complaint is especially familiar.
2. Bill Clinton grinning like a mule eating garlic.
3. Martin Scorcese’s constant, cutesy references to “that’s rock and roll!” Ugh.
4. Buddy Guy’s polka-dot guitar. Sorry, but Buddy Guy just ain’t all that, and that guitar is a further Look demerit.
5. Wattles!
It’s just creepy. They’re too old to be acting like that.
Marty’s eyebrows
I think you can rock and be over 60, but I don’t think you can be over 60 and rock AND prance.
BigSteve, you’re right! Marty’s eyebrows most certainly do NOT rock!
Oh, let’s just cut to the chase and say “Mick Jagger.”
And “the entire concept of guest appearances.”
When did the Beacon Theater become legendary?
Marty’s Jacket & Tie
Bill Clinton
The shot of Marty in a command center
Christina A
I really hate when The Stones do guest appearances, and I really wish they’d have done this movie just a few years ago. In this decade, but not the last tour. They really did get tickets to people I actually know, but they had to sit in the cheap seats so people that have no idea what the big deal is, but look pretty on camera could be up front. That’s just not rock and roll.
Martin Scorsese should just go back to being a minor league fanboy and concentrate on what he’s good at, filming people beating each other up while Rolling Stones songs play in the background.
The thing that’s most unrock n’ roll is that The Stones have totally lost sight of their legacy and what they mean to rock and roll in general. This kind of movie is a bad idea, and would have been at any point in their career. Everything is too planned out, too often by people that have never floated off the floor when a band like the Stones actually hits that perfect groove.
Now I’m bummed out.
By the way, excluding personal documentarians like Michael Moore and the guy who did Sherman’s March, has a director of a film ever spent more time onscreen during a preview than Scorcese does here? I think Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner spend less time appearing in the previews of movies they direct.
2K, you’re right that Scorcese should quickly move away from the flame. The first thing that killed his abilities as a great director was casting blonde cheerleader types. Dude, you’re Scorcese. You’ve been married 12 times. You don’t need to cast Michelle Pfeiffer and the woman from the ’70s King King remake (I’m blanking) so you can hit on them! Cathy Moriarity was one thing: she was a nobody playing a nobody with dignity. Jessica Lange – that’s who I had in mind – and Sharon Stone. Take any Scorcese movie with a cheerleader type, established Hollywood star and you know you’re getting second-rate Marty. Now he’s aiming to be Ken Burns of the rock ‘n roll generation. No thanks. The fact that you’ve done coke with Robbie Robertson does NOT make you a rock expert. Enter the Halls of Rock and show us what you know!
Did you see his blues thing? I think it was his, but there’s so many. I have to give him credit for tracking down the woman with ass cheeks that could not only dance separately from each other, but separately from her as well. He should get a statue of some sort for that.
Now, I really need to get back to my Captain Beyond album. I wonder if I have a silk shirt with a Daliesqe print to wear?
Yeah, I saw as much as I could stomach of Martin Scorcese’s Blues. I generally didn’t like what I saw.
It seems rather fitting that both the Stones and Scorcese peaked in the early seventies and have largely coasted since then.
By the way, if you want to see a film that truly shreds the kind of gangster heroism that Scorcese took to the bank, watch John Cassavetes’s The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
I’m with you on that film, Dr. John!
I like that movie too!
This would get a pass from me if it were part of a “THE LAST WALTZ” series. You know, as in “We brought in Martin Scorcese, cause we’re never gonna play as THE STONES again.
but this isn’t that.
It’s not even THE NEXT TO THE LAST WALTZ
What’s weird is that I don’t think the Stones had to “bring in” Scorsese. I think he was drooling at the chance to film a fake Stones concert for a posh crowd. Which shouldn’t be surprising because he keeps pointing what rock and roll is, and he keeps pointing out what rock and roll is NOT.
woah! you mean mick might really burn up if he stays under that light for more than 15 seconds?
and poor marty, *still* doesn’t know what the stones are gonna play?
I’m sorry but that is just CRAZY!
these guys are SO on the EDGE, man!
TOO MUCH!
and THAT is rock and roll.
btw, keef’s second hands free move (2.21) has absolutely nothing to do with ANYTHING except imaging Keef as an icon. As a completely detached, non-functional simulacrum of various past functional images of “keef-ness”, it’s very post-modern, and therefore suggests that the Stones continue to reside at the cutting-edge of culture. I’ll thank you not to mock it.
Saturnismine sez:
and poor marty, *still* doesn’t know what the stones are gonna play?
I’m sorry but that is just CRAZY!
these guys are SO on the EDGE, man!
TOO MUCH!
and THAT is rock and roll.
I say:
We REACH, Sat! You hit the nail on the head. I get the oogies watching “Marty” pretend (or maybe — even oogier — he’s not pretending) to be FREAKED OUT! and AMAZED! by the ROCK AND ROLL CHAOS! that is THE ROLLING STONES!
Patti Smith damns the movie with faint praise here (she’s at the end):
http://www.breitbart.tv/html/44214.html
Does NO ONE care that Charlie Watts wears Dockers on stage?
What do you think he ought to wear? Should he put a sock in the crotch of his pants like Mick?
Yes, yes, and YES! I posted years ago in former technology that Mick had devolved into a “gestural tourettes” of malapropism-rooster-jerks, head-bobs, and brief formations of various go-go dancer body part simulacra. Keef is doing the same, though, Mr. Mod, I always get less a sense of “free hands” and I more hear snippets of “If I Only Had a Brain.” And the differences between The Last Waltz and The First Walker are many, and no, they are not as much about age as about releveance and attitude. The template is Last Waltz, but post viagra: instead of Kabuki Van Morrison, we get the Hooters waitress effect. And poor Mr. Scorsese! He bootstraped his way up to Grand Old Man of Film (don’t attack me there, it was based on good work. Excellent work. But he seemed to take his foot off the gas early and shot right at “emeritus” status, and then forgot to sit down.) This really makes the Stones and Scorsese an oddly good match, doesn’t it? I want to see the subsequent footage from the “Gimme a Tax Shelter” segment where they sit in an editing room and watch raw footage of a retired Hell’s Angel tragically messing himself with an attack of diverticulitis in the fourth row, the crowd backing away aghast…
Oh, how lampoonable will I be in just a few years!? I will try not to prance beyond my own wing of the rest home, and will order only foods I can masticate without spillage or noise. But have at me, if it entertains, gentle Townfok. You are free to do your worst. And Charlie, dear Charlie. He could do a lot worse than wearing Dockers on stage!
And separately, on the notion of Scorsese, it is a variant of the Peter Principle, that if you are clever enough to get a young Jodie Foster on the screen in hot pants, then we can take your word on Rock and Roll, or, in Clint Eastwood’s case, jazz. Kudos for a bit of Heart In the Right Place, but go make another Outlaw Josie Wales or whatever. The old Onion headline nailed it: AFFLUENT WHITE MAN ENJOYS, CAUSES, BLUES.