A funny thing happened while I was watching Shine a Light.

I got bored.

This was an unexpected reaction to the latest film by our “greatest living director” (surely a sobriquet that must be retired in the face the rising careers of Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher) and to a film that spends a good deal of its iMax screen time showing the wiggling of a 64-year-old man’s anorectic buttocks in your face.

But how did our greatest living director and the world’s greatest rock and roll band manage to bore us? Martin Scorsese–lover of music, editor of Woodstock, maker of numerous other films about music including the Band’s farewell concert movie–and The Rolling Stones, whose longevity is testimony to their energy and persistence, and to the iconic frieze of their early catchy and moody hits, whose subject matter was so often not Top 40 material. In the end, the only interesting parts of the film are the very beginning (quasi b&w documentary footage measuring the chaos of organizing the shoot) and the very end (a patented Scorsese POV “rabbit warren” take of someone leaving the stage and passing though a multitude of sycophants, including Scorsese twice), both seemingly faked.

Everything seems to work right on the film. Much money was spent. Many lights were rigged. The cameramen, led by Robert Richardson, manage to create an intimacy on stage, and we feel we are there, just a few inches from Charlie Watts. There is even a pissy moment between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards during a song (though someone else had to point it out to me). The film may in fact be educational to budding rock musicians who can alternate studies of this film with cached episodes of Rock Star.

But given this technical coup and the prestige of everyone involved, why was I so bored after about the third song?

I think that there are two reasons. Scorsese didn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about The Rolling Stones beyond what we already know, which is that he loves their ’60s movies and often uses “Gimme Shelter” as a signature song. Sure, he intersperses old interview excepts of the band, making statements than that are “ironical” now in light of their success and septuagenarian progress, but those moments turn out to be kitschy and obvious.

The other problem is The Rolling Stones themselves. When all is said and done, they’re just a rock and roll band. They get up, do 18 songs and walk off. Sure, there’s some smoke and flashing lights, limp gestures towards the sort of arena rock that hypnotizes the young, but the songs are discreet units, a mix of old hits, played slightly differently to relieve the band’s boredom with them, and execrable covers or newer songs that sound like strained efforts to come up with a tune, of any kind, now. Instead of on the stage of the Beacon playing for their contemporary, Bill Clinton, and the group of uniform metronomic young women, part staff and part scions of the elites who could afford the tickets, ringing the stage, the Stones should be off in a smoky roadhouse bar somewhere out on 101, where Jagger’s chicken wing dancing and pointing and other terpsichorean ticks will still seem fresh.

The key flaw in the film is the play list. The songs aren’t organized in a particularly interesting or emotionally elevating manner (and the Stones are continually at a loss at how to end them), plus they bring on the occasional guest musician, such as the White Stripes guy who provides eye candy and little else, Christina Aguilera, a belter suited to a better genre of music, and Buddy Guy, trotted out so that the Stones can pay living homage to the music that influenced them.

I was also confused by the iMax presentation. I’ve only seen one previous iMax movie, at the local science museum, about polar explorations, and there the screen was the size of a dam; at the theater where I saw it, the “Regal” Bridgeport, it just seemed to be a regular sized screen with an especially loud soundtrack. Someone needs to write me and tell me what I am suppose to be getting out of the iMax experience.

But despite its high tech presentation, Scorsese’s film fails to the the one thing its title announces, shine a light on the phenomenon of The Rolling Stones.

I get a lot of questions (but can always use more, so keep sending!), but one of the questions I get asked most often is, “where should I take my car to get serviced?” So I figured I would start telling you. For the next few weeks, I am going to travel from shop to shop, find out what the rates are, who is the best, and who is downright bad…so I will be able to tell you here where to get an alignment adjustment, oil change, engine repair, and car dyno. And even recommend some good parts stores for getting the job done yourself right (the first time)! Stay tuned…

IMS Electronics Recycling is holding a free public electronics recycling event on Saturday, April 19, from 9am-5pm at their Vancouver location (address and map below). What qualifies as e-waste, you ask? Computers, monitors, televisions…to find out if what you need to get rid of is considered e-waste, call IMS at 360.750.8883.

2401 St. Francis Lane
Vancouver, WA 98660

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Believe it or not, despite the inconsistent silence of this blog, I have indeed seen some recent films. As a group, however, they prove interesting only from the auteurist perspective.

Take Jumper for example. In its advertising, it touts the director Doug Liman, of The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, of which this film shares not an iota of their perhaps overrated talent. Jumper is about a guy who has the knack to teleport himself anywhere in the world, including the interior of bank vaults, which allows this teen to finance his self-education. It’s a somehow familiar premise, derived from the novel by Steven Gould, but rendered structurally inept in the script credited to David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls (only his third movie since his surprise, mysterious debut as the credited writer of Fight Club), and Simon Kinberg. There’s way too much backstory getting in the way of the plot, as Joe Bob might say, and there is a boring DaVinci Code - Nightwatch - Underworld component in which a cult of vicious Christians led by Samuel L. Jackson hunt down and kill all “jumpers” because “only God should have such power.” Nor is the teen-oriented love story worked out very well, with Rachel Bilson continually crabby in her demand for information from Hayden Christensen, continually mute to her on the subject of his power. And Christensen (who I kept thinking was going to be Ryan Phillippe or Justin Timberlake, probably because of that soft drink commercial where the singer is reeled in my sips on the fluid) is annoyingly passive for an action film hero, continually finding himself tied up or cornered by the bad guys.

As far as Liman’s work is concerned, it is clear now that The Bourne Ultimatum is the lesser of the three films in the series, and that from Smith on his films are descending into structural chaos, ultimately unsatisfying action films full of sound and flurry, but conveying nothing. In fact, the movie Jumper reminded me of most was the recent, execrable, lazy The Bucket List, with its similar jumping around among similar locations, though through the more conventional means of a Lear jet. Jumper leapt off the screens with the alacrity its main character employed to teleport himself out of danger. Unlikely as it seems, a Jumper 2 is in the works.

Doomsday is the third film from the interesting director Neil Marshall, whose previous Dog Soldiers and The Descent are stylish and original. As a Marshall film, it continues his concerns with professionals facing down implacable foes. As a movie movie, however, Doomsday is an anthology of maybe your favorite films, from Escape from New York to Road Warrior to 28 Days Later, and even The Lord of the Rings, vaguely, with Malcolm McDowell as an ersatz Gandalf or Saruman. The film comprises scenes of unabashed homage (if not downright theft), and the innovation of having a tough chick (played by the convincing Rhona Mitra) at the center is not so innovative after the many variations of Underworld and Resident Evil and their sequels.

Marshall’s Tarantino-esque magpie-ism may have been cleaning artistically but it calls into question what seemed the originality of his first two films. Dog Soldiers and The Descent remain valuable, however, for the force of their sheer filmmaking verve, a vigor weirdly diluted in the chaos of quotation that is Doomsday.

Drillbit Taylor is offered up (somewhat misleadingly) as a Judd Apatow comedy, which it is tangentially, as it comes from his producing hand, is written by Apatow crony Seth Rogen, and stars his wife, Leslie Mann. But this film, too, is an update of a sentimental ’80s favorite, My Bodyguard, which this film slyly acknowledges through a cameo by the earlier comedy’s bodyguard, Adam Baldwin. And in its use of a trio of teens who resemble the guys from Superbad, it comes across like an unofficial prequel to that movie.

Drillbit Taylor coasts on the charm of its bodyguard, Owen Wilson, who still has the power to carry a movie, and the intense interest some viewers will have in the subject of the bullying crisis, which the film takes to psychopathic extremes, almost suggesting that there is no real solution to the problem of bullying other than murder (which may be true). In any case, Drillbit Taylor is sadly not laugh-out-loud funny like that minor masterpiece Superbad but also isn’t as super bad as other reviewers have suggested.

88 Minutes is a film that sat on the shelf for a while (it is copyrighted 2007), and is one of those “real time” movies with a rather severe deadline for its hero: shrink-prof Al Pacino has been given 88 minutes to live by the proxy of a serial killer (Neal McDonough) he helped convict. Suspects and friends who help or hinder him in his short term quest include Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski , Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe, Deborah Kara Unger, and Benjamin McKenzie.

88 Minutes is an enjoyable little thriller with a terrific cast that is probably best suited for the small screen, where director Jon Avnet has his roots, and whose style he cannot throw off, despite making five features thus far. In its emphasis on the partnership of unlikely allies it is consistent with his earlier output but lacks the visual distinction or originality that the material invites.

Also from the shelf comes Chapter 27 (also 2007), a film with very little reason to be. For some reason writer and director J.P. Schaefer,whose first film credit this is, thought it would be interesting to explore the psychology of Mark David Chapman (Jared Leto), who shot John Lennon (unseen here) in 1980. It’s not. Watching a crazy person enact and interact with his internal terrors for 84 minutes is neither edifying nor kind to the memory of the slain Beatle.

It’s easy to see why Leto might be drawn to the project. It enabled him to pull a De Niro and alter his body image for the nonce (though the poster rather exaggerates the amount of Chapmanesque tonnage he put on). And for Lindsay Lohan, who plays a fictional Lennon groupie who shows Chapman the ropes outside the Dakota, and who is touching in the role (surprisingly so, probably, to her detractors, but not to those supporters who have stuck with her through the haze of distorting publicity), it was a convenient assignment: some seven scenes in locations agreeably close to her own Manhattan digs (though I suggest that LL not do another assassination-theme film at least for a little while). Chapman may be worthy of deep psychology exploration (and there is a competing film about him, released in 2006), but he is the killer of a cultural hero and the sneaking sympathy for him that the film reveals is offensive.