Reel Politique: Movie Review, Shine A Light
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.