SnoopyStyle Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese sets up a concert film with the Rolling Stones. The guys are performing on their A Bigger Bang Tour. In 2006 over 2 days, they perform at the Beacon Theatre in NYC benefiting the Clinton Foundation and Scorsese captures it. Also joining the boys on stage in small cameos are Jack White, Buddy Guy and Christina Aguilera.The most fascinating part of this movie is Scorsese setting up the performance. It's a black and white section at the start of the movie. It's actually a little funny and we get to see Scorsese at work behind the scenes. The rest is a regular concert film with snippets of old Rolling Stones interviews. It's not a particularly revealing documentary. As a concert film, it's well shoot and great for Rolling Stones fans.

Roland E. Zwick If the astonishing longevity of The Rolling Stones has taught us anything, it's that rock'n'roll is no longer just a young man's game. In fact, after nearly a half a century of rocking out, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood - all now in their 60s - offer proof positive that youth is indeed just a state of mind.More than twenty years after his seminal rock film "The Last Waltz," director Martin Scorsese turns his cameras on the Stones, recording a concert they performed at the Beacon Theatre in 2006 (as part of their "A Bigger Bang Tour") to benefit The Clinton Foundation (Bill and Hillary are both present at the event and are seen mingling with the fellows in the opening moments of the film). I'd say that at least 70 percent of the film's running time is devoted to the concert itself, with the rest made up of backstage stuff (mainly early on) and footage from interviews the band members gave throughout their career when reporters were (ironically, as it turns out) always predicting the band's demise within a few years - snippets obviously designed to contrast the boys' younger selves with what they look like today. The most humorously prescient moment comes when Dick Cavett asks Jagger, in 1972, if he can envision himself still doing this when he's 60. (Jagger's answer, by the way, is yes).With camera-work that is fluid without calling undue attention to itself, "Shine a Light" is essentially a straight-forward concert film, featuring some of the group's most instantly recognizable standards ("Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Shattered," "Start Me Up," "As Tears Go By," "Brown Sugar," "Satisfaction," etc.) as well as songs that are less well known - a feast for die-hard fans of the band, to be sure, though probably less gratifying for those who aren't. For despite the presence of Scorsese in the director's chair, "Shine a Light" is not really all that remarkable as a piece of film-making, but the sight of a bunch of astoundingly agile sexagenarians strutting their stuff on stage as if they were still in their twenties does give hope and encouragement to the rest of us fighting against our own fast-approaching golden years. It's obvious that these boys - clearly the true survivors of the rock era - are one day going to be taken off the stage feet first, going out doing what they love best. And, if nothing else, the film gets these rock'n'roll legends on the record for future generations to enjoy.

Nog I don't know. It seemed like this should be a great way to summarize the Stones' career: the Scorcese treatment. But I was distinctly underwhelmed. There was the over-representation of mediocre Stones songs (they do have some great material that wouldn't just be a greatest hits set). There was Mick, who ardently believes that more is more. But then he didn't give more (where it counts) on a throw-away vocal on "As Tears Go By." Then there was Marty, who distrusts the viewer not to get bored by not hazarding a single lingering shot. Or to cut away from Mick when Chuck Leavell was delivering a very nice piano solo. My wife noted that the Stones seemed better when Mick stepped off the stage. His "rooster on acid" shtick was nearly nonstop on the faster numbers, and grew boring very, very quickly. I've seen Peter Gabriel and Bono do much, much better as entertainers. But then, I never drank the Kool-Aid.From a film-making point of view, I don't get the value of the Clintons in there, nor of the footage with Marty. And the crowd looked like a group of friends of the band's and Marty's, with a smattering of trust fund kids and investment bankers for good measure. Check out "Gimme Shelter" instead; there's some pretty gritty stuff in there, and it's not all pretty, but at least it's real.

frankenbenz The Rolling Stones are ubiquitous. Practically everyone loves them, likes them or at least wants to see them play live before they (or the Stones) die. Aside from producing a few decades worth of great music (most of it lifted from the Chicago blues scene), the Stones haven't had an album worth listening to since the early-mid eighties, so why is it they are still considered one of the biggest acts in the world? Is it their age-defying perseverance? Their on-stage energy? Their legend? All of the above? The painful truth is, there is only one correct answer: nostalgia.The Beatles broke up, John Lennon got shot, Morrison killed The Doors, booze killed John Bonham and the Stones stayed the same. The Stones stayed so much the same that, aside from their wrinkled and withering bodies, every rock 'n roll fan born in the last 60 years or so looks to them as a (fairly) well preserved specimen of their youth. They are a reminder of what it was like to be young, rebellious, idealistic and, ultimately, free. But guess what folks, the Stones may have stayed the same on the surface, but all that remains of the bad boys of rock is the surface. The Rolling Stones are packaging. The Stones of your youth - like your youth - are dead.It's fitting then that another iconic artist well past his prime should rise to the occasion to make a concert film about the Stones. Despite winning his long elusive Oscars for ably re- making a Hong Kong action flick, Martin Scorsese hasn't made a great movie since GoodFellas. Granted, Goodfellas may be the greatest film ever made, and Scorsese may be the most gifted and unique American filmmaker since Orson Welles, but Shine a Light is nothing more than an old man trying to sip from the fountain of youth. That's not to say SAL isn't well made, it is in fact, well crafted, polished and brimming with professionalism. But SAL, like the Stones, like your youth and like any chance of Scorsese ever making another great film, is dead. It may be bristling with glossy, glitzy and glamorous packaging, but like Bill Clinton and his pre-concert guests, this film is stiff and it reeks of establishment. In other words, this isn't what rock and roll is supposed to be about, it's about what happens to rock and roll after a very long time spent being incredibly rich and pampered. The same can be said of Scorsese, Coppola, DeNiro, Pacino and every other angry young artist who has since gone on to untold riches and fame. They lost their edge. They lost what made them seem revolutionary. They simply lost "it."As far as concert films goes, SAL does have something most don't: the dueling visions of two artistic giants. When the tone is set with documentary footage of the behind-the-scenes planning leading up to the concert itself, you get the feel you're in for a display of fireworks that isn't triggered by the Stones' pyrotechnics crew. In this segment, Scorsese is the star, a frazzled control freak (as all directors should be) who is powerless in the court of the whimsical (read: flaky) spirit of the Stones Commander in Chief Mick Jagger. When Scorsese's face time is displaced by his multitude of lenses focused on the concert, SAL loses its appeal and fails to deliver anything more compelling than the startling effect of far too many close-ups of Keith Richard's war ravaged face.After the tedium of hearing every Stones song you've heard before finally wears to an end, we're reminded that this was a Martin Scorsese affair with a signature tracking shot through the backstage crowd and onto Marty himself. The shot continues until we float out of the theater, into the night and high up above Manhattan, a shot aided by the savvy use of a computer. While this tracking shot is intended to remind us of Goodfellas, it does nothing to capture the energy the made Goodfellas great, in the end, all this shot does is remind us we're watching the shell of something that was once great and someone who never used to use a computer to help him walk through a crowd.http://eattheblinds.blogspot.com/