Please allow me to introduce myself
One cinema visit, marked with a *. Contains one use of strong language, Shine a Light style.
Good Night, And Good Luck. (2005)
David Strathairn turns up as Estes Kefauver in The Notorious Bettie Page (2005) (see last week) organising a searing Senate investigation into the deadly effects of pornography and comic books on juvenile delinquency. At presumably around the same time, Strathairn had also been cast by George Clooney on the other side of the prosecutorial fence as legendary journalist of the old school, Edward R Murrow. Strathairn belongs to that unique group of second-string supporting players that exists in Hollywood to gladden the hearts of too-frequent cinema-goers like myself. Strathairn’s presence in a film, like that of say Dan Hedaya or Jeffrey DeMunn, once spotted in the opening credits, in an odd kind of way automatically steps the film up a notch in quality; the movie doesn’t just revolve around the big star, the supporting players have been properly cast as well. Strathairn occasionally plays lead roles in movies, as he does here, but he’s not Tom Cruise style leading man material, he’s an exceptional character actor, and he makes Murrow and Murrow’s contempt for McCarthyism and the witch hunt mentality it created burn off the screen.
Shine a Light (2007) *
I don’t even like The Rolling Stones that much, but I still got a kick out of this film. To me, the Stones were always a singles band (and what singles), who never really assembled a coherent album statement in the manner of the Beatles, and who have effectively been creatively dead for 25 years: their last decent recording was Undercover of the Night, and that was in 1983. And yet curiously the Rolling Stones have stayed pretty much together (some members having been shed along the way) and not stopped touring, perhaps turning into the blues band they really wanted to be in the first place. It’s probably just as well for all the other directors of live concert films that Martin Scorsese only directs one of these concert films every 30 years or so, since he has raised the bar once again as he did with The Last Waltz (1978). For example, the opening sequence of documentary material, probably through the timing of ever shorter cuts, creates a rising sense of excitement exactly the same as standing in a concert hall waiting for the show to begin, then ups the ante on it again, so that when the band hit the stage with Jumping Jack Flash, you feel like you’re in the presence of something really exciting, even though you’re not! What’s particularly great is the sense of communication between the band members on stage, especially Keith Richards’ self-deprecating grin after he’s slightly fucked up the opening riff of Start Me Up, and also Scorsese’s manipulation of the sound mixing desk so as the camera focuses on Ron Wood, we hear exactly what he’s playing. The film doesn’t have the end of an era gravitas of The Last Waltz, what Shine a Light is about is what happened to the band that carried on playing long after it was formerly proper for them to have retired. The new ground the Stones are breaking is discovering how old can you be and still be able to rock and roll? On this exhausting evidence, some time yet…
Sympathy for the Devil (1968)
For the record, this was the producer’s cut of Jean-Luc Godard’s film, the one where Sympathy for the Devil is played in its completed form at the end; apparently it was always Godard’s intention to deny this pleasure to the film’s intended audience, whoever the hell that was. Coming from the high Marxism period of Godard’s career, this now looks as absurdly quaint as Georgy Girl (1966) or Barbarella (1968). The film has essentially two streams: the Rolling Stones recording one of their most notorious songs (which evolves in an utterly fascinating manner from a slow blues stomp into the adrenaline rush, tribal percussion and woo-woos of the finished piece), and various humourless revolutionaries carrying out acts of defiance against The Man: a girl graffitoes left wing slogans on buildings and cars; a phalanx of Black Power revolutionaries brandish guns in a scrapyard and “shoot” white female victims in sacrificial dresses. There are voiceover readings from a non-existent Russian political pornography novel, and lots more time capsule stuff. I’ve always thought that the essential message of the film was that The Rolling Stones and the revolutionary groups are engaged in the same practice at different ends of the scale: that of protest.