Shine A Light (Dir. Martin Scorcese)

While there are plenty who would call bullshit on doing anything with dignity -- even growing old -- in the moveable feast called rock'n'roll, where taste is what you make of it & bad taste is often the best way to tip over the loansharks' cash registers at the gates of the temple, there's something alarmingly icky about watching The Rolling Stones in Martin Scorcese's new documentary, Shine A Light. While I'm eternally grateful that the boys are out of the jogging outfit stage of their live career (though that may only be for this small venue two-night stand at the Beacon Theatre in NYC), this phase -- with Keith as Medusa decked out in one of Kevin Rowland's old Pirate outfits & Keith so skeletal, sinew so tweezed to the bone, that he looks like a starved mule humping the rump of Christina Aguilera -- is equally embarrassing and, at least for me, very difficult to watch. Is it wrong to believe that rock'n'roll, for all its variations & intangibles, is NOT a day in the condo weight room or some pedophilial dress-up party? If the form cannot be defined, can we at least be agreed that there is an aesthetic at work, and that this, in the name of Sweet Gene Vincent, ain't it?

And one would certainly be excused for holding this film up next to Martin Scorcese's rockumentary masterpiece The Last Waltz (1978) & finding this wan parade of disingenuous cinematic cliches lacking. All of the grainy black & white moments early on in the film which portray a harried Scorcese & staff worrying over the logistics of this shoot seem altogether forced, especially considering that these obstacles were surmounted with such grace in his previous concert film. The concern over whether or not there will be a crane camera that wheels about the proscenium of the Beacon is just ludicrous. Of course there will be, as it's really the only way to make any concert film seem immediate. Do they really expect Scorcese to film this from the back of the room, or from the wings through a hole in the velvet curtain? And do they really think this great director doesn't know how to do this without sacrificing the energy & spontaneity of the sell-out crowd? And what lackey is even bringing up these concerns to someone like Scorcese? The whole conversation seems staged or, at the very least, an inconsequential, perfunctory assurance given far too much weight in the film because, alas, Scorcese could make this film blindfolded & there's not much suspense in that. But why should there be any suspense at all? The show happened & we know it happened because we're paying to see it. The entire introductory portion of Shine A Light is a hedge, lest we forget what a rare thing it is to see this arena rock band in such a small, intimate (if 3,000 seats can be considered intimate) venue. It's telling that Scorcese felt he had to build this event up with such tactics. After all, it's not as if the Stones haven't been adequately represented on film, from their many available television appearances to the Maysles Brothers' Gimme Shelter (1970), Hal Ashby's Let's Spend the Night Together (1983) & Robert Frank's invaluable Cocksucker Blues (1972).

The entire first 20 minutes of Shine A Light is a con & a curiously uninteresting one. Nothing at all is revealed about any of the participants -- Bill Clinton may have a slightly inflated sense of entitlement (but just what is a former President entitled to?), the Stones are weary of pre-show meet & greets but politely receive special guests, Scorcese has a rather passive aggressive nervous smile (from years of having to please people he has zero interest in pleasing) & the Beacon Theatre, the 1920s-era vaudeville theater that often threatens to become the film's true star, is criminally underused & dressed up like a Byzantine whore for this crudely-organized event.

But what of the concert itself. Well, there are high points. If you close your eyes & don't watch the very strange jaw movements of Mick Jagger (supporting the mule metaphor), the rare version of he & Keith Richards (on 12-string guitar) performing "When Tears Go By" is gorgeous, though being flippant about tossing the song away early on to Marianne Faithfull seems in poor taste, considering her current viability as an artist & the many years Keith & Mick spent cruelly passing her around like a cheap bottle of port wine. The time the camera spends on Keith & Ron Wood trading wild slashes through greying riffs is revelatory & lends credence Keith's assertion that, separately, the two are rudimentary guitar players at best, but together, they're untouchable. The duet with Jack White on "Loving Cup" is invigorating & adds some much-needed vigor to the Beacon stage & White seems truly touched by his inclusion in the proceedings, giving the Stones all the respect & honor 20 minutes of over-orchestrated pre-show build-up could not.

Other songs, seemingly arranged for the smaller stage, fare less well. The pared down, sometimes loopy, arrangements to cocaine-fueled mid-70s manque-punk burners like "Shattered" & "Some Girls" don't work at all. Stripping these songs of their adrenalin buzz & glitter punk bravado simply point out weaknesses in the song structure & make them seem much, much longer than their recorded versions, which whiz by like furies on 1978's Some Girls. The most troublesome aspect of Shine A Light comes when Keith takes centerstage. He begins "You Got The Silver" from Let It Bleed timidly, but when he hits the pocket & begins belting the chorus, he seems as surprised as the audience & his elation his contagious. It's easily one of his best live recordings, not that there are many gems to choose from in the arena. Then something happens that sinks the momentum of the whole concert. We are edited away to what seems like a whole different concert for a pretty iffy reading of the hardest rocking cut on 1967's controversial Between the Buttons, "Connection," but that is awkwardly interrupted by a sloppily-assembled archival montage of Keith Richards' infamous drug use. After a routine plod through "Tumblin' Dice" & a warm-hearted, if far from vital, jam (The Stones should never jam & should know it by now) through Muddy Waters' "Champagne & Reefer" with a beaming Buddy Guy, this oddly detachable bit was not what Shine A Light needed & it never recovers. Also in there is a strange, profanity-riddled reading of the Temptations' "Just My Imagination," which would be fine if the concert's version of "Some Girls" weren't so robbed of its Studio 54 decadence.

Following this leaden half-way point, the Stones rely heavily on arena hits like "Start Me Up," "Brown Sugar," "Satisfaction" & the aforementioned creepshow of Aguilera rump-cuddling Mick's nethers during "Live With Me," leaving all that alleged Beacon intimacy in the dust & delivering yet another predictable Rolling Stones concert. The one song I was most excited to see performed live, "Shine A Light," is relegated to a low-volume fragment under the closing credits.

For aesthetic reassurance, I kept my eye on Charlie Watts whenever possible, looking like an honorable gentleman, a hip book editor, the elegant stranger at the end of the bar with stories in every line on his face, a hermetic jazz-bo with a passing interest in rock'n'roll. Looking past the gorgon in the pirate outfit & the mule-lipped skeleton shaking his shit vain-groovily against that good night, Watts actually makes growing older look not so silly, effortless in fact. Charming. Though I'm sure rock'n'roll was never meant to be charming.

As the Beacon quakes with applause, one of those crane cameras swerves out the stage doors & Martin Scorcese -- who hasn't made anything approaching a masterpiece since Goodfellas -- energetically beckons the camera into the New York City night, where it flies up above a fake-shimmery CGI skyline to that great John Pasche tongue & lips logo, planted like a comic book kiss where the moon should be. It's a cheap shot, but it does remind one of better days, before every act of worship had to be forced on us by marketing hubris & show-biz desperation. It's cheap, cheap as the Stones were at their shabby best. Cheap as the invaluable dung-heap of rock itself. But it didn't remind me of Mick's swagger, or of Keith's dissolution. It reminded me of Charlie Watts' sly grin. You're 65, Mick. Put the tongue away now.

21 (Dir. Robert Luketic)

It's beyond belief that director Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde, Monster-in-Law) can't forge a functioning tale from Ben Mizrich's riveting non-fiction book, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. Luketic gets so caught up in gambling movie cliches & the glamour of filming Las Vegas hotel suites that he abandons the true story almost entirely. This would be forgivable if his every directorial reflex weren't so haphazardly borrowed from such obvious sources. Some blame rests with star Kevin Spacey as the students' collegiate mentor, who actually parodies his formidable turns in Glengarry Glen Ross & Swimming With Sharks. He's here to give this vacuous Hollywood product some heft, but Luketic just lets him run wild instead of finding him a logical place in the story arc, what there is of it. Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) plays Ben Campbell, a poor MIT student, working at an upscale clothing store to make enough money for Harvard Medical School. If you're thinking, "How the heck is this kid gonna raise the $300,000 for Harvard Med working a minimum wage job?" & you're at the edge of your seat waiting to see how he does it, you should probably be invited to Luketic's home for dinner some night. Ben falls reluctantly under the spell of professor Spacey & his sexy band of waggish card-counting scoundrels & promises he'll quit once he's up the tuition money. But, as the vaudevillians say, "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" or, in this case, the come-hither lights of Las Vegas. Campbell soon succumbs to Spacey's manipulations & the sexual allure of sad-sack sexy Kate Bosworth (Bee Season, Superman Returns). Betrayal, comeuppance & life lessons are just around the corner. Unfortunately these lessons seem as phony & glitzy as Vegas itself & nothing ever really seems on the line, as it must have for the original MIT Six.

Luketic makes the mistake of personifying justice in the form of a world-weary Casino pit-watcher, played with limited effort by Laurence Fishburne. Fishburne's old-school casino security, the kind who catches card-counters with a sharp eye, and he's the last of a breed, being chased from his job by a new computerized security system. Turns out he's got a grudge against professor Spacey, but that's hazy. In fact, the film is always hazy where it demands clarity. It's obvious Luketic doesn't understand Vegas, card-counting, computers, basic math, human relations...the list goes on. So he glosses over what counts in such a story -- the details. Nothing matters here because the director could care less about the endlessly fascinating cultures involved. He doesn't give a whit about academia, gambling, or the meat of human relationships. There's a reason so many fine films have been made about gambling -- California Split (Altman, 1974), The Gambler (Karel Reisz, 1974), Casino (Scorcese, 1995), Rounders (John Dahl, 1998) -- it's a complex addiction & there's a mighty, tactile, visually exciting empire built upon a completely understandable human weakness. We'd all like to get rich, and we'd like to get rich sooner rather than later. And if someone deluges us with enough bright lights, Capital Records-era Sinatra & low-cut cocktail dresses, we're liable to succumb to the luck of the draw. But like the novice gambler, Luketic forgets that there's a craft to it as well & like those amateurs he's seduced by the hotel room vistas & sex appeal of winning, but wants nothing to do with the lurid, life-altering guts of the matter.

PICK OF THE WEEK!

The Bank Job (Dir. Roger Donaldson)

An elegant, very well-directed heist film based on the infamous 1971 robbery of the Baker Street Lloyd's Bank in London, which netted the equivalent of 5 million pounds, and still stands as the largest bank haul in British history. Helmed by the always interesting Roger Donaldson (Sleeping Dogs, Smash Palace, Species, World's Fastest Indian), The Bank Job eschews a lot of post-modern crime film pyrotechnics in favor of tense, linear storytelling, abetted admirably by a fine cast, including the ubiquitous Jason Statham & a seductively feline Saffron Burrows.

In '71, the aftermath of the bank robbery stirred a hornet's net of controversy due to a British government order to suppress any information concerning the crime, leading some to suspect that the robbery, in which a gang of previously unambitious hoodlums dug a tunnel into the safety deposit box vault from a chicken restaurant two doors down, wasn't actually about the money at all. The Bank Job garnered some pre-release hype in the UK due to its plot's reliance on a "Deep Throat"-like character's accusations that the heist was pulled to rescue sexually incriminating photographs of Princess Margaret from the clutches of black radical/pimp Michael X. The story is complex without becoming gimmicky & the twists & turns never betray the factual source material. But what really makes this film tick is Statham, who should finally be relieved of relying on cut-rate Guy Ritchie & Guy Ritchie-inspired vehicles for a living. Kinetic & impressive as these previous roles have been, it's obvious Statham has more to offer. As an actor, no one can match his ability to balance brutishness & couture. Burrows, too, has been poorly used in small, uneven prestige projects such as Frida, Klimt & Fay Grim. She has a chilly European elegance that recalls Charlotte Rampling, Isabelle Huppert & even Catherine Deneuve & it really shows here.

The Bank Job is a rental gem. Highly recommended. 

 The Baker Street Lloyd's Bank in London, circa 1971 

PICK OF THE WEEK!

Classe Tous Risques (Dir. Claude Sautet, 1960)

Director Claude Sautet was primarily known for a series of launguidly paced, pellucidly lensed melodramas & equally drowsy comedies (usually starring the great Romy Schneider) virtually unseen by American audiences wedged as they were between the monumental works of Jean Renoir & Jean-Pierre Melville & the revolutionary cinema of the nouvelle vague. His clean, somewhat melancholy style, while always cerebral & artistic, didn't call much attention to itself in the clamorous rarefied air of post-war French film culture. Classe Tous Risques (The Big Risk) is the closest the director came to making a genre film and, for the most part, it breaks all the rules of the gangster noir. Most aberrent is the cool black & white cinematography of Ghislain Cloquet, whose aversion to closed, artificial spaces quite suavely undercuts the genre's predilection for shadowy, claustrophobic spaces.

French B-Movie staple Lino Ventura stars as Abel Davos, a gangster on the lam in Italy with his wife & two sons. In order to return to France, Davos & crony Raymond pull a gutsy, almost playful broad-daylight payroll heist & high-tail it home by boat. Upon reaching shore in the wee hours, Raymond & Davos' wife are killed by the police & the gangster must throw himself on the mercy of old comrades who owe him a great deal but find this debt tedious, to say the least. The scene-stealing actor who plays Raymond, Stan Krol, is a mystery. According to IMDB he only appeared in three films but he has all the presence & hulking charm of the young Lee Marvin. As far as I can tell, through some admittedly cursory internet research, little to nothing is known about Krol, but it's easy -- if you're unfamiliar with the film's more famous actors -- to assume at the film's outset that Krol is going to be the leading man.

Though Davos' underworld contacts have become banal bureaucrats (a common theme in late period crime films, coming to a glorious head in John Boorman's Point Blank, Don Siegel's The Killers & Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia!), they do manage to connect him with one of Raymond's old friends, Eric Stark (Jean Paul Belmondo, who made Godard's Breathless the same year). The film keeps coming to life around its peripheral characters. It's not that Lino Ventura lacks charisma. In fact, he balances the melancholy of a recent widower with a master criminal's ruthless cunning effortlessly. Still, Classe Tous Risques is always haunted by the death of Raymond & takes delirious flight when Belmondo is onscreen. The uncomplicated friendship between Stark & Davos serves as a beautiful counterpoint to the shadier environs of the Parisian mob. Raymond & Stark are represented by open fields, open windows, open waters, but his relationship with the other kingpins is all cramped rooms & low ceilings.

Sautet's film is a strange one. It keeps becoming different types of movies as it progresses (love story, light comedy, provincial soap opera), but it never grows tiresome or lags in tension & this odd meandering quality actually imbues the inexorable crime film ending with devastating gravity. An oddball classic & highly recommended.  

Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (Dir. Jon Hurwitz/Hayden Schlossberg)

It's probably just cranky to point out that Harold & Kumar...I'll just call it HKEFGB, though that's nearly as troublesome, seems to be more of a marketing tool than a movie, an attempt to develop a healthy franchise before there were any fresh ideas to back it up. But that's the way it goes with movie franchises, right? I mean, Cheech & Chong's Next Movie was certainly no Up in Smoke. Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle was the surprise blockbuster of 2004, costing a paltry $9 million to make & raking in over $80 million from box office & rentals, so it's no surprise, considering the simplicity of the concept, that the filmmakers would concoct a sequel almost immediately. It doesn't take a Ben Hecht to wind up these two reasonably intelligent potheads & send them skittering through a world of squares in search of weed & pussy.

The franchise-to-be hinges on the performance of its likable leads, Kal Penn (Kumar) and John Cho (Harold), and while they never achieve the comic mania of Cheech & Chong, Wayne & Garth or even Martin & Lewis, there's something comfortable about their relative blandness. Maybe a little two comforting. Harold & Kumar are so assimilated, so devoid of any cultural or racial characteristics (unless you think being a pothead counts as a cultural characteristic, which is arguable) that their homogeneity becomes almost suspenseful. Instead the investment of stereotypes is left to those who view the two of them. Harold & Kumar are virtually blank slates on which the world writes its prejudices, albeit humorously. The racial element is damn near a red herring. Even in HKE...um, the movie at hand, where racial perceptions are the catalyst for the resulting mayhem & hijinx (they're mistaken as terrorists & can't get to Amsterdam for pussy & pot), the political subtext is dropped the minute marijuana & sex jokes can be made instead. Politics is cartoonish, pot & sex are serious business, and therefore the source of the film's ample comedy. Unfortunately this leaves the great Daily Show comedian Rob Corddry, playing the Homeland Security agent pursuing our anti-heroic miscreants, little to do but mug & froth patriotic every quarter hour.

As with the first film, HAKGTWC (really?), the actor who gets the most laughs here is Neil Patrick Harris, a model for how to convert childhood TV stardom into adult viability (he's also winning as Barney on the scrappy CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother). While Doogie doesn't get as much screen-time here as he did in the first Harold & Kumar movie, his mushroom hallucinations here are definitely the film's high-point.

While it's obvious that not much work or craft went into making HAKEFGB, its naturalness comes on like comfort food in a field of movies punching us in the face to make us crack a smile. As a rental, it's a sure bet. 

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