Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Mick Keef & Jean Luc, 10 Mar 2007
Godard's elaborate tracking shots prowl around the studio where the Stones laboriously rehearse a new song (Sympathy for the Devil only springs into life when the session musicians are brought in). A voice-over reads Burroughs style cut-ups, providing an ongoing mock commentary on this footage and the various interspersed episodes such as black militants reading from black power texts while torturing white women in a scrapyard by the Thames, "Eve Democracy" being interviewed about revolution, fascist texts being read in a Soho pornographic bookshop and so on.
One Plus One was not a success - Godard was in turmoil - his previous film "Weekend" had proclaimed "the end of cinema" in any conventional sense, his marriage to Anna Karina had finished & then of course the May 68 events exploded & Godard aligned himself with the Maoists & total cultural revolution. And, as the interesting accompanying 1968 documentary on the making of the film makes clear, Godard was out of his element working with an unfamiliar English cast, crew & locations as opposed to his old Parisian set up.
So One Plus One was made "on the run" from Paris May 68 & was the first of several flawed attempts to make a new type of experimental satire. Godard films the Stones not to create swinging sixties rock n'roll mythology but to demystify it, to show it as cultural production. The culture critique here puts Marx with Freud & attempts a kind of "deconstruction" influenced by Barthes, Derrida et al & it has to be said that Godard asks all the right taboo questions about sex, politics, gender & race but can't sustain any kind of meaningful analysis - and so it will probably seem an obscure & incomprehensible film to many viewers today.
Of course it is interesting to see how the Stones worked (Jagger in charge, Keef supportive, Brian Jones comatose) and predictably this DVD edition stresses the 60s rock n'roll mythology angle, precisely what the film was trying to undercut & the reason why Godard famously assaulted the producer at the NFT premier. Still, you get both versions of the film & a reversible sleeve so you can choose Godard or the Stones, revolution or nostalgia!
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15 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Flawed, frustrating, pretty poor piece of "art" , 10 Jun 2006
This awful, dated and frustrating movie will be attractive to Rolling Stones fans and repel everybody else. Even Stones fans will be annoyed with it. In other words, nobody wins. And almost 40 years since it was recorded, no attempt has been made to reorganize it for its core audience -- in other words, you still have to pick through an awful lot of annoying "art" to get to hear the Stones in the studio. It's not quite the disaster that was made of the Pink Floyd "In Pompeii" DVD, but it shows about the same lack of commercial judgement (for which instead read "directoral self-indulgence").
Godard's original title "One Plus One" sums it up. There's two of everything here. Two movies, one called "One Plus One" and the other called "Sympathy For The Devil". Two interlaced events, one the recording of the Stones song of the same name, the other some tedious arty nonsense about black power and communism. Even two covers, so you can choose which goes on the outside of the DVD case. It's padded out by a whole bunch of extras, none of which are up to much. For instance, having become annoyed and frustrated by Godard's self-indulgence, do you really want to sit through an extra 43 minute documentary on him?
Those with the patience can figure out the differences between "One Plus One" (97 minutes) and "Sympathy For The Devil" (100 minutes) -- seemingly the latter includes the finished track over the end credits, though I didn't stick around to check it out. The rest seems identical. So there is footage of the Stones, 1968, in the studio rehearsing and recording "Sympathy For The Devil", mixed in with other footage staged by Godard of actors pretending to be black panthers, fascist bookshop owners, arty film-makers and documentary makers, and graffiti artists writing such witty (and meaningless) things as "Sovietcong" on walls. One long, tedious sequence has a bunch of black panthers handing around guns in a junk yard and (off-camera) brutally raping and shooting a bunch of white women. You just see their blood-splattered bodies. The camera tracks yearningly along racks of pornographic magazines, many proudly promising stories inside about violence against women (strangling a common theme) -- proof that the 1960s really were a different age. There's some pretty heavy swearing too, all of which makes the 15 cert quite generous. And finally, some pompous arch voice-over reciting purple passages from revolutionary, science fiction and pornographic books.
And all this tedium gets in the way of what you really want from this movie, which is the Stones. But there's no escaping it, even though some of the longer sequences have happily been indexed so you can skip them. There are still cut-aways during the Stones footage, and that voiceover all over the top of it. Godard, or the producers of the DVD, clearly never thought we might actually want to do something unsavoury and Anglo-saxon to his horrible movie and just see the Stones at work. Or considered it too much of an important, artistic movie to give us what we'd happily pay for. Idiot.
The Stones footage is good, but not earth-shattering. It's most fun at the beginning, when they tentatively work through the song with a pedestrian, clip-clop rhythm. Annoyingly we don't get to see any decision that was made to bring in a conga player, because the next time we join the band the familiar busy African rhythm is in place and the song is reasonably complete. Meanwhile, the footage simply shows a band hard at work in the studio, with very little (though some) mugging to camera and very little (though some, chiefly Richards) showing off. It's not actually all that interesting, particularly compared to "Let It Be". No arguments, no real discussion, just idly standing around between takes. The most interesting thing in fact is how the lyric "who killed Kennedy" gets changed to "who killed the Kennedys", which bring you up short against the events of the day far better than Godard's infernal set pieces. And Brian Jones seems quite normal here, though history chooses, like Syd Barrett, to paint him into a corner in order to fabricate a good story. Annoyingly we hardly get to hear him play, as his acoustic guitar isn't fed through whatever monitor we're listening to.
I find very little to commend this movie, and if you're not a Stones fan or a rock historian, you won't want to bother. For me, I think it's a shame Godard didn't ditch the duplicate versions and give us his Jefferson Airplane movie as a bonus instead. At least that would have doubled its worth.
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4 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Under Rated Concept!!! - (SO WHY DON'T YOU TRY IT!?), 6 Aug 2006
The Rolling Stones related to the black power movement , with black power being that period's issue, can portray the liberation and rebelion vibe to make this an interesting "REAL LIFE" movie, freedom and expression, and the comunist revoluation too! everything rock n' roll was made for, about sticking it to the man! with the Rolling Stones can only, ONLY mean one thing about this movie, which made me want to buy it, "UNIQUE!.." plus, i'm a bit curious to see if The Rolling Stones, being British, might be the director's own symbol for anarchy, and the band being on top of the world or "kings of the music world at the time", could the rebelious footage tied in with the The Rolling Stones tell an orginal tale of true life "FIGHT THE POWER" against the British Empire?
"COULD BE INTERESTING, BUT IF NOT, I LIKE THE ROLLING STONES ANYWAY AND HEY... IT'S ONLY ROCK N'ROLL, BUT I LIKE IT!"
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