Shine a light (2008)

Stones
This is the IMAX Rolling Stones concert film directed by Martin Scorsese. Should this film have been? No! I’ll tell you why.

The Stones are too old and ugly to look at them for two hours so close and so large that you can see the dust collecting on their copious wrinkles magnified across a huge screen in a crisp digital image.

Another thing, it is shot at the Beacon theatre in New York City. The Beacon is beautiful but small theatre. The seats are practically stacked right on top of each other. Since it is so tight, the cameras don’t have much flexibility, and they certainly cannot to take advantage of grandeur of the IMAX format.

The film starts of with some drama about Scorsese not having the set list, it needlessly takes up 20 minutes of dead time.

Mick Jagger is the only member of the Rolling Stone with any charisma, and he is barely in it outside of singing.

Now let’s get to the actual performance. The Stones will always be the Stones, but now they are a band held together by a daily schedule of medicine to keep them going. Although the Stones are a five piece band, a whole other band supports them and almost carries the entire rhythm. The geezers do their thing and Mick Jagger has more energy than he should at that age.

They are a flickering flame. Sometimes they sound good, often they are flat like a stale soda. It’s really sad, but it’s been this way for a while. I remember going to the Stones concert in the 90’s with my sister, and it was the same way. You wished that they didn’t play an old favorite just so that you didn’t hear them murder it, but as my grandmother used to say “You murder it, but you can’t kill it” – so all of the Stones standard were performed and pleased the crowd.

They brought in some fresh blood to add plasma to the supply. Jack White of the White Stripes and Christina Aquilera join them, and old blues man Buddy Guy. Jack White looks like the happiest guy in the room to be playing with Mick and company. Maybe he understands that his moderately successful band has just been knighted by a band with a stature only lower to the Beatles with a singer as Rock ’n Roll as Elvis Presley.

Scorsese does mix clips of them current Stones with vintage clips of them, which reminds the audience that these guys were once young.

Although, they are in a more nature environment of a theater, which where they got there start, like the Beatles. A better IMAX concert film is U23D whose stadium presence fits the format comfortably. Shine a light is not worth the money.

U23D (2008)

U2 in IMAX, really? Do I really need to see Bono eight feet tall and coming right me? Not only that but in 3D too? OK, the answer is probably not, but as a hard-core U2 fan I made it to the IMAX as soon as I could.

Does it work? Well, sort of. It is just a few highlights from their Vertigo Tour in Argentina. It lasted for about an hour and 20 minutes. The 3D aspect of it becomes inconsequential after a while as you just get absorb into the show. And what it missing are the long dramatic shots of the band from a far away place, which is so much a part of their character.

So what does work? U2 works. The concert is awesome. Bono’s voice sounds really good. In some of their DVD releases his voice sounds a bit dodgy, but not this time. They make a smart decision of skipping a lot of their hits and going into what they call ‘The Dark side of the heart.’ This is the U2 that makes Axel Rose and Lars from Metallica U2 fans. This is the best part of any U2 show. In songs like Sunday Bloody Sunday, Bullet the Blue sky, and Love and Peace, it is easy to forget it is in 3D.

The problem of putting a live U2 show into a box is the box itself. U2 is essentially a stadium band. The have an ability to connect 55 thousand people and make them feel like some small community. This is done through a mixture of their music and body language. Despite how high tech the bands shows can be, they are always better when they are stripped down. Their body language is sometimes biblical, grand, and dramatic and somehow with that the guy in the noise bleeder seats feels like he is a part of the show.

Another character of a U2 is the Audience, which is really diverse. Even in the IMAX theatre, which was really packed, their were college kids through parents with children. The U2 crowd can sing 5 verses of any U2 song and Bono often asks them to do it.

There is really nothing here that isn’t their latest concert DVD. Still, it is the closest you will get to being at a U2 concert without being at one. At the end of the show, people in the audience seemed surprised on how good it was. So, yeah, is does renew your faith in the band. It was a good show.