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By Cole Smithey

‘Shine a Light’

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Martin Scorsese returns to the rock ‘n’ roll concert documentary genre that he helped develop in 1978 with “The Last Waltz,” to capture an energized performance by The Rolling Stones at New York’s Beacon Theater in the fall of 2006. Sparsely augmented with brief interview and performance segments, “Shine a Light” (the film’s title was taken from the Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” album) provides an incredibly intimate look at rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest living band performing a slew of timeless favorites and a few lesser-known songs. Buddy Guy, Jack Black and Christina Aguilera make memorable duet guest appearances on several songs, but it’s Mick Jagger’s famous athleticism that captures your imagination. Even in his ’60s, Jagger never stops moving like a juiced-up Iggy Pop as he drives the band to the far reaches of sonic space. The level of musical sophistication on display is divine, and Scorsese seals the enchanting event with a closing bit of camera virtuosity that puts it all in context.

We get a taste of the boisterous working dynamic between Jagger and Scorsese in a phone message clip from Jagger about confusion regarding the stage set that’s already being built before being entirely approved. There’s plenty of tension and personality in Jagger’s concerned voice, as Scorsese’s good-humored ability to make carefully tilled snap decisions enables the crew around him to carry out his will.

Where Scorsese’s focus for the “The Last Waltz” was on capturing a cultural zeitgeist that supported a generational shift of musical ideas, here he goes after the incredibly honed inner-workings of the Rolling Stones’ performance style and musical delivery. A horn section, a pair of back-up singers and a mobile percussionist adds rhythmic and harmonic textures to Jagger’s precise yet spontaneous phrasing. The communication that goes on between the musicians is nearly always on display, and it’s inside this happy convergence of rock orchestration that we experience the Rolling Stones as a musically refined group running on pure instinct.    

That might sound odd considering the unimaginable amount of songwriting, rehearsal, and performance experience the band has accumulated over its 46-years, but the Stones are so marinated in the joy of making music together that the story their songs tell can’t help but be refreshed.

More than a DNA sampling of the band’s endurance gene, the film is a wide-open celebration of the Blues music that the Stones have expounded on with as much invention as any Jazz artist alive. When Jack White joins Jagger on “Loving Cup,” the two singers harmonize from different registers. Both men strum away on acoustic guitars, and the effect is an eerie and whiny country-inflected sound that digs under swamp tree roots to extract a rough and rugged pearl. Keith Richards gets some well-deserved centerstage time with “You Got the Silver” and “Connection,” his tobacco-bruised voice stretching even at moderate interval leaps.

There’s just enough use of interview footage from the ’60s and ’70s to give an informal sense of Jagger’s ironic honesty that engulfs the audience on songs like “Sympathy for the Devil” and the rare Muddy Waters’ classic “Champagne and Reefer,” for which blues icon Guy trades choruses. In one hilarious clip, Jagger gets out of a helicopter, after just being released from jail on drug charges, to walk across an English estate lawn for a group discussion with a clergyman and other community pillars. Like a schoolhouse rebel being brought before a British PTA meeting, Jagger revels in the negative attention. After all, he knows something that they never will — utter liberation through rock ‘n’ roll. One look at “Shine a Light” and you can see how the Rolling Stones eclipse every other rock act around. This could just be the most intimate concert experience you could have, even if you were at the show. CV

‘Stop-Loss’

Movie Trailer

Co-writer and director Kimberly Peirce returns after her impressive 1999 drama “Boys Don’t Cry” with an equally empathetic film centered around the U.S. military’s current backdoor-draft, responsible for forcing 81,000 soldiers back into war after multiple tours of duty. Squad leader Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe), his best friend Sgt. Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) and fellow soldier Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) return to their Brazos, Texas, hometown after spending five blood-soaked years in Afghanistan and Iraq. Following a welcome home ceremony, where King receives a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star from a U.S. Senator, he tries to help his friends adjust to civilian life in spite of their violence riddled psyches. King’s own effort to reacclimate to home life is challenged when he is ordered, under the Stop-Loss policy, to return to Iraq. “With all due respect, fuck the President,” is King’s vehement reply to the commanding officer who ineffectively attempts to jail King. What follows is an honest, patriotic soldier’s desperate attempt to find a way out of a malicious bureaucratic booby trap.

With the help of fiancé Michele (Abbie Cornish), King goes AWOL and they head for Washington, D.C., to seek assistance from the senator that called King a hero, just days earlier. On the run, the American streets that King dreamed of returning to take on a similar war zone quality to Iraq’s unpredictable alleys. Shriver gets in touch with King to tell him that “Boot” (a term applied to all U.S. military authority) has contacted the senator, and no reprieve will be possible. Starting a new life from scratch in Canada or Mexico becomes the topic of discussion as the road trip meets with dead ends.

Peirce, whose younger brother recently returned from duty in Iraq, doesn’t push the story for ultimate dramatic effect. She doesn’t track the sensual tension between King and his fiancé. Their off-limits relationship is understood and respected. Certain subplots could have been heightened to extract audience sentiment, but this is a movie about people, soldiers and their families, being forcefully submerged into tragedy with no less coercion than a water torture victim being vigorously tortured. It is a movie full of anger and heartbreak that sticks with you. Maddening, upsetting and articulate, it’s a story that dares to address a systematic tentacle of government expediency connected to a much larger monster. The term “Stop-Loss” comes from an economic definition. “A ‘Stop-Loss Order’ is an order placed with a broker to sell a security when it reaches a certain price. It is designed to limit an investor’s loss on a security position.”

The U.S. media has kept hidden the breadth of affliction that Americans are suffering from two wars that we are told will never end. “Stop-Loss” elegantly poses the question, when is enough, enough? It’s a question that every thinking person on the planet is asking about America’s radical necon movement, and one that you might be closer to answering after seeing the film. CV

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