U2 and The Rolling Stones play the multiplex—but please leave your lighter in your pocket
U2 3D
Directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington. Featuring U2. Opens Fri, Apr 11.
3 Stars
SHINE A LIGHT
Directed by Martin Scorsese. Featuring The Rolling Stones. Now playing.
3 1/2 Stars
Personally, I’ve never been much on the arena rock concert. If I had to choose, I’d pass on all the bombast of those large-scale spectacles just to be able to see the expressions on the performers’ faces with my own eyes and not on a giant video screen.
In this sense, a concert movie is in many ways preferable to an actual concert, since directors and their many, many cameras have way better access to what’s going on up there onstage than anyone in the audience. That may cost me the visceral thrill of communing with my fellow fans in sweaty, over-amped bliss, but the inveterate cheapskate in me likes the price differential.
But as a music snob, a film snob, and a cheapskate, I won’t go to just any concert movie. Luckily, there are two not-just-any-concert-movies available for consumption in the city right now that offer not just the chance to see some major musical acts live but also technological enhancements that will leave the kind of people who like to see concert movies (i.e., potheads) mightily impressed.
The question is: how long will they stay impressed? Your love of U2 will certainly be a factor in your ability to endure U2 3D, which delivers exactly what the title promises: the durable Irish rockers popping right off the stage of a jam-packed soccer stadium in Buenos Aires and into your lap. On the one hand, the massive scale of their live show lends itself perfectly to immortalization by directors Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington’s stereoscopic cameras. On the other hand, the novelty does wear off eventually.
The novelty is pretty magical at first, though—you see a field of flickering lights in the murky background as the opening credits throb toward you on a waft of crowd noise. Then the lights come and you look across U2’s vast stage set to the ocean of ardent Argentine U2 fans brimming over the tiers of a colossal concrete bowl. It’s rather breathtaking.
I should confess at this point I haven’t listened to a U2 album all the way through in about 20 years. Like mercury, U2 pervades the pop-culture environment so thoroughly that they’re hard to keep out your diet entirely, but the sidestream U2 I’ve been exposed to was enough to keep me from tracking down more.
That said, they’re a seasoned and solid live act with a three-decades-deep songbook to draw upon, so the show ain’t gonna suck. All the expected hits are recapitulated and the live sound captures a bit of the acoustic din from the huge venue which daubs some much-needed mud on the band’s trademark sound.
Having an enormous pseudo-profound frontman Bono cantering and posing a few feet from my face wasn’t the most exciting prospect to me, but the filmmakers keep the visual interest (and trippiness) ramped up by layering close-up images of the musicians with the huge venue and the gargantuan Lite-Brite background visuals at different depths. I found it also helps to pretend you’re watching a 3-D horror movie from the 1950s in which Buenos Aires is terrorized by a gigantic, sweaty Irish guy and his messiah complex.
This is perhaps an indication of U2 3D’s main shortcoming: it seems like the filmmakers are trying to use the 3-D effect tastefully when it would be way more fun if they embraced 3-D’s tacky birthright and threw some shit at the audience. After an hour, they’ve used up all their tricks and you’re left with nothing but the music and, perhaps, the vague wish that there was an intermission so you could go out and freshen up your buzz.
Shine a Light comes with an altogether more distinguished cinematic pedigree: it was directed by Martin Scorsese, who, besides making some of the classics of contemporary cinema, also made one of the best concert films of all time, The Last Waltz. Here Scorsese turns no fewer than 16 IMAX cameras on The Rolling Stones at a rare small-venue performance last year. Remarkably, it’s not just the sight of a six-storey-high Mick ’n’ Keef that’s impressive, but the astonishing level of energy and passion these elderly gents still bring to their music.
The movie opens in normal cinematic dimensions with behind-the-scenes dickering between the filmmaker and The Stones over the how the show will be filmed before the screen blows up to IMAX dimensions once the band hits the stage at New York’s Beacon Theatre. At first, the band looks like the bunch of old British men that they are, all prim demeanour and wattled faces stuffed with too many teeth. But when they rip into “Jumping Jack Flash” at the top of their 20-song set, those geezers lose about 100 years off their collective age.
From the get-go, the cameras seem to have trouble keeping up with the geriatric yet frenetic Mick (he’ll be 65 this July), who looks no less than ever like some frantic wading bird with a few dozen volts of electricity shooting through it. He sings great too, giving not a single sign of losing wind through the entire aerobically intense performance.
Jagger’s hyper-alert, zero-body-fat preening contrasts nicely with Keith Richards (zero body moisture) and his muzzy, amiable disposition. Richards’ slashing rhythm guitar and trebly leads are way up in the mix, so you can appreciate his lackadaisical precision and carefully honed sloppiness, and he spends the whole show wearing a sozzled grin that acknowledges the marvel of his continued presence on the planet.
Scorsese sprinkles archival footage of the barely recognizable Stones of 40 years ago throughout the show to wryly comment on the band’s longevity, but Shine a Light is all about how the music sounds now. White Stripes frontman Jack White and Christina Aguilera are both hauled up (on “Loving Cup” and “Live With Me” respectively) for relevance, and Buddy Guy joins the band for a chaotic romp through Muddy Waters’ “Champagne and Reefer” to reference the band’s blues roots.
That tension between tight and loose is part of the charm captured by Scorsese’s cameras, not to mention the warmth and camaraderie between the players (sexy backup singers and large horn section included). While there’s nothing very surprising (or fun) in U2’s calculated, conscience-stricken live show, The Stones positively revel in winging it, sharing big smiles when they almost bottom out, as when Ron Wood laughingly shouts mid-song to Jagger that he’s forgotten the chords to “Brown Sugar.”
In the past I’ve joined the chorus of cynics wishing The Stones would just pack it in and rest on their laurels already. Shine a Light, though it strained my attention span eventually, has forced me to revise my opinion. A band with a back catalogue so full of great songs and the energy to put on a straight-up, fun rock show well into their 60s ought to be able to do whatever they want.
