Quick recap: This documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their worldwide tour in 1969, although the focus is mainly on the tragedy at the Altamont Speedway December of that year.

The post will be Mick Jagger heavy. Deal with it.

Fun (?) fact: Meredith Hunter, the guy who was stabbed by the Hell’s Angels, was not actually murdered during ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ but instead ‘Under My Thumb’.

My thoughts: Mick. Jagger.  Oh my god, Mick Jagger. I know that the documentary touched on a few complex issues in the music world, but let’s just sit for a minute and appreciate Mick Jagger. Go ahead. Take a minute. I’ll be right here.

Good? Ok. So I’ve never been a big Rolling Stones fan, although I certainly appreciate their talent and influence on virtually every rock band in existence. I think the reason I never got into them is because I’ve only heard their biggest hits on classic rock stations and it never occurred to me just how important they were/are. After watching Gimme Shelter, I get it. What’s funny about that is that this isn’t the sort of music documentary that most people are familiar with: a lighthearted look at a hard working group who spend long days on the road, meet with thousands of fans and still manage to find time to goof off.* Gimme Shelter is a critical look at The Stones and their decision to hire Hell’s Angels to protect them as well as the counter culture movement in general.

* The only music documentary I am familiar with. Unfortunately, not on this list.

My take on the whole thing is that everyone had a hand in this and yet who’s really to blame? Starting with the Rolling Sones, when it was announced they would be doing a free concert at a speedway, I knew things wouldn’t end well. They were one of the biggest groups at the time, if not the biggest. Practically the entire country would try to come to this. Which leads to their decision to use the Hell’s Angels to protect them. I read that there is a Hell’s Angels in Britain that the Stones used before, but they were much less violent. It seems that they didn’t know what they were getting into until it started getting out of hand. Which leads to the audience’s part in all of this. There were over 300,000 people in attendance that night and I would guess that most there were on something. People showed up expecting a Woodstock but instead it turned ugly and violent. Meredith Hunter’s death is incredibly sad, but as it was later noted, he had pulled out a gun and one of the Hell’s Angels stabbed him in self-defense. It’s hard to say how this all could’ve been prevented except to maybe have not had the concert at all.

It’s powerful enough to see the crowd start to get out of hand and even more powerful to actually watch as the death occurs. The Stones keep playing during all of this although they do say at some point that a doctor is needed. I imagine that stopping the concert at this point would’ve been useless because that would’ve probably started a riot. So it isn’t until the end of the movie that we see The Stones sitting and watching the footage of the concert and feeling the weight of their consequences. And it isn’t even that they are to blame necessarily, but that there are consequences to everything, especially with  such explosive fame as theirs.

Final review: 4/5. A little slow at first but very powerful at the end.

Up next: The Burmese Harp

Quick a recap: This is the ‘making of’ documentary about Apocalypse Now, the movie where everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

Fun (?) fact: It’s really difficult to find ‘fun facts’ about a movie that is basically ‘fun facts’. So instead, here is a fact about Francis Ford Coppola: George Lucas has said he based the character Han Solo off of him.

directing Dennis Hopper would probably have driven me to the brink of insanity more so than any other issue the film had

My thoughts: After watching a movie on this list the very first thing I do is head to IMDb and Wikipedia for trivia. Most of the time I’m greeted with subpar information about who might’ve been cast in a lead role or who didn’t get along, but then sometimes I land on a goldmine like Apocalypse Now. I don’t know if I could call it the biggest disaster in movie making, but it was pretty bad: shooting in the Philippines during a civil conflict, a typhoon, Martin Sheen’s near fatal heart attack, going way over budget, everything Marlin Brando…..and the list goes on. The distinction this movie has over other disasters, though,  is that it continued to plug along and what was finally released to the public is one of the best movies ever made.

Which makes me wonder how this documentary would be viewed had Apocalypse Now been a bomb. Part of the joy of watching this was seeing all the chaos and knowing that in the end a masterpiece would be created. I loved watching the process of how it all came together and it gave me more appreciation for the director knowing all the fires that must be put out daily between the actors, production crew and even the setting. At the same time, watching Coppola talk about his plan for how the movie would play out, one has to wonder how anything less than a disaster was to be expected. This isn’t some romantic comedy starring Reese Witherspoon; this is a war movie, with the full war experience and big themes woven all through each scene. Knowing this side of the story makes me love the end result even more.

My drawback to this documentary is a big one: I didn’t find it all that interesting over all. I learned nothing new about how the movie came to be, although I was deeply interested watching Coppola and his methods. I blame the internet for this one more so than the movie. Had I seen Hearts of Darkness in 1995, let’s say, it would’ve been shocking to find out everything that happened. As it stands now, all I have to do is read an article on Wikipedia and I’m good to go. What’s left is a compelling enough story about a director and the lengths that he must go through, but not compelling enough for me to enjoy myself very much.

Final review: 3/5. As a personal preference, I’m not a huge fan of ‘making of’ documentaries to begin with.

Up next: Gimme Shelter