The Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter - Criterion Collection
Criterion - Criterion
Release date: 2000-11-14
DVD
Director:Charlotte Zwerin
Actors: Marty Balin, Sonny Barger, Melvin Belli, Dick Carter (II), Jack Casady
Adult Language, Adult Situations, Arts & Entertainment, Biting, Brief Nudity, Color, Concerts, Culture & Society, Direct Cinema, Disturbing, Documentary, Drug Content, English, Forceful, Gloomy, History, Law & Crime, Menacing, Movie, Music
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The Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter - Criterion Collection
Date undefinedThis appears to be a true and accurate record of these events. Very absorbing and of significant historical interest. The music is good as well!!
The Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter - Criterion Collection
Date undefinedI have always heard that it is difficult to make a rock and roll film, let alone one that is also a documentary. Gimme Shelter is both- a filmed concert experience but one that also documents those events that take place behind the scenes.
This one gives the viewer virtually unlimited access to the Rolling Stones for their 1969 tour of America. We see the Stones as they perform at Madison Square Garden, working in the studio, and checking into hotel rooms. For Stones historians, there are brief glimpses of Ian Stewart- founding member and so called "sixth Stone", including one of him at the Altamont concert, asking for a doctor to please come to the front of the stage.
Some of the most fascinating scenes do not even have the Stones in them. These are the meetings that would take place in the office of famed attorney Mel Belli. Here is where the ill-fated Altamont show would be planned.
Last of course, is the Altamont concert. It was here that peace & love would collide with extreme violence with fatal results. Was it the end of an era? Did Altamont somehow symbolize the dawning of a new age in America- one in which Flower Power was replaced by death and destruction illustrated by the war in Vietnam?
Perhaps so but at its heart, Gimme Shelter was never intended to be a comment on the sixties nor was it supposed to make some sort of political statement. Gimme Shelter started out as a concert film about the Rolling Stones and it just happened to record something that went very, very wrong.
The Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter - Criterion Collection
Date undefinedSaw Gimmie Shelter again last night and suddenly I felt like I was envisioning what the great artist Goya saw when painting the horrors into the faces of his characters. The buildup to Altamont, because you know it's coming, is full of tension and dread cloaked in the mundane. The footage shot from the stage ecompasses almost every emotion and reality known to man -- joy, sadness, fear, anger, sensuality, frivolity, violence, psychotic reaction ... as Goya saw it, the horror of existence and who we are. The most amazing shots: The hatred for everything Mick Jagger stands for etched in the face of a Hell's Angel standing right next to him on stage, staring....In the aftermath of the killing, young men in police caps -- yet clearly not police or police hats -- milling around on the stage ineffectually.
People have ripped the Stones for living in a self-deluded bubble during these times, but you've got to hand it to a horrified, at times speechless Mick -- considered by many in those days the devil himself -- as he tries to calm the crowd, appeal for sense and sanity. "Babies, please..." I'm sure he was scared the Hell's Angels might kill him too.
P.S. -- One of the Angels knocks out Marty Balin, and, go figure!, he got up and wrote the smash hit "Miracles" just a few years later for Starship. Peace.
