Purely Joyful Movie!

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

To save you time, I'll make some broad generalizations up front. Further down I'll get more into the guts of this film, but if you're just trying to decide if this movie is worth 2hrs of your life, here's what you need to know:If you're a hardcore Stones fan, then this film will possibly irritate you, maybe even to the point of rioting as Stones fans reportedly did at the premiere of this film in '68. This is not a documentary about the Stones nor is it a documentary at all. It's a film that Godard had been intending to make about counter-culture revolution, and it just happened to coincide with Godard filming the Stones recording "Sympathy for the Devil", so he mashed them together and this is the result.If you're a Godard fan, you might appreciate what he tried to accomplish here, but all the same, I've never met a Godard fan who considers this among his better efforts.With a visionary filmmaker like Godard and a very poetic & provocative song like "Sympathy for the Devil", you'd think the marriage of the two would spawn a work of art the likes of which hadn't been seen since Pink Floyd's "The Wall". (Yeah I know The Wall came out in 1982 but bear with me, I'm onna roll).Instead I feel like the two themes didn't exactly gel. Godard took a markedly different approach which, on its own, could have been a worthy film. Rather than follow the Stones' lead with an intriguing historical narrative that leads us from Biblical times to the assassination of JFK, Godard just throws a bunch of unrelated vignettes full of superfluous political blather (intended to be tiresome) interspersed with Stones recording the song, and we are to accept that they are somehow related?While both the song & the film make heavy use of irony & sarcasm, and while both the song & the film are about the decline of human society due to human nature ("the devil"), the Stones & Godard are on different ends of the spectrum. What makes the Stones song so memorable is its suave, seductive flair told in 1st person narrative. In the very first line, Mick introduces the devil (the speaker) as "a man of wealth and taste". Essentially, this presents a very revolutionary concept of the devil: not an, ugly, smelly, cartoonish creature with a pitchfork but a charming, hypnotizing, classy character.It would have been great if the film had followed along this absolutely central theme, but instead it took a very base, unattractive approach that was not enticing at all. There are no classy gents playing the devil here, instead we get the Black Panthers in a squalid junkyard spouting NOT hypnotic words but pulpy rhetoric which we immediately dismiss as pointless ravings as they casually commit base murder before our eyes.In another example, Godard sets up a comical slapstick scene in a comic book store that also sells porn & Nazi propaganda, where the customers are allowed to take what they want in exchange for a "heil Hitler" and a slap across the face of two kidnapped hippies. I thought that was a hilarious scene, but really it was jarringly incongruous with the Stones song.Between the half dozen vignettes like the Black Panther scene & the comic book scene & scenes of someone spray painting graffiti slogans across London, we get abruptly shifted back to the studio sessions where the Stones are working out the details of their song. In contrast with the vignettes, the studio scenes are very somber, very respectful and very endearing to watch. I found myself wishing that someone actually *would* make a documentary about the "Sympathy" sessions because so much could have been expounded on. We see the slow evolution of the initial song (a gospel type ballad) to what it ultimately became, an ironically uptempo samba that draws its power from a seductive Afro-Brazilian candomblé beat. Again I'm harping on the seductiveness of the song, both lyrically and instrumentally, because it's a real shame that Godard either didn't pick up on that, or chose to go in the opposite direction with a (deliberately) unappealing visual show.Like I said, Godard's film would have been worthy on its own. The Stones song is, of course, a great piece of literature in its own right. But sticking them both together like this just didn't stick. I'm glad I saw this film, and I'll probably watch it again. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they're ready for a very strange and jarring experience.For a great marriage of movie & music, I would recommend the aforementioned "Pink Floyd The Wall" as well as "Tommy", a sarcastic, carnival-esque satire much like Godard's approach here but with the perfect music in the same vein, and maybe the Monkees movie "Head" which is a nearly-incomprehensible acid trip but with similarly nearly-incomprehensible lyrics that gel perfectly.

Like many, I'm sure, I was under a distinct impression that this had a lot to do with and thus featured a lot of the Rolling Stones. When it came up on Sky Arts, I thought this was a must!Frankly, I only watched all of it as I wanted to write a review. I like the Stones, a bit before my time and I only have their Forty Licks 'Best Of' plus a Live In Concert DVD. Thus, the studio bits of them rehearsing are therefore interesting but hardly essential to me.As it went on, I checked a couple of reviews and started to dread the next 90 mins... I've seen, unfortunately a couple of later Godard's and whilst he used to make amazing films (his 1960's Breathless is one of my all-time favourites) some of his stuff since, including the awful 'Weekend' has been just selfish, incoherent claptrap. He's a prolific fellow, according to IMDb he's directed 98 films! So far...I'm sure there's subliminal messages in amongst the hogwash and it must have been "fun" for stoners and dope-heads to try and extract them. But, for the rest of us, putting one's head in a spinning washing machine is much more fun.

In the 60's, having as the background the rehearsal and recording of "Sympathy for the Devil" in the classic album "Beggar's Banquet" by the revolutionary bad boy Rolling Stones – Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Brian Jones – plus Marianne Faithful, Godard discloses other contemporary revolutionary and ideological movements – the Black Power through the Black Panthers, the feminism, the communism, the fascism - entwined with the reading of a cheap pulp political novel divided in the chapters: "The Stones Rolling; "Outside Black Novel"; "Sight and Sound"; "All About Eve"; "The Heart of Occident"; "Inside Black Syntax"; and, "Under the Stones the Beach"."Sympathy for the Devil" is another pretentious and boring mess of the uneven director Jean-Luc Godard. The narrative and the footages are awful, but fortunately I love the Stones and "Sympathy for the Devil" and it is nice to see them in the beginning of their careers; otherwise this documentary would be unbearable. My vote is three.Title (Brazil): "Sympathy for the Devil"

Sympathy for the Devil (1968) BOMB (out of 4) Jean-Luc Godard's "documentary" shows The Rolling Stones recording the title track while mixing in footage of the Black Panthers preaching hatred. This is without question one of the worst documentaries I've ever seen and it's the worth Godard film I've seen to date but it's rather amazing how incredibly stupid this legendary director can be at times. The title is going to attract mainly fans of The Rolling Stones but their footage isn't here for fans and I'm still trying to think of why Godard put the footage here. Apparently he's director's cut run eleven minutes longer and features more of the Black Panthers and it's clear that he wanted the spotlight on hate instead of the band so why include the band at all? There's one scene where a couple Black Panthers tell a story of how they want to kill white women and Godard follows this up with a short film of black men gunning down white women. There's non-stop hatred talk coming from this group so I'm really shocked there's not more controversy surrounding this film. There are various short films throughout the movie and there's all sorts of stuff acted out, which makes no sense when put together and you also get constant scenes of men spray painting cars. The Stones footage shows them recording the classic song from the early stages to its complete version but with all the other crap in this film I can't even recommend this to fans of the group.