Crossfire Hurricane
Releases: 28thNovember 2012
Rating: M – Contains drug use & offensive language
Duration: 111 minutes
Genre: Documentary
Starring: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts
Director: Brett Morgen (The Kid Stays In The Picture)
Reviewer: Jon E Clist
The Premise>> The Rolling Stones are to be chronicled in a kaleidoscopic new film, Crossfire Hurricane, that documents key periods of their career and their incredible adventures. The film will be broadcast live by satellite to cinemas from the London Film Festival on Thursday 18 October and include live coverage from the red carpet before the film screening begins. Directed by Brett Morgen, the film features historical footage, much of it widely unseen, and commentary from Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Ronnie Wood and former Stones Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor, as well as rare interviews with Brian Jones. Period interviews, extensive live performance material and news archive footage will complete the documentary, which takes its title from the opening lines of “Jumping Jack Flash”.
The Review>> So if you were going to make a list of the most influential rock bands of the past fifty years, I am pretty sure that The Rolling Stones would find their way onto most people’s lists and for the most part end up towards the top of said lists. Then if you took those lists and converted them to a Ven diagram and cross referenced it with the total volume of drugs taken during the sixties and seventies, you would find that both circles would be heavily ensconced within each other. That Ven diagram would pretty much sum up this rock documentary perfectly and it would be known forever as the sex, drugs and rocknroll ven diagram.
So here we have a brilliant collection of clips from predominately the first 2 decades of the fifty years of their illustrious musical journey. I think that for me, I didn’t want this documentary to go longer but then I would have liked to have seen perhaps a little more of the eighties leading into the nineties as they journeyed supposedly into chemically sober rockn’roll. So you don’t get to the point where Bill Wyman left the band, however it does cover the rest of the comings and goings including the departure and death of founding member Brian Jones. You get a lot of insight into the rock machine that is The Rolling Stones and there is this very interesting format involved in the editing of this documentary. The bulk of the audio/narration comes from a interview done on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Stones. No cameras were allowed in the room so it is purely dialog that flows over top of archival footage. This works very well as you don’t get distracted looking at the wrinkly faces of the Stones as they are now. Instead it visually focuses on them in their youth.
However each member of the band both current and previous that are still alive, feature in the interviews. So you get to hear some great insight from past members such as Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor. For the most part they certainly appear to be given the freedom to talk about whatever they like, even though it is public knowledge that Mick Jagger had final sign off on every scene and audio clip used in the film. In fact to be honest there were plenty of scenes throughout the film that you get the feeling Jagger was feeling rather open about including. You also get to see just how shrewd a businessman Jagger really is. After all he has managed to keep the business of The Rolling Stones alive for five decades now.
The Verdict>> An intriguing rock-umentary that gives a lot of credence and evidence to the legends of a band so fueled by chemical additives and the desire to have fun in the process of making music for the masses of dis-affected youth.
Some extra bits to know about the film and to look out for>> With one hotly-anticipated Rolling Stones documentary under his belt, director Brett Morgen already has another rock legend on his mind: Kurt Cobain. For Nirvana devotees, this is awesome news. Crossfire Hurricane has been getting good reviews, which bodes well for a Cobain documentary. But because Courtney Love is involved in this movie (she actually recruited him for the project back in 2007, according to Morgen) this isn’t going to be your run-of-the-mill life story.
“We are going to do the movie sort of like a third-person autobiography,” Morgen told the New York Post. “[As] if Kurt was around and making a film about his life.” And while we have no idea what that means, we’re not letting it dampen our hopes for this potentially illuminating project. Even though Morgen has spoken all of 100 words about the project thus far, he’s already demonstrated a reassuring familiarity with the subject matter. “Kurt was not only an amazing songwriter and musician: He was an incredible artist and filmmaker,” Morgen said. In case you didn’t know, Cobain used to make Super-8 movies in his spare time. Which isn’t a secret, but it’s a lesser-known bit of trivia that indicates Morgen’s done his research.
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