2/5 a boring waste of money
  by Michael Justice (australia)
I found this a boring waste of money. It could have been condensed down to 10 minutes.

2/5 Sympathy for the Devil
  by Black Dawg
I remembered seeing this in a theatre coupled with Gimme Shelter. But I had forgotten how bad and bizarre it was. Thank Goodness I bought it used for a few dollars more than nothing. I think it may be impossible to sit through the whole feature without the finger on the fast forward button during the bookstore, Democracy Eve interview and black militant scenes.



4/5 Driving Fast in the Fog
  by G. Bestick (Dobbs Ferry, NY USA)

Sympathy for the Devil (originally titled One Plus One) was shot in 1968, when Godard's infatuation with Maoist ideology was at fever pitch. In the films he churned out from 67 to 74 (approximately 18 films, some of which were never released) Godard was struggling to find sounds and visuals that would convey the reality of revolutionary change. One Plus One works better than most because its central image - a rock band struggling to make a great song - is an inspired metaphor for the turbulent, tedious and confounding process of making a social revolution.

Over half the movie is a straightforward documentary of the Rolling Stones working on Sympathy for the Devil, a song from their Beggar's Banquet album. The deadpan camera captures unglamorous, blue-collar songmaking, filled with dead ends and the odd moment of serendipity. We see the cohesiveness of the band (except for Brian Jones, pathetically boxed off in the studio, out of tune and out of touch. He drowned shortly afterwards.) and the hard work behind their genius. The recording sessions are interspersed with revolutionary agitprop - gun toting black revolutionaries in an auto junkyard; communist manifestos being read in a newsagent's shop filled with girlie magazines. The final element is a moderately amusing voice over prose piece that puts world leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and John Foster Dulles in compromising sexual situations.

The message here is that making something new is messy, solipsistic, self-indulgent and occasionally sublime. In keeping with Godard's idea of revolution as ongoing and unfinished, the director's cut of the movie never included the finished version of the Stones song. The producer added it later, at the end, over some slapped in color-tinted still frames, earning him a well-deserved punch in the nose from Godard. (The version reviewed here, with the Sympathy for the Devil title, is the producer's version.)

Even while drunk on revolutionary idealism, Godard couldn't stop being a talented and provocative filmmaker. One Plus One is a successful if occasionally tedious film in its own right. It's also an interesting period piece, bringing us back to a time when artists, activists and your average hippie all felt they had to do what they were doing in order to get where they were going next, a time when all of it felt dreadfully important, even when it wasn't.


4/5 I found this film fascinating, despite its reputation....
  by Grigory's Girl (NYC)
This film has been unfairly maligned by many (Rolling Stones fans, Godard fans), but it's actually pretty good and absolutely fascinating at times. Godard's politics get in the way of his cinematic mastery at times, but overall I found this as good and as compulsively watchable as his classic films. One of the greatest things about this film (as others have noted here) is showing The Rolling Stones in their rawest state. This isn't a slick, MTV, reality style TV programme with lame interviews and an obsession with showing only the "fun times" while working. Godard shows (with his camera circling the studio in brilliantly filmed long takes) how absolutely TEDIOUS it is to make a record/CD/music. We see Jagger, Richards, Wyman, Watts (and studio musicians) obsess over the most minute details on how the song Sympathy for the Devil is going to sound. It's not like "hey, let's do the song", and one take later, they're done. There aren't any groupies, flashing lights, nothing. It's just The Stones making their music, and it shows the dedication that great musicians like The Rolling Stones put into their craft. It's also especially sad to see Brian Jones, who was pretty much "gone" at the time of this film. The Stones put him off in a corner (he looks like he's sitting in his own little box), and you can hear him strumming inaudibly. There's a microphone in front of him, but it obviously isn't on, and Jones doesn't seem to know. Jagger, Wyman, Richards, and Watts pretty much ignore him, and soldier on without him. Jones's drug use and alienation were at its zenith here, and he died shortly after these sessions. These sequences might be the most realistic depiction of rock musicians recording an album ever.

Godard intercuts a lot of political material in the film (this film was made during his generally abysmal "Maoist" period), but his framing (especially scenes shot at a junkyard) is classic Godard. Even though these scenes in the junkyard are with the Black Panthers and their rhetoric/dialogue are completely dated, dogmatic, and overly political, the scenes are still well shot and crafted. I never found the film boring, unlike some of Godard's other Maoist films like La Chinoise, which was REALLY boring. So if you're a Godard fan, or a Stones fan, you should see this film. It's really quite good, despite some of its politics.

1/5 ***pathetic (NO sympathy!)
  by The Concise Critic: (New England)
Great song; ridiculous movie.
I'm of this silly generation, yet it is not the silliness of half this movie which bothers me. (The movie mixes footage of the Rolling Stones recording "Sympathy For the Devil" with immature, amateur social "commentary".)
It is the arrogance and the ignorance which flows from this film that bothers me, the fakery that richness and idleness birth. Silly me! When I was impressionable, I listened to these jesters and these jumping jack flashes rather than the wisdom of the west.
Maybe this is why so many had so many objections to us in the 1970s; we were so objectionable.
Continue to listen to the song. Save yourself, though, from this dull, pornographic drivel. (Unless, of course, you want to see just how ugly and empty we were then.)