Sunday, October 24, 2010

One Plus One = No Sympathy



Jean-Luc Godard's One Plus One (aka Sympathy for the Devil) is a big pile of merde.

About half the film is of the Rolling Stones working their way through what eventually became "Sympathy for the Devil" on Beggar's Banquet.

The other half is, to be nice about it, incomprehensible revolutionary gibberish.

It's only an hour and a half but it seems like forever.

The revolutionary bits are so self-conscious and so... stupid, yeah, that's the word — I half expected the Monty Python guys to pop out of the abandoned cars in berets, striped French sailor shirts and elaborate mustaches. "Un, deux, trois!"

About the Stones: "Sympathy" started out as a folky, bluesy thing, and it seems Keith Richards worked up that little loopy bass line for Bill Wyman. Brian Jones is shown playing away at an acoustic, but they don't seem to have turned his microphone on.

Thank God for the fast-forward button. Two coils.

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