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Simply A Masterpiece

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Great capture of rock's darkest day.A documentary on the Rolling Stones' 1969 US tour and the tragic events that concluded it. We see footage of their concerts and of them making the Sticky Fingers album in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. However, the main focus of the film is on one concert - Altamont Speedway, outside San Francisco, 6 December 1969. A free concert, it is the Stones' idea and it was meant to be the Woodstock of the West (Woodstock having occurred four months earlier). Other bands performing included Jefferson Airplane, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Ike and Tina Turner, Crosby Stills Nash and Young and Santana. However, it is far from being the peace and love of Woodstock. Part of the problem is that the Stones hired the Hells Angels as security. The other problem was that a large portion of the crowd were high on drugs. Friction ensues. During the Stones' set, Meredith Hunter, high on methamphetamine and armed with a gun, makes a lunge for the stage and is stabbed to death by the Hells Angels. The peace and love era of the 60s was over.A very well made documentary, especially considering the limited material the producers had to work with. We don't just see the concert footage but also the Stones and the film makers sitting in the studio going through the footage. We see their thoughts and reactions to what occurred. Some of this feels contrived or staged but for the most part it provides a narrative to what happened. Otherwise we would just have concert footage with no explanation of what to expect or what was going on.The fact that the Meredith Hunter incident is mentioned early on in the film helps the tension in the movie. You know something is going to happen, but you don't know when. You see the friction preceding the incident and there's now an inevitability to it all. It plays out like a thriller, ultimately.The camera work at the concert contributes too. The roughness of the shots adds an edginess and feeling of anarchy to the proceedings. The footage preceding the Altamont concert is quite interesting too. We see some Stones concert footage from other concerts, and get complete songs from these concerts. These are probably the only enjoyable live music moments from the movie, as the Altamont songs are too soaked in tension and the threat of violence to fully enjoy. The Sticky Fingers footage is great too, seeing a classic album being formed. In the movie it only lasts a few minutes but it deserves a documentary of its own. The highlight was seeing Jagger and Richards listening to an early take of Brown Sugar. Quite illuminating to see artists' views of their own work.Overall, one of music's most infamous incidents, quite accurately captured.

A documentary crew tails the Rolling Stones for a leg of their 1969 North American tour and unwittingly captures one of the nastiest, bloodiest all-day concerts in music history - the infamous Altamont Speedway show. Mostly pieced together from ambient hand-held shots taken on the day of the festival and shown sans narration, it's a stunning stream-of-consciousness presentation of the crowds, cultures and events leading up to the angry, violent personality of the gig itself. It's stunning just how little foresight and planning went into this event, as two days beforehand organizers were still trying to settle on a venue with little or no mind paid to such vital elements as parking, waste management or security. Maybe that kind of mindset would have worked for a small or mid-sized show, but with a crowd in excess of 300,000 showing up to take in what was being portrayed as "Woodstock of the West," the only possible outcome of such an awful strategy is total, unmitigated chaos. And that's what they got, as a pushy, balls-tripping audience ran headlong into a moody, fight-spoiling security outfit and lit a set of tragic fireworks. A painfully slow degradation of civility and humanity set to music, it's a dark counterpoint to the radiant, optimistic attitudes seen at Woodstock.

While I had previously seen this film on tape that I recorded off AMC, that cassette didn't record the whole thing so it wasn't until I just watched it on YouTube that I saw the murder that pretty much ended the picture. If I didn't already read about it on various internet articles, I wouldn't have known about the gun that murdered man had that he presumably intended to use on that Hell's Angel that stabbed him. This film, Gimme Shelter, is both enjoyable for the performances of The Rolling Stones and others like Ike and Tina Turner, Jefferson Airplane, and The Flying Burrito Brothers, and upsetting for all those scenes of those Hell's Angels constantly beating up on several audience members not to mention some of the musicians like Airplane's Marty Balin. And seeing Mick Jagger's face after seeing the whole thing on the view finder makes one wonder how he could have continued the way he did after that. Still, at least during those Madison Square Garden performances of The Stones and The Turners, you could marvel at the way they put themselves out there. I especially loved the way Tina stroked that microphone and its handle! And while the camera is mostly on the audience and their scuffles when the other acts are playing at Altamont Speedway, at least you can hear what they're singing when that happens. So on that note, Gimme Shelter is one of the most compelling of concert documentaries from this most interesting era in Rock music. Kudos to David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin.

The great thing about "Gimme Shelter" is the way this documentary works as a dramatical film with acts, thrills, and when you watch how things were at the Altamont Festival you see how difficult things were that it looks like a Hollywood film where everything happens because it was written this way in order to be appealing to audiences. The Mayles Brothers film has no script whatsoever but some of the situations presented in it seems to coming out of a intriguing suspense. The now infamous concert seems to fated from the moment where managers wanted a place to do the show until the deaths of four people during the whole thing, being the murder of Meredith Hunter as the worst presented (and the only displayed and mentioned in the film, during the Rolling Stones performance of "Under My Thumb"). Reasons for being a failure are countless: Security issues concerning that the police almost wasn't present and the Hell's Angels were the ones contracted to do the job, pushing people around and hitting Jefferson' Airplane's member Marty Balin on the face (act denounced by the band members while performing which almost caused a big clash between band and the motorcycle members); the place where the concert was made with a enormous number of people (this is the drama I was talking about, since this place was the third selected for such event, sounds like a play with three acts of tension, the third place where everything happened, things like that). Every time you can sense that something's gonna happen and it will be something bad. Everything was a mess, but you can see some happiness, some smiles in crowd, it wasn't so bad but it could have been a better event to be remembered as a nice thing.Future viewers pay attention to Rolling Stones performance in the final minutes of the film where the most gripping and shocking part appears. The band couldn't play a song without being interrupted by the crowd and then the unfortunate event of the murder of a man by the Hell's Angels who attacked the man because he had a gun. Question to be made by us viewers is: why someone carried a gun in a show and a improvised security member carried a knife with him? And despite all the planning we see Mel Belli and managers doing throughout the documentary one must wonder what happened there."Gimme Shelter" captures the 1970's hippie movement, the rock n'roll as a powerful art in that social scenery, and of course the music is great. Brilliantly edited and directed it is a bold and interesting documentary. It gets sad towards the ending (especially Mick Jagger's face viewing in details the murder that happened in front of them but in the moment they couldn't saw a thing. Thanks to one of the film editors he could see the awful truth). Rock N'Roll fans or not, see it right now! 10/10