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I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

It occurs to me that if you followed a particular band from it's very beginning, a film documentary concerning their career will generally reveal very little you didn't already know. That was the case here, at least for this viewer, who's been a Rolling Stones fan right from the get-go. Released in 2012, I was surprised actually that this look at The Stones basically took you from the beginning of their career to just about the middle to late Seventies, so it's not the thorough piece I was expecting.There were however a few tidbits I hadn't been aware of. How is it that in a little over fifty years since the Stones began playing, this is the very first mention I ever heard that the crazed young teenage girls who first came out to see the band play actually wet themselves in their hysteria? It must be true, Mick said it himself. Actually, Jagger had another comment along those lines. He stated that it was primarily in England that girls reacted hysterically to the band, while in the rest of the world it was boys. I thought that was an interesting observation on his part.Among the topics covered in the film - manager Andrew Oldham's shaping of the band as the anti-Beatles with a significantly darker image, the early drug busts that threatened to break up the band, Brian Jones's death, the Altamont disaster, and Keith getting arrested and deciding that the band and the music were more important than his personal relationship with heroin.In all, one will catch snippets of about two dozen songs in the Stones repertoire, with some time spent on Mick and Keith's collaborative writing and how some of their songs came together. But again, most of the footage that goes with those songs emanate from the late Sixties and early Seventies, so it's somewhat shocking to make the forty year time jump when a clip of the band singing 'All Down the Line' is used to close out the picture. It's from the 2008 Scorsese film "Shine a Light", documenting the Stones two day performance at the Beacon Theater in 2006. You wonder how the lot of them are still standing much less performing.And yet they still perform. I've never seen them live myself, and the chances of ever doing so grows slimmer with each passing day since most of their concerts are sold out within minutes. But one can always hope.

The movie is a lot of what The Stones are. A crazy madcap band, that ultimately, perhaps not by their own design, that the music survives. In the early going this look back captures the first wave of success which when it took off became a carnival of excess. Out from obscurity the guys just went with the crazed fans and did plenty on their own to stoke the insanity. In their defense their was plenty of pent-up of repressed decorum which the fans, especially the girls early on, morphed into a kind of heretofore unleashed out of bounds adoration. It just added more fuel to the fire which is captured here as kind of dangerous ride. It went on for several years without brakes.Life goes on and within it there is death and trouble. Brian Jones is ousted and dies while the band just keeps getting bigger. The next chapter with Mick Taylor, almost without a blip, only got bigger and more excessive. The viewer feels that this couldn't be right and so there was more trouble even while the music kept selling more and more. Another vaguely, but horrifically, related death at the Altamont concert causes a furor among many including blindsiding the band with things they couldn't contain. The music kept selling more and the excesses continued on.Now this is where the viewer feels a bit like how can this be? So many things should be in place to devastate a career. The Stones even left Britain as they felt they had become the whipping boys for all of the worst of society. Of course it was the realization that they had a hefty back tax bill to satisfy that really made the choice for them. With so much turmoil and Keith's ever increasing heroin addiction things could have careened off the rails. Again, the music didn't let the band, or fans, down. The Stones kept rolling and to save himself Mick Taylor eventually leaves. This is where the film loses it's quite linear trajectory. The rest of the story which includes Keith's famous Canadian bust gets a huge fast forward with big holes. Keith cleans up??? Ron Wood is in and even though it isn't mentioned by name The Stones return with their big statement which was incorrectly called "their comeback" album, as Some Girls, propels them past their sixties and seventies period into modern times. The rest gets hardly a mention which for a band celebrating their entire 50-year+ career seems strange.All in all this is a good, not definitive, look at the wild ride of a wild band. One that had the right elements to survive even as it barely fleshes out what exactly constituted that. I'd say in this regard it is for the fans and more of curiosity for others. Still the catalog of the music, which did include missteps, survives, ultimately making it more worthy of a look even though it is hardly completest.

This is an abbreviated history of The Rolling Stones in 2 hours. Certainly that's not enough to go into much depth. They go from the start of their success to modern day with very little after the Canadian arrest and release.They go through using old TV and film clips. It's fun to see some of the old footage. Although they didn't use the footage, they did use snippets of present day interview as narration for the documentary. Again the reminiscence is fairly superficial. They're not digging real deep in these interviews and nothing shocking is shown here. Just good music and good memories.

Half a century of the Rolling Stones gets the full treatment in Brett Morgan's "Crossfire Hurricane". The documentary actually focuses more on the group's first decade, as they developed a reputation as the anti-Beatles, went through some drug busts, and even fled England to avoid the taxes. There are number of scenes in which interviewers (obviously from the older generation) are asking the band members ridiculous questions, and one gets the feeling that Mick, Keith, Charlie and the rest don't like having to answer.But of course the best part is the music. We get to hear most of the famous songs, often getting footage of the recordings. It just goes to show that the '60s will never die. In other words, this documentary is pure satisfaction!