On the Saturday November 18, 2023 edition of the Richard Crouse Show, we meet Nick Broomfield, director of the new documentary “The Stones And Brian Jones,” now playing in theatres. With candid interviews and never-before-seen footage he reveals how Brian Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones, was left behind in the shadows of history.
Broomfield props the film up with first-hand accounts, particularly from former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, whose enthusiasm for the music, and Jones’s contributions to it, is infectious. The old stories are bolstered by the addition of new, fresh interviews but it is the focus on Jones as a brilliant musician and not simply another rock ‘n’ roll casualty, that elevates “The Stones and Brian Jones.” The story has its sordid moments, but Bloomfield emphasizes the very heart of Jones’s being, the music.
We’ll also get to know Chelsea McMullen, director of Swan Song, a documentary that takes us inside the National Ballet of Canada’s 2022 legacy-defining new production of “Swan Lake,” choreographed for the first time by the company’s artistic director Karen Kain, who famously debuted in the ballet in 1971. The film’s intimate, character-driven approach chronicles creative conflicts, devastating injuries and personal sacrifices amongst its subjects who, in various ways, confront ideals of race, class and body standards as they navigate a tradition that has historically valued uniformity and compliance.
Then, John Carney, the Irish musician and director of Flora and Son, a new Apple TV+. comedy about a mom, played by the fabulous Eve Hewson, who tries to connect with her rebellious son with music. The director of the Academy Award winning film “Once” tells me about his music saved his life and why he didn’t include my favorite Dublin pub in the film.
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Chris Pratt, Elvis Costello, Baz Luhrmann, Martin Freeman, David Cronenberg, Mayim Bialik, The Kids in the Hall and many more!
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A month after the release of “Hackney Diamonds,” the latest record from The Rolling Stones, comes a documentary about the largely forgotten musician who started the band. “The Stones and Brian Jones,” a new film from Nick Broomfield and now playing in theatres, examines the man who posted the want ad in “Jazz News” that got the Stones rolling in 1962.
“He was the heart and soul of the Rolling Stones,” says Broomfield in the film. “Yet, most people today haven’t even heard of him.”
At age 14, Broomfield, director of music docs like “Kurt & Courtney,” “Biggie & Tupac” and “Whitney: Can I Be Me,” had a brief, chance encounter with Brian Jones on a train. Jones was then a superstar, the guitarist of the Rolling Stones, the dangerous alternative to the clean cut Beatles.
Six years later, the director attended the famous Rolling Stones concert in London’s Hyde Park, a tribute to Jones who had been found dead less than a month after he was fired by the band he began. “If anyone was going to die; Brian was going to die,” Jagger said. “He just lived his life very fast. He was kind of like a butterfly.”
A light that burned brightly, Jones was an innovative multi-instrumentalist with a love of the blues, who embodied London’s Swingin’ Sixties, but harboured a troubled soul. With a mix of new they-were-there interviews from folks like former Stones bassist Bill Wyman, Animals’ singer Eric Burdon, model/singer Zouzou and singer Marianne Faithfull, plus archival footage and interviews from Mick jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts, among others, Broomfield builds a portrait of Jones as the bad boys band’s most rebellious member.
Raised by straightlaced parents, an aeronautical engineer father and church organist mother, Jones displayed antagonism toward authority early on, rebelling against his family and getting suspended from school. Obsessed with blues artists like Elmore James and Robert Johnson, he got his first acoustic guitar at aged seventeen and began performing at blues and jazz clubs. He was s womanizer—”He just uses people,” says teenager Valerie Corbett, mother of his first baby.—a wild child, uninvited to art college after being labelled an “irresponsible drifter.”
The story of the beginning of the Stones is more familiar. Jones put the band together, gave them the name, cribbed from “Rollin’ Stone Blues,” track five, side one of “The Best of Muddy Waters,” taught Jagger to play harmonica and roomed with his bandmates in a grungy apartment on Edith Grove in Chelsea as they developed the intertwined guitar sound that would characterize their music.
With fame, came musical exploration—Jones played everything from slide-guitar and harmonica to recorder and Appalachian dulcimer—but also a change in the band’s dynamics. As Jagger and Richards moved the band’s sound further away from the blues Jones loved to a more mainstream rock ‘n’ roll vibe, Jones found himself indulging in two-thirds of the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll stereotype. “Drugs destroyed his discipline,” says filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff, “and you can’t be an artist without discipline.”
As for the sex, Broomfield details Jones’s chaotic relationship with actress, artist, and model Anita Pallenberg, who left Jones for Richards. He also dives deep into the decision to remove Jones from the band and his passing, called “first drug/alcohol casualty of our generation.”
Much of the biographical information is familiar, but Broomfield props up this section with first-hand accounts, particularly from Wyman, whose enthusiasm for the music, and Jones’s contributions to it, is infectious.
A note of pathos comes near the end when Bloomfield reveals a personal note from Jones’s father expressing regret for not being more supportive. The formality of the writing hides a deep well of emotion and acceptance, which, for the musician, came too late to ease his troubled mind.
The old stories are bolstered by the addition of new, fresh interviews but it is the focus on Jones as a brilliant musician and not simply another rock ‘n’ roll casualty, that elevates The Stones and Brian Jones.” The story has its sordid moments, but Broomfield emphasizes the very heart of Jones’s being, the music.
Ambition and art mix and match in “The Burnt Orange Heresy.” A coolly elegant crime thriller, based on Charles Willeford’s 1971 novel of the same name, the film peels back the art world’s veneer to reveal a dark underbelly.
“The Square’s” Claes Bang is James Figueras, a once internationally famous art critic now reduced to lecturing American tourists in Milan. After one of his talks he meets Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki), a willowy art aficionado from Duluth, Minnesota. They hit it off, and have what she assumes is a one-night stand until he invites her to spend the weekend at the Lake Como estate of enigmatic art collector Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger).
James’s expectations of being offered the job of cataloguing Cassidy’s massive private collection are flipped when the collector asks him to do a task that could bring the disgraced critic back to prominence. Cassidy, sensing that James will do anything to get back in the public eye, asks him to steal a painting from hermetic artist Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland). Debney is a legend and his work so rare, that just one painting could gather world attention. Question is, how far will James go to finish the job?
Like the painting that gives the movie its name, nothing in “The Burnt Orange Heresy” is not quite as it seems. Using noir tropes—the anti-hero, the femme fatale, a villain protagonist, a double cross— director Giuseppe Capotondi keeps things interesting after an unhurried start. What begins as a sun dappled caper takes a very dark turn as the director completes his portrait of ambition and desperation in the film’s final third.
As Figueras, Bang oozes a sketchy appeal. He’s desperate and dangerous, but his worst qualities are hidden behind a suave exterior. He’s the central character but is overshadowed by the chemistry that sparks every time Debicki and Sutherland share the screen. She is charismatic in an underwritten role, but it is her scenes with the eccentric and kindly Debney that shine. That there are questions as to everyone’s motives—except for the Machiavellian Cassidy, wonderfully played by Jagger—adds intrigue to the tale.
“The Burnt Orange Heresy” isn’t a typical crime drama. The story is fuelled by arrogance, deceit and lies as much as plot, the crime is almost incidental to the interest created by the characters.
Hidden from view for almost fifty years, “Amazing Grace,” the rough-hewn documentary of Aretha Franklin’s remarkable two night stand at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, is a making-of look at the recording of the singer’s soul-stirring gospel album of the same name.
Director Sydney Pollack shot twenty hours of footage but failed to use clapper boards at the beginning of each song. Later, in the editing room, technicians were unable to synchronize the sound. Decades later producer Alan Elliott’s team spent two years synching sound to image, completing the film two years after Pollack’s death. Franklin then sued Elliott for using her likeness without permission and the film was delayed even further. Now, a full forty-seven years since those legendary shows the film is on the big screen.
It was worth the wait.
Franklin was already the Queen of Soul when she recorded “Amazing Grace.” With eleven consecutive No. 1 songs to her credit, including “Respect”, “Chain of Fools”, “Think”, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)”, and “I Say a Little Prayer” she was unassailable on the pop and R&B charts. “Amazing Grace” was to take her back to her roots, singing the music she grew up with as the daughter of minister C. L. Franklin.
The Grammy-winning two-disc LP was a high-water mark in Franklin’s career and became the biggest selling gospel album of all time. Here we see Franklin standing behind the preacher’s podium, sweating, singing some of the most glorious spirituals ever committed to tape. The audience, about two hundred people (plus Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts who visited on one of the nights) are treated to traditional songs like “God Will Take Care of You” and non-traditional mash-ups such as the blend of “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and the James Taylor hit “You’ve Got a Friend.” “It doesn’t matter what you sing,” says the show’s MC Reverend James Cleveland, “it matters who you’re singing it to.” With her father in the front row she delivers a version of the title song that makes even the members of her background chorus cry.
The photography in “Amazing Grace” is crude, the editing choppy but the sound is transcendent as Franklin caresses and stretches the notes of these songs to maximum effect. It is a document of a time, a place and most importantly, of a voice that sounds truly heaven sent.
Richard sat in as host of “The Nightside” on NewsTalk 1010 on Friday November 2. In this highlight package we hear the “Who is the Greatest Rock Star of All Time” Debate and learn about foldable smartphones.
January 25th at 7:00 pm will feature a special screening of Gimme Shelter at the Revue Cinema. Due to the Revue’s inability to obtain the rights to Don’t Look Back, special guest Geoff Pevere will be interviewed by Richard Crouse as they discuss what many consider to be the most impactful music documentary ever produced. Geoff and Richard long-time friends and television co-hosts will discuss the history of rock music as a visual medium and Gimme Shelter’s role in that history.
Gimme Shelter
1970 91 mins
A harrowing documentary of the Stones’ 1969 tour, with much of the focus on the tragic concert at Altamont.
Called the greatest rock film ever made, this landmark documentary follows the Rolling Stones on their notorious 1969 U.S. tour. When three hundred thousand members of the Love Generation collided with a few dozen Hells Angels at San Francisco’s Altamont Speedway, Direct Cinema pioneers David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin were there to immortalize on film the bloody slash that transformed a decade’s dreams into disillusionment.
Geoff Pevere is one of Canada’s leading pop culture commentators and movie critics. Geoff was a former host of CBC Radio’s Prime Time program, a movie critic with the Toronto Star for ten years, a TV host and a lecturer on film and media and is currently a movie columnist with the Globe and Mail. He is the co-author of the national bestseller Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey, his books include Toronto on Film and Donald Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road, his latest book is Gods of the Hammer – The Teenage Head Story.
Geoff will be signing copies of Gods of the Hammer! If you don’t have your own copy you can pick one up at the Revue before and after the screening.
Robert Rodriguez, co-director of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, has assembled an impressive cast of marquee names for the long awaited followup to 2005’s Sin City.
Actors like Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson and Bruce Willis are returning from the first instalment, while newcomers to the series include Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eva Green and Josh Brolin.
Rodriguez welcomes back another name, Lady Gaga, who he first cast in Machete Kills.
“When I asked if she was interested in acting she said, ‘I studied acting and I always wanted to be in one of your movies because of the theatricality and the showmanship.”
When she finished shooting her role of a deadly assassin in Machete Kills, Rodriguez tweeted, “Holy Smokes. Blown away!” and promptly cast the singer in A Dame to Kill For.
For years, directors have looked to musicians to bring their natural charisma to the screen. Perhaps no one more than Nicolas Roeg has explored the potential for rock stars to become movie stars. “They have,” he said, “a greater ability to light up the screen than actors.”
In 1970 Roeg and co-director Donald Cammell made the psychedelic crime drama Performance, starring Mick Jagger in his first on screen role. The Rolling Stone played the mysterious Mr. Turner, a jaded former rock star who gives shelter to a violent East London gangster (James Fox). In 2009 Film Comment declared Mick Jagger’s Turner the best performance by a musician in a movie.
Next came The Man Who Fell to Earth, an existential sci-fi film about an extraterrestrial named Thomas Jerome Newton, starring a perfectly cast David Bowie in his feature film debut. Roeg says he “really came to believe that Bowie was a man who had come to Earth from another galaxy. His actual social behavior was extraordinary. He seemed to be alone — which is what Newton is in the film — isolated and alone.”
Finally, Bad Timing was advertised as a “terrifying love story” and called “a sick film made by sick people for sick people” by its own distributor. Art Garfunkel, of 60s folk duo Simon and Garfunkel, stars as a psychology professor living in Vienna whose sadistic relationship with a pill addicted woman (Theresa Russell) ends with a battle for her life. The sexually explicit film was difficult for the actors, and at one point Garfunkel even wanted out. Over martinis Roeg told his nervous actor, “I must ask you to trust that I know where I’m going. It’s a maze, but there is an end to it.’”
Garfunkel stayed on, delivering a performance that the New York Times called “very credible.”
He was called many things. The Godfather of Soul, Soul Brother No. 1, Mr. Dynamite, and The Hardest Working Man in Show Business but he preferred to be called Mr. Brown.
James Brown is probably best remembered as the hit maker behind “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” and “I Feel Good”; a larger-than-life, cape-wearing showman who made funk a household word over a career than spanned six decades.
A new film, “Get on Up,” aims to fill in the blanks, detailing Brown’s rise from poverty to the top of the R&B charts.
Chadwick Boseman, who, after earning accolades for his performance as Jackie Robinson in”42,” seems to be making a career of playing 20th century legends on screen, plays Brown from age 16 to 60.
In non-linear, cut and paste style, the film tells of an abusive South Carolina upbringing at the hands of his sharecropper father (Lennie James) and a mother (Viola Davis) who abandoned the family early on to career highlights like the incendiary T.A.M.I. Show performance where he upstaged the Rolling Stones, (whose singer Mick Jagger produced this movie). It covers his close friendship with singer-songwriter Bobby Byrd (Nelsan Ellis), a brush with death on a USO show and a young James pulling two-tone loafers off a lynched man.
“Get on Up” is the second musical biopic of the summer but the first one to vibrate with energy, spirit and soul. Where “Jersey Boys” felt staid and straightforward, “Get On Up” is as loose-limbed and funky as one of Brown’s groove-heavy singles.
Some may find the non-linear time jumping scenes that bookend the film arrhythmic, but the randomness of those sequences—it jumps, willy nilly from the 1940s to Brown’s 1970s heyday to a wild scene that lead to his 1988 arrest—breaks the standard rags-to-riches-to-arrests biopic formula. Director Tate “The Help” Taylor takes an impressionistic view of Brown’s life, integrating some magic realism and fourth wall breaking dialogue direct to camera in a bold approach to a very mainstream genre.
Stylistic flourishes aside, there are the usual biographical “one day everyone will know your name” show biz clichés, but the movie is smart enough not to rely on those elements to tell the story. Instead Tate relies on an extraordinarily charismatic performance—one guesses it’s a liberal mix of fact and fiction, life and legend—from Boseman to illuminate Brown’s angels and demons.
He’s called a musical genius more than once, and given his legacy it’s hard not to agree, but some of the more unsavory parts of Brown’s life are glossed over. The drug use and domestic abuse that checkered his life (and arrest record) are touched on but not explored with the same interest as the upward trajectory of Brown’s musical career.
Like the expert backing bands that supported Brown throughout his career, here the character is supported by very good actors. As life-long friend Bobby Byrd, Nelsan Ellis shows he has more range than simply playing Lafayette Reynolds on “True Blood” every week and Dan Aykroyd has fun with the role of Brown’s manager. It’s a shame that good performances from Craig Robinson, as sax legend Maceo Parker, and Viola Davis as Brown’s mother, are limited to extended cameos.
“Get On Up” is one big chunk of funk with a gold standard performance from Boseman and music that will make you want to… er… get on up.
After mid-1970s success of two “midnight movies” called “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain,” renegade director Alejandro Jodorowsky was offered the chance to make any movie he wanted. He toyed with a number of stories, including “Don Quixote,” the story of an hidalgo with lofty, but unrealistic ideas.
Instead the Chilean born Jodorowsky chose to make “Dune,” the science fiction epic by Frank Herbert. As it turns out, however, the director may have been better suited to the story of Cervantes’s impractical idealist than the maker of a giant Hollywood film.
To hear Jodorowsky tell it, his version of “Dune,” which never made it past preproduction due to budget and Hollywood’s reluctance to work with the avant-garde director, would have been more of a mystical journey than a film. He collected “spiritual warriors” like Salvador Dali (who demanded to be paid $100,000 an hour to appear as the Emperor of the Known Universe), Orson Welles (who was promised a private chef), special effects wiz Dan O’Bannon and conceptual designers Chris Foss, H.R. Giger and Jean “Moebius” Giraud, to fulfill his vision, creating an amazingly detailed storyboard of the proposed film.
The story is mostly told by the people who in the room, lead by the 84-year-old Jodorowsky. It’s a talking head doc, punctuated by preproduction art and storyboards. For movie geeks it’s an essential glimpse into the mind of a legend. For others—including fans of Frank Herbert who gets a bit of a short shrift here—it may sound like the ramblings of a madman. Which it is, but an endearing madman who values art and spirituality above all else. He was so committed to making this movie, a movie he says might have changed the very fabric of humanity, that he was prepared to die for it.
Of course, that didn’t happen. David Lynch made the movie and one of the pleasures of “Jodorowsky’s Dune” is watching the elderly director describe his delight in realizing that Lynch’s film was a bit of a disaster.
As for whether or not the director’s vision for “Dune” would have been feasible, we’ll never know. Like many lost or never made films, it feels as though the legend of the project might be more entertaining than the film itself could ever have been.
On the Saturday November 18, 2023 edition of the Richard Crouse Show, we meet Nick Broomfield, director of the new documentary “The Stones And Brian Jones,” now playing in theatres. With candid interviews and never-before-seen footage he reveals how Brian Jones, the founder of the Rolling Stones, was left behind in the shadows of history. 
