This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

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

There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

Has a film ever combined one theme of such wide popular appeal with another that will interest only a small crowd and simply baffle that big popular audience? Jean-Luc Godard's SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL would delight one set of viewers and infuriate another. How does one even give a star rating to this? In May 1968, Jean-Luc Godard was permitted to film the Rolling Stones over several days in a London studio as they gradually fleshed out their now classic song "Sympathy for the Devil", and so one might expect simply a documentary about a rock band's creative process. However, over the last year Godard had broken ties with conventional cinema (even in its zany French New Wave form) and was now interested in using film to agitate for the Maoist philosophy that he had latched onto as the Zeitgeist for this era. Consequently, hardly have we seen the Stones at work before Godard cuts to completely different footage centered around the reading of strident political texts. Over the course of the film we repeatedly go back and forth between the Rolling Stones in the studio and political shots: Black Panthers sitting around a junkyard and advocating revolution, a woman spraypainting Maoist slogans over London walls, a comic book shop as a metaphor for American imperialism, etc.Even if the juxtaposition is jarring and indeed rather silly, the Rolling Stones portion of the film is satisfying for fans of this music. The viewer gets a sense of how the song "Sympathy for the Devil" went from merely a product of Jagger's imagination that he has to teach Keith Richards to ultimately the ample rendition with conga and backing-vocals that was finally released. Probably unbeknownst to Godard himself at the time, the film also serves as a portrait of Brian Jones' breakdown only about a year before his death: he's sometimes present in the studio, but he just sits in the corner, neglected by his bandmates and strumming a guitar that isn't even miked.The rest of the Stones, however, are clearly enjoying themselves. It's amusing how Jagger's English working-class accent, itself quite fake, immediately shifts to an imitation of some old American bluesman as soon as the recording of each take starts; rarely have I got such a vivid sense of how much blues meant to this generation of English youth. The last shot of the band in the film, presumably after recording wrapped on "Sympathy of the Devil", is a longish jam session. Another delight of this film for music lovers is that we can see in full colour how recording studios looked in the 1960s with the technology and sound insulation strategies of that era. (Everyone's smoking constantly, too. The place must have smelled like an ashtray).What, then, of the political bits? These would weird out anyone not familiar with Godard's earlier work of the late 1960s, but if one watches his films chronologically, then there is a clear progression from WEEKEND, his last relatively conventional film: again we see a breakdown of 1960s consumerist society depicted through militants holding guns versus prostrate figures red with (intentionally very fake) blood. Anne Wiazemsky, who had acted in Godard's immediately preceding films as a symbol of rebellious youth and now the director's second wife, appears as the personification "Eve Democracy". Unable to answer anything to her interlocutor's questions but "Yes" or "No", she mocks what Godard saw as the impotency of bourgeois representative democracy, where the people have no other way to effect political change except to vote for or against a candidate, a process that happens only every few years even as the nation is confronted by pressing challenges.Godard's politics during this time were wonky and it's hard to tell just how seriously he believed in Maoism, or whether the 38-year-old director was just trying on a fad to be closer to the youth. And yet, for viewers interested in history and especially this turbulent decade, the political scenes too hold a lot of interest. In the comic book shop segment, the camera pans slowly across the shelves, presenting a variety of pulp literature and pornography that is utterly forgotten today. Didactic as the scenes of the Black Panthers and Eve Democracy might be, even they can be appreciated as a time capsule of 1960s fashion thanks to their colourfully dressed characters.

In the 60's, having as the background the rehearsal and recording of "Sympathy for the Devil" in the classic album "Beggar's Banquet" by the revolutionary bad boy Rolling Stones – Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Brian Jones – plus Marianne Faithful, Godard discloses other contemporary revolutionary and ideological movements – the Black Power through the Black Panthers, the feminism, the communism, the fascism - entwined with the reading of a cheap pulp political novel divided in the chapters: "The Stones Rolling; "Outside Black Novel"; "Sight and Sound"; "All About Eve"; "The Heart of Occident"; "Inside Black Syntax"; and, "Under the Stones the Beach"."Sympathy for the Devil" is another pretentious and boring mess of the uneven director Jean-Luc Godard. The narrative and the footages are awful, but fortunately I love the Stones and "Sympathy for the Devil" and it is nice to see them in the beginning of their careers; otherwise this documentary would be unbearable. My vote is three.Title (Brazil): "Sympathy for the Devil"

In the late 60s, rebellion against establishment was the order of the day. Paris saw students rioting. They eventually help to bring down the conservative values of De Gaulle's government. Around the world, youth protests against the war in Vietnam. In cinema, Godard and the French New Wave seek new ways of expression. New freedoms from the conventional shackles.At this movie's London opening, Godard was incensed at his producer's unauthorised changes. Godard suggests the audience ask for their money back. Donate it to Cleaver's defense fund, he says. (Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver had just gone underground.) The London audience dissents. Godard calls them fascists. A melee ensues. Godard punches the offending producer who, ironically enough, played a fascist porno bookseller in the film.Sympathy for the Devil is experimental cinema and agitprop at its finest or most incomprehensible. The main thread is a documentary of the Rolling Stones as they create and record the eponymous song. Then, without warning, the camera will cut back and forth to abstract, fictional scenarios. Quasi-documentary style diatribes. Godard in full-flow polemic.Much of Sympathy for the Devil can appear chaotic to casual audiences. The answer is maybe to let it wash over you. The montage, the barrage of ideas, will evoke responses from a diligent and intelligent viewer. But what you make of it may have a lot to do with your own psychological make-up.Apart from the Rolling Stones, the other main sequences are these: A scrapyard. Black revolutionaries. White women wearing only simple white smocks. At one point, the 'Panthers' lay their guns on the women's prone bodies, angled, as if about to fire from a trench.A rural scene. A woman called Eve Democracy gives yes/no answers to a filmmaker's reflections on revolution and the role of culture. Statements are offered as questions. "There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary and that is to give up being an intellectual." "Orgasm is the only moment when you can't cheat life." "The tragic irony is that in fighting communism we are creating the absolute equivalent of communism in our own society." A seedy bookshop. A man reads from Mein Kampf. The scene explores fascism, imperialism, art and exploitation.A graffiti artist sprays compound neologisms / word-games on cars and billboards. 'Cinema' becomes 'Cinemarxism.' A man is interviewed on black power and Marxism by two young black girls. Fighter planes are heard overhead.Godard uses right and left wing propaganda for dialogue. Many detractors have lost interest over this, accusing him of failing to make coherent arguments. But to my mind, the outpourings of revolution, like the testosterone charge of youth, are never fully formed. They combine brute force with an intellectual striving. For good or ill, they invoke change. Another intercut soundtrack has a prim Englishman reading from a pornographic text.The film's intertitles use different highlighted letters for tangential meanings. For instance, one section is called 'Outside Black Novel'. Four of the red letters are highlighted with black paint to make the word 'love'. We see a black man sitting in a wheelbarrow. He's on a jetty next to scrap cars and reads out loud from a book (probably by Eldridge Cleaver). He speaks of the blues of the black man, leading us into the idea of how their music was exploited by white men. The camera pans into the junkyard (a metaphorical human or technological scrap heap). Black revolutionaries arm themselves and make speeches. The white women prisoners arrive in a red mini van.The creative process, minutely observed in the recording studio, parallels themes of revolutionary spirit and sexuality. In a dramatic scene, Eve Democracy falls. Her body is borne sacrificially aloft, caught between the red/black flags of communist and anarchist. It recalls a striking image of guns laid over the prostrate and scantily clad bodies of two white women. The guns angled as if firing over a trench.To Godard, the dilemmas of the film were open-ended. Providing a 'conclusion' would have been against the sense of primal revolution that was the film's core. Which is why he was so incensed that, for commercial reasons, the 'completed' song had been tacked on the end.Godard's first English movie was originally to be about abortion, but the new abortion law in England spoilt his plans. He then visualised a dialectic between creation (the recording of a song) and destruction (the political climate that leads to uprisings). He would intercut the recording session with a triangular love story about a white revolutionary seduced by a Nazi Texan. She becomes suicidal when her real lover embraces the black separatist movement. But Godard decided on the more abstract formula. Still, such traces of the original story provide insights to Sympathy for the Devil. Godard's title (his 'Director's Cut') was One + One – which he pointed out didn't necessarily mean two.Although not really a film for any but the most dedicated of Stones fans, it provides intimate insights into their workings as a band. We see Jagger's sober and patient leadership. Brian Jones fairly off his face. The dogged persistence of the band until a good version is achieved. (The film is in not critical of the Stones, in spite of the minor 'theft of black music' theme.) They are here enshrined with one of the most creative filmmakers of the generation. It has an honesty and depth conspicuously absent from the same song performed forty years later in Scorsese's glossy concert operation, Shine a Light. The guilelessness here would then be gone. The 'meaning' of the song, appropriated so beautifully by Godard, probably lost in bright lights and presidential approval.Sympathy for the Devil is overtly political and not the easiest of Godard's films. But as a shock to a cinema grown fat on saccharined sweetness, it is a breath of intellectual fresh air. I watched it twice straight through.

Jean Luc Godard's Marxist polemic is as close to unwatchable a film as you're likely to see from an internationally respected filmmaker. Bits of political theater, mind-numbingly boring and interminable, are interspersed with the making of "Sympathy for the Devil", featuring the Rolling Stones in the studio.The process of the song's development, from Mick Jagger playing a demo on acoustic guitar, to the backing vocals being recorded towards the end, is fascinating, and it's worth renting this film just to see the bits with the Stones. Almost half the movie is devoted to this, so thanks to the miracle of chapter stops, you can skip all the bizarre political skits and just watch the Stones put a song together.When I had this on laserdisc, I valiantly attempted to watch it all, but I don't see how anyone could get through it. I finally gave up and just chapter-skipped my way to the Stones segments.