Rating: 
Summary: Angels Not to Blame/The Truth is Shown !!
Review: Everyone shold not be on the Angels ass. They did what they were hired to do - protect the stage from idiots " who shoudn't have been there, zapped out on the drugs some of them could not handle".There were a few great musical moments at Woodstock, but it was the "peace and love crowd" and the promoters were just money hungry freaks.The Rolling Stones have always had a dark side, and just because a few hippie types couldn't handle the scene, it has gone down as the "end of the Sixties". Well, my dear friends, the sixties were a time of change, but the rot had set in way before Altamont. I know, as I was there. Where are all the "share the world, wealth, and love" folks now? Sitting in places they protested, greedy and nothing like they were in the Sixties, towing the line like their parents and others they wanted to overthrow then. Greed, greed, greed. That's where the "peace and love" generation is now, not caring about their "bros and sisters". Power to the people my ass.
Rating:
Summary: Lawyers, Guns and Money
Review: The era of Peace Love & Dope crashes with a resounding thud in the summer of '69 and the brothers Maysles are there with thier cameras. An amazing document of the Rolling Stones' 1969 U.S. tour, conducted in the wake of Woodstock and with the glaring absence of one recently "fired" Brian Jones. Traditionally, reviews have played up the film's most sensationalist element-the murder of an Altamont concertgoer by Hell's Angels members, shockingly captured on film. In reality, this is about 15 seconds of somewhat blurry, vaguely confusing footage toward the end, and really shouldn't be seen as the main reason to view this fine documentary. With some rousing concert footage aside, the best moments pop up in the studio scenes, where one gets a rare and very real glimpse of Jagger and Richards as creative artists at thier peak. There is something almost poignant about one particular moment where Jagger and Richards listen to a playback of an early take of "Wild Horses". Richards lays on his back, eyes closed, cradling a half empty bottle of booze and blissfully mouthing the lyrics, while Jagger, who initially registers a somewhat nervous appraisal of his vocal take, literally claps his hands with an endearing, almost childlike delight and register of (quite justifiable) pride by the song's end. The Criterion DVD Edition does an outstanding job with the audio (especially on the studio playback numbers, which completists/collectors will appreciate as a way to hear crystal-clear alternate mixes of a couple of well-worn Stones classics). A five-star disc by all definitions.
Rating:
Summary: Gimme Shelter
Review: "Gimme Shelter", the Rolling Stones documentary, follows the Greatest ROck and Roll Band in the World on their 1969 US Tour,and at the tours finale, a free concert festival at Altamont Speedway. It also shows them at Muscle Shoals studio in Alabama laying down tracks for their next album Sticky Fingers.
It captures great performances of Jumpin Jack Flash, Satisfaction, Street Fighting Man, Honky Tonk Women and others, while you also get to hear early versions of Brown Sugar, You Gotta Move, and Wild Horses. The documentary also focuses on the efforts that were being made to create the free concert which was supposed to take place at a different park in San Fran, I think it was the Golden Gate Park or something. Things take a bad turn when the free concert gets started. The Flying Burrito Brothers play a tune and the Hells Angels, who were hired as security decided to enforce the crowd by smashing pool sticks on their heads and just basically stomping the fans on the ground. The Jefferson Airplane takes the stage next and are greeted with the same chaos from the crowd of over 300,000, and Marty Balin of the Airplane actually jumps in the crowd and gets punched in the face. I think Santana actually performed there too, but his concert footage is not included here. The days turns to night and then the Stones come out in all their stoned and wasted glory. They get things started with Sympathy For the Devil here, and a motorcycle engine starts to catch fire and explodes causing the band to stop for several minutes, then they get back in the groove and perform an excellent version of the song. Under My Thumb comes next and its definetly got an erie sound to it. As they perform it, a fan named Meredith Hunter aims a gun, and as he does so he is stabbed twice in the back by one of the Hells Angels. They go on to stab him once more in the ear and proceed to kick and stomp him to death while the Stones play on. At the end of the concert the Stones jump in a chopper and get the hell out of Altamont. The film shows a couple of replays of the murder with Mick Jagger watching and commenting. The film ends with shots of the fans leaving the show early the next morning with a rocking rendition of Gimme Shelter played live at one point during the Stones tour i guess. This is definitely a great documentary to watch and its packed full of extras like some footage of two or three songs performed on the tour. The album "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out" is the perfect companion peice to "Gimme Shelter". Its a live album record on November 26th and 27th at Madison Square Garden while on that 1969 tour. Get both the cd and the dvd for a classic Stones experience.
Rating:
Summary: Unquestionably one of the truly great rock documentaries
Review: Many people identify this as the greatest rock documentary ever made. I'm not sure it quite deserves that label (my vote would go for the older T.A.M.I. film, which has not yet been made available on DVD), but it is certainly the most interesting and frightening. Clearly it started off as a documentary of the Stones 1969 tour of the United States (which I believe was their first U.S. tour following the death of Brian Jones and his being replaced by Mick Taylor), but everything changed once Altamount happened. The death of Meredith Hunter at the hands of a member of the Hell's Angels, who had been employed to maintain security at the free concert the Stones gave in San Francisco, takes over the film, changing it from a documentary about the Stones on tour to a murder that took place at a Stones concert.
Until about half way through the documentary, the film is still primarily a documentary about the Stones. But once the cameras get to Altamount, the crew (which included as a cameraman young filmmaker George Lucas, though none of Lucas's film was included in the film due to a camera jam) catches the increasingly nasty atmosphere at the concert, with fans ascending the stage, fighting with the Hell's Angels, fighting with each other. The Grateful Dead, scheduled to play, declined to do so when they heard that Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane had been beaten up onstage by the Angel's (we see a brief shot of Jerry Garcia reacting incredulously to the news of the violence). By the end of the film, the viewer is left with a completely sickened feeling of the stupidity of everything he or she has just seen.
The violence completely obscures the fact that the Stones were at the time precisely what the announcer at the beginning of the film announces: the world's greatest rock and roll band. The performances, especially the earlier ones in the film, but also in the raw tape of songs like "Brown Sugar," are stunningly good, and it is especially apparent the new great guitar edge that Mick Taylor has brought to the band (Jones brought an across the board brilliance, and could add everything from slide guitar to upright piano to sitar to the mix, but was probably not quite Taylor's equal as a guitarist, and Taylor also brought a new reliability that contrasted with Jones's increasingly erratic behavior in his last year with the band). On the other hand, in the film the band largely disappears at time. Apart from Mick Jagger, the Stones are not always a palpable presence in their own film.
Historicism could be defined with focusing on the meaning of history rather than the objective telling of the events of history, or recounting the events for the sake of getting to their supposed underlying meaning. Sometimes it even involves projecting onto events meaning they would not otherwise have. Altamount is easily one of the most historicized moments in the history of both the sixties and rock and roll. Altamount is rarely treated as an isolated tragedy, but is more frequently regarded as a turning point in history, as if it were when the sixties came crashing to an end (something that I feel can more rightfully be ascribed to Kent State). I don't personally understand this need to project some story of apocalyptic closure to the decade. I'll merely state that I don't think that we should see anything more in Altamount than a tragedy that ought otherwise to have been prevented. It should it not be baptized as, nor was it, a defining moment in history.
One frustration I had with the film is that far too often the camera isn't focused on what was happening. There is a tendency for the film to merely drift at times. For instance, while the Flying Burrito Brothers, there are only a couple of incredibly brief shots of Gram Parsons's back. We can hear him singing the song, but we never see him actually singing it. Earlier, when performing the great Robert Johnson song "Love in Vain" (featuring some of the most powerfully poetic images ever written by an illiterate individual), the camera completely abandons a real-time observation of the performance, and lapses into a near fantasy-like viewing of Mick Jagger swirling about the stage in slow motion.
Anyone who loves this film, or merely enjoys it, should definitely read the Stanley Booth book THE TRUE ADVENTURES OF THE ROLLING STONES, which covers the precise same events as the film, but in much greater detail and with more insight both into the events surrounding Altamount and into the members of the band. It is one of the great classics of rock journalism.
Rating: 
Summary: A Tragedy Indeed!
Review: Not this DVD, Video or whattever it's on nowadays again!!!!!!!
It's a documentary of a concert that went wrong, due to the Stones hiring The Hells Angels as security!!! Now, How exciting can that be??!!!! The Stones start playing, they have to stop, they start again, stop again, and so on, and so on.
A good video? Hell no!
Stones trying to cash in again? Definetely!
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