A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

A lot of people have made mention that this concert was the death of the hippie ideal. I would argue that the hippie never existed in the first place. It was all just an excuse to take drugs, have sex and avoid responsibility while claiming the fight for some higher impossible cause. What we see here is what happens when idealism runs it course and all that is left is drug addicted people who have no clue whatsoever. It is interesting to watch the musicians trying to cope with the Hell's Angels who just have a totally different reality. It is a bit like Mad Max meets Mary Poppins in that respect. Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane singing woefully out of tune and then trying to calm down the crowd so that the Angels stop beating them, as if that is really the problem. She tells them "Both sides are temporarily f***ing up, we need to stop f***ing up" the Angels head man gets on stage and tells people that they are the problem. There is a complete lack of organization, the Angel's even being told to park their bikes at the foot of the stage. Eventually we see a member of the audience pull a gun and get stabbed by a Hell's Angel's member. Musically the Stone's are quite good, Mick's voice is spot on and the music great. He tries to calm the crowd but he isn't a bouncer or anyone who commands that kind of respect. It's out of control, the bikers rule the roost. Watching Mick at the end as he reviews the footage, he tries to show some kind of professional distance. He neither looks disturbed (although he claims to be) or surprised or anything really. A bit of trivia, the Hell's Angel's tried to assassinate Mick Jagger due to this concert.

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.

I only heard about this documentary because it was listed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, and starring one of the most well known British bands, it had to be worth a go. Basically this documentary focuses on The Rolling Stone, with members Mick Jagger, Keith Richards Keith, Mick Taylor (replaced by Ronnie Wood four years later) and Charlie Watts, talking a little about their career and singing of course. But the main focus of the film is on the disastrous free concert performance, which they performed in Northern California, east of Oakland at Altamont Speedway, four months following Woodstock, near the end of their 1969 tour of the USA. 300,00 people crowded to watch the show, and Hell's Angels were put in charge of security, but these men instead spent most of the concert armed with pool cues and knives beating people up, with at least one being killed. The film is made up of footage from the concert itself, including the violence that ensued and Mick Jagger trying to calm things down on stage, some of the point of view from drugged up and dancing spectators, and The Rolling Stones watching it all back and reflecting. Also starring Bill Wyman, Ike Turner, Tina Turner, Grace Slick and Skip Spence Skip. I knew it was going to be a film with plenty of the Stones' songs, but I wasn't expecting there to be a dark incidence being the main focus, it is relatively interesting viewing, but the songs were more enjoyable for me, an alright music documentary. Songs in the film include the song of the title, "Jumpin' Jack Flash", "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", "Wild Horses", "Brown Sugar", "Love in Vain", "Honky Tonk Women", "Sympathy for the Devil" and a few others. Good!

(contains spoilers) Filmed over the course of ten days, Gimme Shelter is the film that catapulted The Maysles' Brothers and Charlotte Zwerin to the forefront of "direct cinema" – a term the Maysles' coined and preferred over the highly assumptive "cinema vérité". As originally planned, Gimme Shelter was to be a celebratory document of The Rolling Stones' 1969 tour of the U.S. that began with the Thanksgiving show at Madison Square Garden which opens the film, and ended with the free concert given at the Altamont Speedway near San Francisco. What the Maysles', Zwerin and their crew ended up with though, was the celluloid equivalent of an autopsy – the body dissected is the 1960s itself. In fact the only other movie that tenses me up more than Gimme Shelter is Stan Brakhage's faceless autopsy-room documentary The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, a title that could be transposed with the Maysles' film. Cynical? Perhaps. But before Gimme Shelter, never before in a film had the actions of the micro reflected the failures of the macro in such a telling and startling way. Both Brakhage's and the Maysles' films depict decay, disintegration, the cold, harsh reality that befalls everything, be it life or credo.But what makes a decade? This ethereal term we use to describe a grouping of ten years is always loaded with highly distinct connotations of its particular time – some are arguable, some are universally accepted. Strangely enough, despite whatever man-made structure the 'decade' has as its skeleton, key social and historical events always seem to occur soon before, during or immediately after its cusp, events that serve as both endings and beginnings. The moment that defines the passing of one decade into another is always open for debate. However, the actions that transpire in this brilliant and sobering film actually give flesh, albeit bloodied, to the unarguable exact cusp between the 1960s and the 1970s.Was Woodstock, which had been only four months before, a fluke? Half a million people coming together, without serious incident, for three days of peace, harmony, music, and love. Incredible evidence that the progressive love-work of the decade had accomplished its promises. Yet in Gimme Shelter half that number of people swirl into an abyss. And at its obscure center are The Rolling Stones themselves – charismatic to no end, yet languorous and floating in ennui. Whether they were primadonnas or not that night, once Mick Jagger hits the stage he truly becomes the foreboding dark-knight, the chanting shaman, the sinister devil's agent, all those labels with which he'd (and still has) been copiously laden.The event that made Altamont (and therefore this film) infamous – the death of Meredith Hunter at the hands of stage security Hell's Angels – is disclosed at the beginning, much like film noir actually, making the 80-minute interim before the fact be all the more nail-biting. So powerful is the actual murder scene – when you know what's going on, but no one else really does (or do they?) – that I doubt you'll ever be able to listen to "Under My Thumb" again without thinking of Gimme Shelter, and this indelible moment. Meredith Hunter's loud green suit. The Hell's Angel stabbing him twice in what looks like the back of the neck. Does Mick notice what's going on? One moment you think so. The next it's hard to tell. All the while he's singing, "…I can still look at someone else." It's chilling as well that the closing, repeated refrain of that particular song is, "Take it easy, babe…"In Woodstock, the 'happenings' are all jovial. When you see people tripping out or high, it comes across as good vibes. In Gimme Shelter, the Maysles' didn't shy away from the bad trips. Look at the faces of those squashed against the stage during the climax; the chilling, paisley-clad hippie during "Under My Thumb" whose just to the right of Mick – it's like watching a lysergically-infused lycanthrope going through the moon-change; the frenzied, seemingly autonomous (thereby anti-hippie) dances during the Jefferson Airplane's "The Other Side of Life"; even Mick Jagger himself gets hated on the moment he lands at the Speedway. It's as if the whole day was cursed from the start. Urban legend has it that Kenneth Anger had done just that to Mr. Jagger, for only months prior he dropped out of the lead role in Anger's Lucifer Rising (leaving Anger high and dry), and for not properly acknowledging Anger's influence on his songwriting, namely "Sympathy For the Devil".Once the murder had been recognized in the editing room, did the Maysles' choose to make Gimme Shelter one big bad vibe, or was that all they had to work with? We'll probably never know for certain. But by most accounts of those who were really at Altamont, it was no editing ploy. The decade ended that cold early December day, but at least it was able to die where it was born. "It's down to me, the change has come…" Indeed.