If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Best movie of this year hands down!

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

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

To save you time, I'll make some broad generalizations up front. Further down I'll get more into the guts of this film, but if you're just trying to decide if this movie is worth 2hrs of your life, here's what you need to know:If you're a hardcore Stones fan, then this film will possibly irritate you, maybe even to the point of rioting as Stones fans reportedly did at the premiere of this film in '68. This is not a documentary about the Stones nor is it a documentary at all. It's a film that Godard had been intending to make about counter-culture revolution, and it just happened to coincide with Godard filming the Stones recording "Sympathy for the Devil", so he mashed them together and this is the result.If you're a Godard fan, you might appreciate what he tried to accomplish here, but all the same, I've never met a Godard fan who considers this among his better efforts.With a visionary filmmaker like Godard and a very poetic & provocative song like "Sympathy for the Devil", you'd think the marriage of the two would spawn a work of art the likes of which hadn't been seen since Pink Floyd's "The Wall". (Yeah I know The Wall came out in 1982 but bear with me, I'm onna roll).Instead I feel like the two themes didn't exactly gel. Godard took a markedly different approach which, on its own, could have been a worthy film. Rather than follow the Stones' lead with an intriguing historical narrative that leads us from Biblical times to the assassination of JFK, Godard just throws a bunch of unrelated vignettes full of superfluous political blather (intended to be tiresome) interspersed with Stones recording the song, and we are to accept that they are somehow related?While both the song & the film make heavy use of irony & sarcasm, and while both the song & the film are about the decline of human society due to human nature ("the devil"), the Stones & Godard are on different ends of the spectrum. What makes the Stones song so memorable is its suave, seductive flair told in 1st person narrative. In the very first line, Mick introduces the devil (the speaker) as "a man of wealth and taste". Essentially, this presents a very revolutionary concept of the devil: not an, ugly, smelly, cartoonish creature with a pitchfork but a charming, hypnotizing, classy character.It would have been great if the film had followed along this absolutely central theme, but instead it took a very base, unattractive approach that was not enticing at all. There are no classy gents playing the devil here, instead we get the Black Panthers in a squalid junkyard spouting NOT hypnotic words but pulpy rhetoric which we immediately dismiss as pointless ravings as they casually commit base murder before our eyes.In another example, Godard sets up a comical slapstick scene in a comic book store that also sells porn & Nazi propaganda, where the customers are allowed to take what they want in exchange for a "heil Hitler" and a slap across the face of two kidnapped hippies. I thought that was a hilarious scene, but really it was jarringly incongruous with the Stones song.Between the half dozen vignettes like the Black Panther scene & the comic book scene & scenes of someone spray painting graffiti slogans across London, we get abruptly shifted back to the studio sessions where the Stones are working out the details of their song. In contrast with the vignettes, the studio scenes are very somber, very respectful and very endearing to watch. I found myself wishing that someone actually *would* make a documentary about the "Sympathy" sessions because so much could have been expounded on. We see the slow evolution of the initial song (a gospel type ballad) to what it ultimately became, an ironically uptempo samba that draws its power from a seductive Afro-Brazilian candomblé beat. Again I'm harping on the seductiveness of the song, both lyrically and instrumentally, because it's a real shame that Godard either didn't pick up on that, or chose to go in the opposite direction with a (deliberately) unappealing visual show.Like I said, Godard's film would have been worthy on its own. The Stones song is, of course, a great piece of literature in its own right. But sticking them both together like this just didn't stick. I'm glad I saw this film, and I'll probably watch it again. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they're ready for a very strange and jarring experience.For a great marriage of movie & music, I would recommend the aforementioned "Pink Floyd The Wall" as well as "Tommy", a sarcastic, carnival-esque satire much like Godard's approach here but with the perfect music in the same vein, and maybe the Monkees movie "Head" which is a nearly-incomprehensible acid trip but with similarly nearly-incomprehensible lyrics that gel perfectly.

The uninitiated should be aware that this movie is primarily a Godard film, and thus it is unconventional, yet with patience will yield great results. On the one hand, it is a great film which shows the Stones at work finalizing their famous song, Sympathy for the Devil. This being a Godard film, the action in the film will break to show something seemingly completely unrelated. It is the job of the viewer to harmonize the two and make sense of the message the great director is intending to convey.The following is a rough summary of the film itself. It is not intended to be a spoiler, because, again being a Godard film, it must be experienced and viewed to be fully appreciated. By referring to this rough guide, some sense of the entire film may be made easier.First, there are the opening credits.Then the camera pans to a hand-painted sign which says, I believe, "The Rolling Stones," in anagram.The camera cues to the Stones in rehearsal. Mick Jagger is singing an obvious demo of the lyrics, with the camera panning to Keith Richards, then Bill Wyman, Nicky Hopkins, and Charlie Watts in the background.Cue to a hand painted writing on the screen saying "Hilton Stair," then activity in a hotel room.Cue to the Stones in rehearsal again.Cue to a Scene of a store, the Trenchman.Cue to the Stones in rehearsal.Cue to a Hand painted sign, "Outside Black Novel," showing a someone reading from a book, apparently about black empowerment, in an auto wrecking yard.Cue to a Hand painted sign, "Sights and Sounds," with the letters "SDS" in black letters, the rest in red.Cue to the Stones in rehearsal, the camera using extended panning on each Stone.Cue to a Hand painted sign, "All About Eve," where a reporter with a camera asks questions, some thought-provoking, others silly, to a young woman in a forest.Cue to a Hand painted sign, "Hi FI Ction Science," with the words "ONE" in black letters and the rest in red.Cue to the Stones in rehearsal. The rehearsal breaks abruptly to a person spray-painting a car with the following word-gram: MAORT Cue back to the Stones in rehearsal.Cue to a hand-painted sign, "Hi FI Ction Science." Cue back to the Stones in rehearsal. The song is coming along to its recognizable, familiar sound.Cue to a hand-painted sign, "1 Plus 1 makes 2,"spray-painted on a wall of the wharf, the rhythm tack of Sympathy for the Devil in the background.Cue back to the Stones in rehearsal.Cue to a hand-painted sign, "Black Inside Syntax," where a black interviewee is being asked questions about Black Power and revolution. The interview continues to the auto wrecking yard.Cue to a hand-painted sign, "Changes in SoCIAty." A reference, of course, to the CIA.Cue back to the Stones in rehearsal.Cue to a hand-painted sign which is, this reviewer believes, a cross of two messages, "The Stones," and "On the Beach." There is gunfire and fighting on the beach. Closing credits feature the finished song in the background.As Godard films go, this is more coherent than most. The Sixties, particularly 1968, when Beggars Banquet, the album which opens with Sympathy for the Devil, was being recorded. There were student demonstrations in London and Paris and the United States. These demonstrations were definitely on Godard's mind when he presented the hand painted sign which empathized the letters, "SDS," standing for the Students for a Democratic Society, one of the many student groups existing at that time. They were politically charged times, and the energy and urgency of those times are reflected in the political messages found in the many cues from the Stones rehearsals.The great treat is seeing the Stones in the recording studio. The dynamics of the group can be clearly seen in the portions of the film showing the recording of the song. The Glimmer Twins, Jagger and Richards, had clearly formed a prominent role in the group, and Brian Jones, once the leader of the group, was detached and acted uninvolved in the progression of the song. One of the most talented members of the group, he was clearly on automatic pilot. He died six months after the film was released.The film deserves five stars if not for a glimpse of how the Stones recorded in the studio and is one of the finer Godard films. A must see.

It utterly defeats me why Godard is taken so seriously - and One Plus One is a great example of his ineptitude as both a filmmaker and an 'intellectual' polemicist. It's hard to credit that Godard actually believed all that Marxist and Maoist kant. Anyone with half a brain could work out the bankruptcy of those 'isms' and how many people they had destroyed and were continuing to destroy even as Godard was making his films supporting them. As a filmmaker, ask yourself: would you have boring voice-overs reading tedious political diatribes at your audience, and then, when you couldn't think of anything else to do, layer another voice-over to the first voice-over, which had lost its listeners after the first 100 words in any case? Brilliant, Jean-Luc! As for Godard insisting on making a film with the Rolling Stones: of course he did; wouldn't you? It was the only guarantee of getting such mindless rubbish seen in the first place: the genius of the Stones eclipsing a talentless and babbling political idiot set loose with a camera. The bookshop scene wasn't worthy of even the worst fringe theatre, and was an insult to the intelligence of even the young children who were used to play in it - as could be readily seen. Copping-out by allowing friendly critics to claim that all this artless crap was a satire on mainstream film-making is no more than a safe get-out to offer those who clearly see Godard's poverty of intellect and arrogant contempt for his audience. Ironic that Godard's one-time great friend, Truffaut, with Nuit Americain, made the best film about film-making ever, and Godard made the worst with Le Mepris! Incidentally, Godard didn't choose the Stones' track of Sympathy With the Devil. It just happened to be the track they were working on when the 'film' started shooting at Barnes Olympic Studios.

An amazing depiction of the creative process in contrast to the "revolutionary" process. The Rolling Stones, working together, create a new piece of music, which is itself a commentary on political upheaval. At the same time, Godard, pointing his finger at the true "devil" - i.e. the deadening impact of the media - playfully contrasts the Stone's creative process with the decidedly "uncreative" language and actions of the "revolutionary" forces of the time as well as the keepers of the status quo. As with all of Godard's films, here too the media is indeed the message, but one that is in no way a massage; "revolutionaries" mouthing words that they hear played on a tape recorder, a book-store where you have to slap a hippie and give a Nazi salute before you can leave with copies of pornography - these are the images that Godard assaults us with right outside of the studio where the Stones are doing their creative work. All in all, a wonderful cinematic interpretation of the Stones' song, Sympathy for the Devil. Nor does Godard exempt himself, or at least his own medium, from his critique of the deadening power of the media. Check out the last image of the film.