The Film – Er, Documentary
Shine A Light is a two hour long documentary that basically split between a behind the scenes look at the band members and Scorsese’s interactions, as well eighteen live tracks by the Stones. This is really something that Rolling Stones fans will love, but everyone else probably won’t even consider watching because it is solely focused on the Stones and their music. The behind the scenes footage is mildly entertaining; you will see the Stones bicker about set lists and venues, while Scorsese and the Stones lightly kid each other about miscellaneous things like Scorsese’s attention to detail and the Stones’ more relaxed approach to filming the show.
The eighteen tracks included in the film that the Stones play include some big hits like “Paint It Black,” my personal favorite of theirs, but also: “Just My Imagination,” “As Tears Go By,” “She Was Hot,” and “Brown Sugar.” Some performances like “Live With Me” include special guest stars, in this case, Christina Aguilera. For Stones fans, these two hours of footage are likely to be very appealing, but for the rest of us, it’s not really engaging. There aren’t any dramatic or exciting events for non-Stones fans to get into, so that could be a barrier that will keep many viewers from looking into this release.
Turn It Up…Or Down, Your Choice
Visually, this Blu-ray isn’t bad, but it’s not great either. Being a documentary, especially one about a rock group, the visuals vary from bright and colorful stage performances to literally, for whatever reason, black and white behind the scenes shots. As far as direction goes I think Scorsese did a fair enough job, certainly enough I think to satisfy the core audience of this release.
As far as audio, you might expect this Blu-ray to come with quite a package, and you’re right. Three distinct audio tracks are available including uncompressed PCM 2.0, Dolby TrueHD 5.1, and DTS-HD Lossless 5.1. Each of these tracks packs a punch, in terms of quality and volume, but on a good system, they’ll really rock – pun intended.
Additional Material
The extras are fairly thin for Shine A Light, but I think the core audience will already be sold on the primary content. That said, there is a fifteen minute collection of miscellaneous behind the scenes shots that weren’t shown in the feature for fans to peruse; the nice thing is that this is an HD extra. The only other feature is just four audio tracks: “I’m Free,” “Undercover of the Night,” “Little T&A,” and my favorite by this group, “Paint It Black.” Considering that fans likely have these tracks already, I don’t see much value in adding them on this Blu-ray. I doubt anyone would load up the Blu-ray just to listen to these audio tracks, so they come across as fairly useless to me.