THE STONES AND BRIAN JONES (B) - This documentary from Nick Broomfield about the doomed co-founder of the Rolling Stones is incredibly intricate but not very intimate. Broomfield is very respectful of Brian Jones, and he draws out a lot of people who knew him back in the '60s, but the director never really gets under Jones' skin or inside his mind.
Jones was the pioneer of dying of rock-star indulgences at age 27. He succumbed to drugs and alcohol in the summer of 1969, just weeks after getting kicked out of the band by Mick Jagger and Keith Richard. And this biography can get quite granular at times -- not unlike the documentary from earlier this year about another troubled soul, Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd -- tracking down a lot of the beautiful women who defined Jones' existence. There was at least one gasp in the audience when it was revealed that Jones had a pattern of finding a teenage girlfriend, moving in with her family, making a baby, and then moving on to the next one, doing that five times by age 23.
But why did Jones act the way he did, engaging in aggressive serial monogamy and drowning himself in pills and booze? Maybe something-something about his childhood, we're told, coming from a square household led by strict parents. There's not much to glean from Jones himself, seen in archival interviews. He was quite deferential to the songwriters Jagger and Richard, and Jagger quickly surpassed Jones as the face and appeal of the band. While he didn't mind standing off to the side, he did rue the evolution from blues to rock 'n' roll. What also seemed to bother Jones was the mate-swapping that the Stones principals engaged in, passing women around like baseball cards. A story is told that willowy model Anita Pallenberg arrived at the Cannes film festival with Jones and left it days later with Richard. Marianne Faithfull seemed to make the rounds with the trio, too.
Broomfield can't resist the urge to insert himself in the story. As a teen he met Jones on a train and was forever transfixed by the mop-haired rocker. Broomfield's narration at times is sluggish. Mick and Keith don't sit for an interview, of course. Bill Wyman, though, is a wonderful host, and this is worth it simply for his flair for spinning war stories, always with a twinkle in his eye. But in the end, it's difficult to conjure strong feelings either way for Jones. This might have been a touching tragedy, if the demons in Jones' head hadn't gone to the grave with him 54 years ago.
SQUARING THE CIRCLE: THE STORY OF HIPGNOSIS (C) - The stories of Baby Boomers sure are getting tiresome. Especially when many of the stories seem apocryphal. Here we delve into the British art studio Hipgnosis, which made its name during the classic-rock era designing a bunch of iconic album covers, such as the prism on Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon."
And, yes, we again come full circle with Syd Barrett (profiled in this doc), with now-familiar stories told, as we get to know Aubrey "Po" Powell, the co-founder of Hipgnosis with Storm Thorgerson, Barrett's old pal, a decade gone and seen here only in archival footage. Anton Corbijn ("Control," "The American") chugs chronologically through the cover designers' oeuvre, and the origin stories are pretty interesting at first. But he starts to pinball from David Gilmour and Roger Waters' Pink Floyd album covers to Paul McCartney's "Band on the Run" and "Venus and Mars" (a couple of billiard balls, cool) to 10cc to Led Zeppelin's "Presence." There's a twinge of curiosity piqued by references to the Sex Pistols and Peter Gabriel. Grumpy Noel Gallagher of Oasis brings a Gen X factor to play fanboy to his elders, his observations a clunky note in the proceedings. Everyone (shot in arty black-and-white) looks really old, even McCartney.
Maybe if this were less than an hour it would have made a snappier PBS special. In the second half, Powell, who seems like a genuinely talented and friendly person, just kind of drones on with more hoary stories (we yet again revisit the infamous inflatable pig from Floyd's "Animals"). By the time we get to McCartney insisting on posing a statue on Mount Everest, the documentary crosses over into the indulgences of rich rock stars from a million years ago. (Powell literally reminds us that "money was no object" back then.) OK, old dudes. Cool stories. Glad you all had fun.
BONUS TRACK
The "Jones" trailer:
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