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melvin
But what about the visual quality. Is it a huge upgrade, too?

I wouldn't say a "huge" upgrade.

Mostly just cleaned up so you don't see spots like you would on old film.

can someone please tell me what the heck is the issue with trying to buy a copy of this dvd ? i went to target this morning and found that it was ONLINE ONLY . this is what the "world's greatest rock and roll band" has been releagated to? the online dustbin ?i went online first to target .com and then to bestbuy .com and i am having the darndest time trying to give them my money for this item. dumb ass password problems with both sites.i also am a memeber of bestbuy rewards zone they have my e-mail because the pc is full of there junk e-mails and my password and my e-mail dont match ? does that make sense to anyone? they can send me there stupid e-mails but i cant buy something off there stupid websites the both of them.

This is why amazon is best.
I preordered on amazon and it appeared in my mailbox this morning.

Just picked it up at Best Buy. Marked $13.99, rang up $7.99. WOW, that is the deal of the year! They also had many Four Flicks sets for $3.99 and Biggest Bang sets for $5.99!

So, for less than $20, you can get what, 6 concerts plus extras? I bought a few Four Flicks to give out as gifts. Unbelievable!

Ross

I bought it this morning at Best Buy in Toronto. The sticker on the DVD said $12.99 but it rang up as $11.99. Not as good a deal as yours, Ross, but not bad.

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melvin
I have the 4 Reels version of this movie. the quality is pretty good. Is the new release visually that much better. I understand the audio is a huge upgrade over previous bootleg releases. But what about the visual quality. Is it a huge upgrade, too?

Yeah, I have the 4 Reels one also and I just got my Amazon pre-order this morning. I'm IMPRESSED - the official release sounds and looks better than I thought it would. The colors are more saturated and the sound quality is really spot on. There's also tour rehearsals (Shake Your Hips/Tumbling Dice/Bluesberry Jam) and a few interviews (Old and New). I have a big screen (73" ) and it looks damn good on there. The thing is the 4 reels boot is about as good as a boot gets but this official release still out shines it by about 1.5 or 2 points (from 1 to 10). I say it's worth getting..... Now we still NEED Knebworth '76 Complete and a 1978 tour DVD... then the Stones will have their touring history almost completely covered (well, more or less) - let's get it done - COME ON BOYS !!!

hmmmm...if it is only a slight improvement on the 4 Reels version, that would be a disappointment. All the boots to date of this movie have been pretty bad. I must have seen 6 or 7 over the years. Was hoping for more from the "official release"

Did nobody get the Blu-Ray? Everyone seems to have gotten the DVD version.

I have the Blu-Ray waiting to be watched soon as I get a free moment.

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stonesseventytwo
hmmmm...if it is only a slight improvement on the 4 Reels version, that would be a disappointment. All the boots to date of this movie have been pretty bad. I must have seen 6 or 7 over the years. Was hoping for more from the "official release"

It´s a no brainer, really. Get rid of the boots and get the official disc, whether it´s the BluRay or the DVD. It wipes the floor with the bootlegs. Go for BluRay if you have the right equipment because it has lossless sound.

My earlier comments on the BluRay:

I got the BluRay today and I love it!

Of course the video quality is far from excellent by modern standards but considering the source material, which was allegedly in very bad shape when Eagle Rock acquired it, this is probably the best they could do. Also, you have to consider that L&G was filmed in 16mm, i.e. far from a "high definition" video format. Still, the video quality is a HUGE improvement over the bootlegs. It looks particularly great at the end when they turn the house lights up.

However, what truely blew me away is the SOUND quality. The BluRay-exclusive lossless LPCM stereo and DTS-HD audio tracks are MASSIVE. The stereo track is not too shabby although a little boomy, bottom-heavy and heavy on the guitars but the DTS-HD is perfect: Crystal clear guitars & drums, dynamics and PUNCH. Perfect mix.
The only thing that still bugs me about L&G is the fake and annoyingly loud crowd noise that fades in and out between songs. It´s totally unnecessary and way too noisy. This can be heard particularly loud at the start of JJF.

No more crappy bootleg DVDs with washed out video, faulty NTSC > PAL conversion (source for the speed/pitch problem mentioned earlier) and poorly mastered audio.

The BluRay is the real thing.... Finally.

It´s too bad that we don´t get more outtake performances with this release. They filmed and multitracked four full shows for L&G, there must be some release-worthy material from Texas´72 in the vaults.

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The Greek
can someone please tell me what the heck is the issue with trying to buy a copy of this dvd ? i went to target this morning and found that it was ONLINE ONLY . this is what the "world's greatest rock and roll band" has been releagated to? the online dustbin ?i went online first to target .com and then to bestbuy .com and i am having the darndest time trying to give them my money for this item. dumb ass password problems with both sites.i also am a memeber of bestbuy rewards zone they have my e-mail because the pc is full of there junk e-mails and my password and my e-mail dont match ? does that make sense to anyone? they can send me there stupid e-mails but i cant buy something off there stupid websites the both of them.

How about walk, or drive, to BESTBUY and give them $7.99 and stop messing around?? JUST OWN IT

Thank you very much Mick, at $7.99 this is the bargain of the century. I amazed that we can own this for less than the price of a ticket at the theater last month (which I was unable to attend)... btw- It looks amazing on regular DVD on my HDTVs...As I said before, I am skipping over BluRay technology... I watch a lot of HD content (on DirectTV) without it..... and usually SDTV does not look so good, but this old footage looks great (all things considered)..... FKN-A!!!!.... AWESOME!!!! THE GREATEST ROCK AND ROLL BAND OF ALL TIME!!!!!

ps
Fun to see Mick singing HAPPY with Keith ...YAAAHHH!!! MAKES ME HAPPY



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-10-13 02:31 by Max'sKansasCity.

Paid $8.47 at Best Buy!!

$9.99+tax for BluRay at Best Buy. listened to the LPCM track. truly outstanding sound. had to turn the bass down a little, it was a bit boomy (Velodyne 15" sub). thought it sounded better than in the theatre - no audio dropouts or other oddities.

Picked up 3 copies at Best Buy for $7.99 each. Gonna hand out some to some friends. Figured the extra sales wouldn't hurt...

Yet to find it here in new zealand.

Great review by Marc Spitz!

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones Finally Gets the DVD Treatment

As far as Rolling Stones concert films go, Ladies and Gentlemen The Rolling Stones (out today on DVD and Blu-ray) doesn’t have the elemental status of the Maysles Brothers’ dark verite Gimme Shelter. It lacks the notoriety of Robert Frank’s unreleased but often bootlegged @#$%& Blues. It has no marquee director like Hal Ashby (1983’s Let’s Spend the Night Together) or Martin Scorsese (2008’s Shine A Light). It’s been on ice for the entire home entertainment era, but it merits a place among the better known classics because you simply will not find the Rolling Stones looking or sounding any better than they do here. Director Rollin Binzer spent over a year editing footage intended for the Frank film. “Then Rolling Stones Records President Marshall Chess realized they’d never be able to release @#$%& Blues,” Binzer told me by phone last week, “they already at that time couldn’t get into three countries because of their drug bust—they didn’t need any more problems, you know. So he asked me if I could do anything with it.” Binzer distilled the backstage action away and left only the best of four performances (two matinees and two evening shows) from the band’s June ’72 swing through Houston and Fort Worth, Texas. “At one point we had a lot of Robert’s footage in there. Backstage stuff, and so on but it kept being a distraction. Robert was a wonderful guy. His vision was always sort of on the dark side. That’s what he was after. I was after performance. I just wanted to give people the best seat in the house. This is straight music. The Stones doing what made them the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world.” The band was defending that title in the summer of ’72. They’d been playing for a full decade, survived the death of their founder, Brian Jones, and the fiasco of Altamont. They’d also outlived the Beatles, their chief rivals for rock’s alpha group status. Seventy-two was the time of Bolan, Bowie, Iggy, and Eno—and it shows. Jagger, then 29, is glammed out, with purple sequins around his eyes, a pinkie ring and a spangled, Ossie Clark jumpsuit on his skinny, lithe frame. He alters the lyrics of “Brown Sugar” (the show opener) to “Just like a young boy should,” as if to prove that none of these dudes can vie for the crown either. Keith, with his missing tooth and cape, is equally beautiful but certainly less femme. “My daughters went with me to a recent screening. They weren’t around to see the Stones then and their first response was, ‘Oh they’re so cute.’ They didn’t’ realize those guys were young once,” Binzer says.

Binzer favors a close frame, which is also jarring as we’ve since gotten quite used to seeing the Stones spread out across a massive stage on one stadium tour after another. Here Mick and Keith are more brotherly than we remember, sharing a microphone on “Dead Flowers” and “Happy.” The band: bassist Bill Wyman, drummer Charlie Watts, and super-impassive guitarist Mick Taylor (who manages to play one impossibly powerful solo after another without moving anything but his hands and fingers) seem like a tight unit as well; accompanied only by keys, trumpet player Jim Price, and pianist Nicky Hopkins. “The fact that they were close together was really helpful. It was just five guys on a plain stage kicking ass for an hour and a half,” Binzer recalls. With the exception of their early 60s show closer, Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny,” the Rolling Stones American Tour ‘72 set list drew exclusively from their matchless “Jimmy Miller period” from “Jumping Jack Flash,” through Beggar’s Banquet (a sped-up, almost punk “Street Fighting Man”), Let It Bleed (“Midnight Rambler” in which Mick, bathed in fuchsia light, beats the floor with his leather sash belt, and a soulful, sax-driven “Gimme Shelter”), Sticky Fingers (a dirty, boogie version of “Bitch”) and Exile on Main Street, played here for the first time (Mick swigs from a bottle of Jack during “All Down the Line”). “There are people who called that tour the lost tour because they didn’t do a live album from it,” Binzer says.

In 1974, Ladies and Gentlemen was distributed to movie theaters as a sort of proto-virtual rock concert; a harbinger of the IMAX-style event-movies of later years (including the Stones own at the IMAX), which may ultimately be the reason for its obscure status. Each screen had a tower of speakers on either side, mounted with blue spotlights targeting the audience. “They dimmed as the images started to appear on screen and the sound of a 15,000 seat auditorium filling up was projected. It gave you the feeling of a concert. The sound totally surrounded you at 100 decibels. It really was the first quadraphonic film.” The audience were given foam Frisbees as they entered and there were even scalpers outside. Ultimately it all proved too high maintenance to be sustained, and despite a sell-out box office, the film was pulled in frustration. “There was a lot of monkey business going on with the sale—I ended up with the job of dealing with the distributors and making sure they set it up the way we wanted it with regard to the speakers. They made the first payments but didn’t continue—and the Stones ended up taking the film back.” Nearly four decades later, the long belated release is the latest to revisit the Exile era (joining the reissued double album and the DVD documentary Stones in Exile), which most consider the band’s absolute peak. “People get softer as they get older,” Jagger quips during an interview on vintage BBC pop program, The Old Grey Whistle Test (part of the extras, which also include Swiss tour rehearsal footage and a brief, new interview with Jagger in which he critiques the band’s dubious fashion statements: “Charlie’s wearing a Rhumba shirt!”). Many believe the Stones began softening in ’73; becoming a more vulnerable and indulgent band in between bursts of genius like 1978’s Some Girls and 1981’s Tattoo You—but on Ladies and Gentlemen they’re beyond hard enough and rough enough to make us forget all that.

>>Great review by Marc Spitz!<<

The Olympic swimmer dude ??

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Edith Grove
>>Great review by Marc Spitz!<<

The Olympic swimmer dude ??

lol. That was Mark Spitz. '72 was his peak year, too.

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Max'sKansasCity

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The Greek
can someone please tell me what the heck is the issue with trying to buy a copy of this dvd ? i went to target this morning and found that it was ONLINE ONLY . this is what the "world's greatest rock and roll band" has been releagated to? the online dustbin ?i went online first to target .com and then to bestbuy .com and i am having the darndest time trying to give them my money for this item. dumb ass password problems with both sites.i also am a memeber of bestbuy rewards zone they have my e-mail because the pc is full of there junk e-mails and my password and my e-mail dont match ? does that make sense to anyone? they can send me there stupid e-mails but i cant buy something off there stupid websites the both of them.

How about walk, or drive, to BESTBUY and give them $7.99 and stop messing around?? JUST OWN IT

Thank you very much Mick, at $7.99 this is the bargain of the century. I amazed that we can own this for less than the price of a ticket at the theater last month (which I was unable to attend)... btw- It looks amazing on regular DVD on my HDTVs...As I said before, I am skipping over BluRay technology... I watch a lot of HD content (on DirectTV) without it..... and usually SDTV does not look so good, but this old footage looks great (all things considered)..... FKN-A!!!!.... AWESOME!!!! THE GREATEST ROCK AND ROLL BAND OF ALL TIME!!!!!

ps
Fun to see Mick singing HAPPY with Keith ...YAAAHHH!!! MAKES ME HAPPY

i just ordered it from bestbuy.com finally.bestbuy does not open untill 10:00am target is open before that .bestbuy is kinda a hassle because of my schedule .so all ends well i guess. my point is that it should not be a hassle to spend your money!

Amazing that it was actually cheaper to buy it in a store than to watch it in a theatre. Such a deal.

"It's just some friends of mine and they're busting down the door"

You could start a business buying L and G at Bestbuy and selling on EBAY for 15.00.

The Giants ? I like how people are singing the praises of Brian Sabean. This is the same guy who spent 127 million to sign Barry Zito. How absurd.

I grew up a Giants fan but the team and their fans have changed since moving from Candlestick. Don't root for em anymore.

Go Yanks !



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-10-13 17:38 by stonesseventytwo.

Well, the 2010 Jagger, is certainly a man with a different set of principles to the 1972 version in my opinion. Not that that comes across as particuarly bad from an interviewing point of view necessarily, because Jagger certainly doesn't come across as especially smug or self satisfied, by the greatness of 'Ladies And Gentlemen', and the furore over the 'Exile' album etc. Yet i get the impression he completely fails to comprehend just how great he and the rest of the band were at that period of time.

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stonesseventytwo
You could start a business buying L and G at Bestbuy and selling on EBAY for 15.00.

The Giants ? I like how people are singing the praises of Brian Sabean. This is the same guy who spent 127 million to sign Barry Zito. How absurd.

I grew up a Giants fan but the team and their fans have changed since moving from Candlestick. Don't root for em anymore.

Go Yanks !

good taste!!!!!!!

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Edward Twining
Well, the 2010 Jagger, is certainly a man with a different set of principles to the 1972 version in my opinion. Not that that comes across as particuarly bad from an interviewing point of view necessarily, because Jagger certainly doesn't come across as especially smug or self satisfied, by the greatness of 'Ladies And Gentlemen', and the furore over the 'Exile' album etc. Yet i get the impression he completely fails to comprehend just how great he and the rest of the band were at that period of time.

could not agree more ,esp with the way he poopaed exile

I ordered my copy of the De Luxe box at bol.com in Holland. It was 90 Euros including shipment. I cancelled that order and ordered at Amazon.UK, because it was cheaper there. Hard to believe but Amazon.UK only charges 55 Pounds including shipment to Holland. Because of the low exchange rate this will cost me 63 Euros. That is 27 Euros cheaper than ordering in my own country.

-------------------
Keep On Rolling

Just picked one up at Best Buy, thanks for the tip.


What startled me when I opened it was seeing the large photo of Bill's face behind the DVD. Kind of makes up for him being cropped out of the cover shot.


But I wish they had made the intro/crowd noise a track unto itself, so the viewer could just go straight to "Brown Sugar" if they wanted to.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-10-13 23:14 by loog droog.

Just watched a couple of songs from the DVD. Definitely better than the boots that we have been subjected to over the years. Picture quality not great though ( I wonder if it is better on Blu Ray ?).

Mixed feelings about this. Glad that we finally have a 100 % legit, non-bootleg release of this movie. The boots were awful and a ripoff to boot ( no pun intended) But I also feel it is a crying shame that the Stones let this wonderful film go into a state of decay over the years to the point where we cannot see it in all its glory. What we have is a faded version of the Mona Lisa.

I bought it from Tower Records Japan.
It came with the Official 3D slipcase. (plus not a small poster)

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sweetcharmedlife
Amazing that it was actually cheaper to buy it in a store than to watch it in a theatre. Such a deal.

You can say that again : )

I am pretty delighted with this whole deal,
THANK YOU MICK, FOR TREATING US FANS SO GOOD ON THIS ONE!!!!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-10-14 07:03 by Max'sKansasCity.

The stereo mix on the dvd is a bit weird, sounds mainly mono but with stereo reverb / ambience added. I've not heard the 6 channel sound as I don't have a decoder / home cinema system, but maybe I can extract the 6 channels and make a stereo mix from that (for my ipod).

Overall it's a good film, much of the audio is better than I remember it in the cinema.

Did anyone notice the full MT solo in YCAGWYW on the dvd, which was not in the film - they cut this out! I'm sure there were other bits they cut out, eg. the extended guitar jam part in the middle of Midnight Rambler. Not sure why they would do this, was quite a short film already. (It's possible my memory has failed me, but please correct me if I'm wrong about cutting bits out).

Glad I bought it, well worth £8.99.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2010-10-14 09:48 by WeLoveYou.

Taylor's lead guitar work is significantly quieter in the mix on several tracks also, especially on 'Gimme Shelter', 'Dead Flowers' and 'Street Fighting Man', than on the bootlegs of 'Ladies And Gentlemen', although i partly put it down to my hi fi equipment. Does anyone else notice that ? It's frustrating if it's true, because his contributions, of course, are so vital. When i saw the film in the cinema the other week this was not the case. I might try playing the DVD through some different speakers.