I love The Man From The Elysian Fields too.





from the STEPHANIE ZACHAREK review [www.salon.com]
...But if you're looking for the picture of decrepit elegance, "The Man From Elysian Fields" has it in Mick Jagger. Jagger looks wonderful -- which is not to say he looks young for his age. His face has been steadily taking on the creases and contours of a rock-star apple doll, but in "Elysian Fields" it's a look he wears beautifully, perhaps because his sharply tailored suits bring out his innate elegance. (Those suits are a throwback to the classically cut but superbly modern-looking jackets he used to wear so well in the early to mid-1960s, before he became better known for absurd jumpsuits and ridiculous velvets.)

Jagger's performance rings true. He may not have an excessive range, but there's something very touching about the way he captures his character's reluctance to give in to old age and uselessness. In his best scene, he's chatting casually and comfortably with a gorgeous girlfriend (or is she a client?) played by Anjelica Huston. Their banter is light and natural, and he looks and acts almost mystically boyish, until she says something that cuts him to the quick; then his self-doubt and self-loathing transform him back to his actual age.

Jagger's performance is more than a curiosity; it's a revelation, particularly coming from a man who has for years worked so hard to maintain an aura of youthfulness. Here, Jagger both looks his age and reminds us that the beautiful boy he used to be is still there inside. As an actor, if not as a rock star, Jagger seems to know that hanging too desperately onto youth is the quickest way to lose it. Forgetting your age completely is the only way to stay young.

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Sleepy City

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frankotero
However my overall favorite is Running Out Of Luck. Again, because he played himself.

I watched this again (twice) very recently for the first time in nearly 25 years, & I found it great fun! Worst thing about it is the music, though even that isn't as bad as I remembered...

I've never seen the complete film but the only clip from it one can find on youtube is hilarious

I recommend watching the whole of 'Running Out Of Luck'. It's never been officially released on DVD, but the long deleted official VHS tape is still quite easy to find (I bought mine via Amazon late last year for around £2-£3, & I then transferred it to DVD for myself).

Proudmary, thanks for including that great review of Man From Elysian Fields, which I absolutely love! Mick did an amazing job with his role. I always loved Performance, mostly because as someone pointed out, Mick is stunningly beautiful. Very sensual. I also liked Running Out of Luck. Being Mick is not really a movie; it's a documentary, right? I loved it! The plot of Freejack sucked so I was never a fan of that film, and the same goes for Ned Kelly. The Aussie outlaw thing was not that interesting but Mick was not bad in that part. He looked a bit stiff . Come on now, the Nightingale is a fairy tale!! How bad could that be! I liked it!

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mickschix
Proudmary, thanks for including that great review of Man From Elysian Fields, which I absolutely love! Mick did an amazing job with his role. I always loved Performance, mostly because as someone pointed out, Mick is stunningly beautiful. Very sensual. I also liked Running Out of Luck. Being Mick is not really a movie; it's a documentary, right? I loved it! The plot of Freejack sucked so I was never a fan of that film, and the same goes for Ned Kelly. The Aussie outlaw thing was not that interesting but Mick was not bad in that part. He looked a bit stiff . Come on now, the Nightingale is a fairy tale!! How bad could that be! I liked it!

You're welcome, mickschix. You can check out this one by Roger Ebert
[rogerebert.suntimes.com]

And if we're talking about Jagger, movies and Roger Ebert, there is quite an interesting and different interview with Mick as producer from Sundance

Mick moves into movies
BY ROGER EBERT / January 26, 2001

PARK CITY, Utah -- Mick Jagger is taller than you'd think, thin as a rail, dressed in clothes that were never new and only briefly fashionable. There is a studious unconcern about appearance, as if, having been Mick Jagger all these many years, he can wear whatever he bloody well pleases.
He is at the Sundance Film Festival as a producer. He and Lorne Michaels have produced and Michael Apted has directed "Enigma," a Sundance entry about the British codebreakers at the top secret Bletchley Park facility, who cracked the German naval code when it had 150 million million million possible solutions, and then cracked it again after it was improved to 4,000 million billion solutions.
He wanted to get into film production, he said, because "I got rather bored with people trying to involve me in their projects and then the projects would fall to pieces. I thought, well, wait a minute, if I'm interested in this, I should start doing the things that I'm interested in, and not the things other people want me to do."
In the movie business, it helps to get a project financed if a big name like Jagger's is "attached" to it. Better to attach himself to his own project and eliminate the middle men.
"Enigma" is based on a best-selling novel by Robert Harris, a riveting read, long unfilmed because it's not exactly cinematic to show a lot of mathematicians sitting in a room drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, thinking hard and writing on yellow notepads.
"It's very hard to do a movie about intellectual activity," Jagger mused. We were sitting in an upstairs room of a bar named Gamekeepers, drinking mineral water. "It's even hard to do a movie about painters. What are they doing? Painting. This could have been a movie about guys sitting in rooms with pencils.
"Fortunately, in the real-life Bletchley Park, they invented a way of decoding the Nazi signals using a kind of mechanical computer. They built these things called bombs where you put instructions in and the machines would click away. The man with a pencil would make a calculated guess what the code was, and then the bomb would go through the permutations and say yes or no."
Luckily, however, "Enigma" is about more than computers. It is also about romance and betrayal. The film stars Dougray Scott as Tom Jerico, the brilliant mathematician who has returned after a nervous breakdown, Saffron Burrows as the beautiful war worker who caused the breakdown and then went missing, and Kate Winslet as the plucky operative in the radio reception room, who transcribes the German signals and helps Tom solve the mystery of the code and the missing woman. Jeremy Northam is the British intelligence operative who wonders if all three are spies.
"It's not just about code-breaking," Jagger said, "but about love, and it's got some underlying moral questions also about how many lives can be lost for the greater good."
Hearing Jagger say things like that is tricky because you have the rock 'n' roll persona in your mind, and the person sitting across from you speaks in a well-educated British drawl, like someone on an upmarket talk show. I mentioned that I'd seen the Rolling Stones at the Double Door in Chicago, in a warm-up performance the night before one of the Stones' most recent concerts at the United Center.
"That was a nice night," he said. "That was one of those nights when it all goes nicely." He seemed to be describing another person in another life.
Michael Apted, the director of "Enigma," "is an old friend," Jagger said. "I knew him from years ago. He's a well-known English documentary filmmaker, as well as a feature filmmaker. We had meetings with him, and he seemed right for the job, and then he got this offer to do the last Bond movie, so we had a hiatus of a year while he did the Bond movie, and so we had to keep the whole thing waiting."
The screenplay is by Tom Stoppard, famed playwright and screenwriter ("Shakespeare in Love"), and a formidable force when crossed.
"Tom's an old friend of mine," said Jagger, who has excellent taste in old friends, "and since this is an intellectually challenging story, I thought he would suit it. But everyone else was kind of afraid of Tom, intellectually. He's not a mean person, but he's not a person that you can make mistakes with. If you go in and say, `Scene 38B is not really working,' you'd better know why it's not working. Everyone was afraid to do that. So that was my job. To say what I would say to any writer, because if it's not working, it's not working."

Have you had any fun at Sundance?

"No, I came here last night, and I went to a party where Macy Gray was supposed to be singing. She wasn't there. I had a few drinks and left. That was my Sundance experience."

Will you see any movies?

"I have to go back to Los Angeles tomorrow. I do go to Cannes quite often for a couple of days, to see what movies are around. And I was at Venice (film festival) this year. It was fun."

Jagger said his company has two other projects in the works, one by Martin Scorsese called "The Long Play," about two guys who grow in the music business over 30 years, and the other based on the poet Dylan Thomas' life and marriage.
He hasn't starred in many movies, but people still talk about his androgynous druggie rock star, playing host to a gangster on the run, in Nicolas Roeg's "Performance" (1970).
"I saw it on television not long ago," Jagger said. "What I found interesting was the social observations that were being made and the use of documentary-style footage. It was really quite ahead of its time. It's a good movie; I think it holds up."
He had another dramatic role in 1970, "Ned Kelly," about the famous Australian outlaw. I asked him if he had read Peter Carey's new novel about Kelly.

"People have told me it's fantastic."

So maybe your company would return to Ned Kelly for another movie?

"I think I've done my Ned Kelly years."

You're my new HERO, Proudmary!! Again, thank you! Loved both reviews! Have you seen " The Man From Elysian Fields"?? I also saw Enigma and that was intense but very, very interesting! Mick should be proud of that one!

Have THE LONG PLAY and the Dylan Thomas film totally fallen by the wayside or just resting in some pre-production limbo?

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Glam Descendant
Have THE LONG PLAY and the Dylan Thomas film totally fallen by the wayside or just resting in some pre-production limbo?

That's the last thing I've read about it
Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger & Terence Winter To Develop HBO Rock 'N' Roll Drama
By NELLIE ANDREEVA | Thursday July 22, 2010

EXCLUSIVE: I hear the Boardwalk Empire duo of director Martin Scorsese and writer Terence Winter is re-teaming with HBO for another sweeping period drama series project, and this time, they have rock legend Mick Jagger as a partner. The project, referred to as History of Music, is a rock ‘n’ roll epic, which follows two friends through 40 years in the music business, from the early days of R&B to contemporary hip-hop.
It originated as a feature based on Jagger’s idea, first at Disney and most recently at Paramount where it was set up three years ago with Scorsese attached to direct, The Departed scribe William Monahan to write and Jagger, his Jagged Films partner Victoria Pearman and Scorsese producing. I hear HBO is now making a deal with Paramount to develop a pilot based on the idea, and Sopranos alum and Boardwalk Empire creator Winter is being brought in to write it. (Monahan is no longer involved.) Scorsese would get first crack at directing if the project goes to pilot. Scorsese also directed the pilot for Boardwalk Empire, which was picked up to series and was a top seller at the international LA Screenings in May. Deals are still being negotiated, but Scorsese, Jagger, Pearman and Winter are expected to executive produce the History of Music project. Boardwalk Empire, set in 1920s Atlantic City at the dawn of Prohibition, premieres Sept. 19. Scorsese directed Jagger and his Rolling Stones bandmates in the 2008 feature documentary Shine a Light, which Pearman produced.

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mickschix
You're my new HERO, Proudmary!! Again, thank you! Loved both reviews! Have you seen " The Man From Elysian Fields"?? I also saw Enigma and that was intense but very, very interesting! Mick should be proud of that one!

Thanks
There is an extract from another very goog interview

You seem to have a lot of film projects going on.

The thing about film projects is, whereas you work on a music project and it will just happen, more or less, there’s not so much money, not so much of a committee, the problem with movies is that you have to have to have a lot of projects, because they come together, they fall apart, the rights revert to someone else, they get too expensive, all kinds of things. So instead of saying ‘My next film project is X’ they’re so amorphous that you have to have a ton of stuff going on. It’s like fishing, you know you’re going to catch a fish some time, but what kind, or how long it’s going to take, you really don’t know. And you may have to go home disappointed, to continue my really boring metaphor! So that’s why you hear about so many things. I always say to people, ‘Why do you have to announce these things, when they may never happen?’ I like to announce things when they’re ready to go, not when I’ve thought of them. It’s like, ‘I may record a song with Bryan Adams’: well, you may, but you may not. I may be making a movie about Che Guevara. You just hope one of them is going to come. It basically means the money is going to come, which means you can get a good script, or a good actor or director, and if any of those things fall out you won’t get the money and you won’t get the film made.

Enigma seems to be doing well.

It’s got very good reviews, more than most British films, which get rapped over the knuckles at home. It’s had a good weekend’s business and it’s a satisfying movie to watch, you can see it more than once.

Presumably it started for you when you read Robert Harris’s book.

Yes and no, I’d read stuff about Bletchley Park before, which had me primed for the Robert Harris book, if you will. And Tom Stoppard was very knowledgeable about the background of it all.

Are any other projects at a sufficiently advanced stage to mention?

I have two things which vaguely feature the music business, one is called The Long Play which I’ve written with Martin Scorcese, it’s an idea of mine, just how two guys in New York were brought up in the independent record business, what happens to them over 30 years, how the music industry changes, and how the world changes as seen through that microcosm of the music business. I hope very much that Martin Scorcese can direct it. And I wrote the other outline, for this film which is like The Prince and The Pauper, about a rock star who swops his job with a roadie, for a bet. It’s a common theme, and a comedy. Other than that, I’m trying to finance this film about Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, which is a bio pic, really, with a really interesting script. So we’ll see what happens.

There’s a song here, Everybody Getting High, which depicts the film world as a kind of human menagerie. A reflection of your impressions?

Ha! Well the rock business is pretty similar… Yeah, it’s my take on the film business, and their drug habits, God bless them. It’s good to have a new background to do observations on. It’s fascinating, the film world, but what is not particularly gratifying is how long most things take to get off the ground.

Btw, this interview is really worth reading
[www.pauldunoyer.com]

I'm going to print out that entire interview to read and keeps, thanks Proudmary! You're a cool dude!! LOL. I've heard about the Dylan Thomas movie and I hope that it's not dropped...sounds interesting. Now you can see why Mick doesn't NEED to tour. He has a lot of other interests.

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TeaAtThree
I've only seen Performance -- loooooong time ago, Freejack and Bent.

I loved Bent. It's the best of the three by far.

T@3

Victor Vacendak was great!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2011-02-20 05:01 by GADAWG.

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msw2525
Freejack is probably one of the worst movies of all time.

You must be nuts. Filmed here in Atlanta Victor Vacendak was great

freejack would have been a hit movie with better actors in place of esteves and mick, maybe tom cruise and rutger hower and a better script and director

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melillo
freejack would have been a hit movie with better actors in place of esteves and mick, maybe tom cruise and rutger hower and a better script and director

Yeah ! Other than that.....

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Sleepy City

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GetYerAngie
The Nightingale I will look forward to see.

If anyone's interested I'm currently selling a brand new (sealed) official Region 1 DVD of this on ebay:

[cgi.ebay.co.uk]

Less than 2 hours left to bid on this (current highest bid £2.99!), so if you want to grab a bargain...

I also have Marianne Faithfull's 'Girl On A Motorcycle' movie for sale (uncensored German edition), about 90 minutes left to bid: [cgi.ebay.co.uk]

I'd love to see Being Mick but it is not on YouTube except for small clips.

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Bliss
I'd love to see Being Mick

[www.amazon.com]

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Keep On Rolling

I've seen

Freejack (Not good but there are a lot worst films)

The man from Elyssian fields (I really liked it)

Performance (I've tryed to watch it twice but not able to finish... perhaps the thirth strike..)

[www.stonescovers.com]
@Stones_Covers
[www.facebook.com]

Performance is still interesting to the public. BFI named it to be one of the 10 British films ever. So maybe Keith is wrong while saying that suicide was the greatest work Cammell ever did.

SWINGING LONDON MOVIES
POSTED ON TUE, 22/02/2011 @ 08:44 BY:
PAUL MARTIN
Forget the Angry Young Men - this is not a retrospective of how the British New Wave gave a cinematic voice to the working class. Nope, this is instead a celebration of those more lurid, often swiftly-dated films which emerged during the period when London was being heralded as the capital of world cool. Yesterday, it was the turn of Dick Lester and Pete 'n' Dud. Today it's Mick Jagger and Michael Reeves.
Certainly not to suggest that it was in any way a competition, but Reeves was not the most famous premature demise of '69. That particular 'honour' went instead to the then-recently-dismissed Rolling Stones guitarist, Brian Jones. But while Jones was most definitely gone, the previous autumn had seen a small part of his essence immortalised on celluloid by one of his former band-mates, with Mick Jagger conceiving his performance as rock exile Turner in Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg’s Performance as a combination of Jones and the Stones other six-string superstar, Keith Richards.
The scenario of Performance hints at one of the more curious cultural idiosyncrasies which was thrown up by '60s London, namely the acceptance of some of the capital’s key underworld figures into the showbiz set. The Kray brothers even cropped up alongside the likes of Lennon and McCartney and the Stones themselves in David Bailey’s Box of Pin-ups, a prestige archive of the day’s scene-makers by the famous photographer. And it is the gangland underworld in which Cammell and Roeg’s picture begins, as cold-blooded enforcer Chas Devlin (a deeply impressive James Fox) falls out of favour with his yeti-backed boss Harry Flowers (played by Johnny Shannon), a psychopath whose avuncular Bow Bells vowels barely hide a seriously unbalanced temperament.
Chas is forced into hiding at the home of libertarian Turner, and his companions - androgynous Lucy (Week End actress Michele Breton) and Pherber. The latter role is filled by Anita Pallenberg, who famously at the time of the Performance shoot was dating Richards, having left Brian Jones for him. She ended up having an on-set affair with Jagger, which is always a risk when your co-star is playing their character as a combination of your current and previous lovers.
Co-director Cammell, who himself had enjoyed a liaison with Pallenberg, entered footage of his leading lady and Jagger forming the beast with two backs into an Amsterdam pornography festival where it won a prize. For his part, Richards was not much of a fan of the Scots filmmaker, later referring to him as “the most destructive little turd I've ever met,” and suggesting that his 1996 suicide by method of self-inflicted gunshot was the greatest work he ever did.
Cammell and Roeg were an unlikely directorial double-act, the former providing the scenario and vision for the project but lacking anything in the way of movie-making experience. This was duly provided by the latter, who had already worked as cinematographer for such luminaries as Francois Truffaut and David Lean (as well as Richard Lester on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum). This blend of ideas and visual artistry actually dovetails rather splendidly in Performance, with the resultant picture proving to be both conceptually intriguing and beautifully photographed. Freejack, it ain't.
Roeg’s camera haunts the blood-red interiors of Turner’s mansion, presenting it as an extension of its owner’s damaged mindscape, a realm of Bacchanalian iniquity into which Chas has unwittingly blundered. It is in this realm where Cammell’s key conceit unfolds, as he prepares a Borges-esque melding of identities between the two principals (a portrait of the Argentinean writer is even hung on Turner’s wall, casting an intrigued eye over proceedings). Of course, once Chas has got all that out of his system he goes on to link up with Dave, for Performance 2: Snooker Loopy, Nuts Are We (this is not even remotely true).
Although Performance was shot in 1968, the cataclysmic studio response to the finished product saw it shelved for a further two years. Having expected a Rolling Stones version of A Hard Day’s Night, the Warner Bros. suits were left baffled and repulsed by Cammell’s transgressive vision, with one executive’s wife famously expressing her distaste by vomiting on her husband at a preview screening. It's a reaction that contemporary physicians have termed the 'James Corden Effect'.
Even plans for a Stones tie-in soundtrack album were scuppered, with the shenanigans between Jagger and Pallenberg resulting in Richards refusing to contribute to any such project. Music duties were eventually handled by sometimes-Stones keyboardist Jack Nitzsche, with Jagger contributing a single track, Memo from Turner, which, in spite of its title, had no lyrical connection to the movie, although it is pretty bluesy-groovy. The film was finally released in August 1970 – after the success of Easy Rider had left studios hungry for comparable counter-culture material, but a good while after the swing of London had ground to a halt.

[www.indiemoviesonline.com]

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Rolling Hansie

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Bliss
I'd love to see Being Mick

[www.amazon.com]

The official DVD is well worth buying as it features lots of nice bonus footage (2 promos, several live songs, Mick's home movies, etc).

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proudmary

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Sleepy City

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frankotero
However my overall favorite is Running Out Of Luck. Again, because he played himself.

I watched this again (twice) very recently for the first time in nearly 25 years, & I found it great fun! Worst thing about it is the music, though even that isn't as bad as I remembered...

I've never seen the complete film but the only clip from it one can find on youtube is hilarious

Am I missing something? Is Brown Sugar on Through the Pask Darkly? Is that a 'bait and switch'?

What the hell is going on?!

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treaclefingers
Am I missing something? Is Brown Sugar on Through the Pask Darkly? Is that a 'bait and switch'?

Ain't it funny eh ? BTW, what does a 'bait and switch' mean ?

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Keep On Rolling

Happened to watch Enigma today, liked it as much as the first couple of times I had watched in year's past.

Has anyone seen this? (I haven't.)

I've never heard of that one! Is it for real??

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treaclefingers

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proudmary

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Sleepy City

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frankotero
However my overall favorite is Running Out Of Luck. Again, because he played himself.

I watched this again (twice) very recently for the first time in nearly 25 years, & I found it great fun! Worst thing about it is the music, though even that isn't as bad as I remembered...

I've never seen the complete film but the only clip from it one can find on youtube is hilarious

Am I missing something? Is Brown Sugar on Through the Pask Darkly?

Nope. It isnt. Which makes it even more bizarre. He's in the arsehole of nowhere and found the only copy of the album that features a song that was only first recorded three months after the album came out.

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Rolling Hansie

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treaclefingers
Am I missing something? Is Brown Sugar on Through the Pask Darkly? Is that a 'bait and switch'?

Ain't it funny eh ? BTW, what does a 'bait and switch' mean ?

Bait and switch is when someone is enticed into a transaction with ulterior
motives. An example: A store will advertise a product at a low price, only they
do not have it in stock and try to sell a more expensive version of the product, providing a bigger profit.

>He's in the arsehole of nowhere and found the only copy of the album that features a song that was only first recorded three months after the album came out.

Plus it's the LOVE YOU LIVE version if I recall correctly.

Performance at no. 7 on Time Out's Top 100 British Films...

[www.timeout.com]

Thanks for the explanation MKjan.

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Keep On Rolling