Word: shiningly
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...Shine a Light, which opens in theaters April 4, is Scorsese's fourth rockumentary. His others: The Last Waltz (1978), a record of the final concert given by The Band; Feel Like Going Home (2003), his affectionate retroglance at old Delta bluesmen; and No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005), a compilation of interviews and performances from Dylan's early years. All these films speak to Scorsese's fervent belief in movies as music. You see this in his studio pictures: in the operatic intensity of the acting and the camerawork and in their use of music, from arias...
...Departed (for which he finally won a Best Director Oscar), he has blended elegance with agitation, depicted the anomie of the cunning, late--20th century brute in classical style. Though he's earned his renown with these movies, he's equally adept directing documentaries. Making films like Shine a Light is a vacation from his vocation--an escape from the straitjacket of narrative and from the rigidities of the Hollywood system...
...Shine a Light begins as its own making-of documentary. In the preconcert planning, Scorsese asks for a playlist of the songs; he gets it just as the show starts. Mick Jagger frets that the moving cameras will distract the audience and that the lighting will throw too much heat on the stage. (As even the director realizes, "We cannot burn Mick Jagger.") During the concert, the singer shouts, as if to Scorsese, "These lights are burnin' up my ass!" He suffers for his art, but there's a film to be shot. Basically, Mick wants to give a great...
...Shine a Light isn't the record of a unique event, so it's not on the exalted level of The Last Waltz. But it has its own fascination. The film is less about the music than about the dedication of show-biz troupers--about doing your job, year after year, as if it's your joy. Jagger and Keith Richards, no less than Ethel Merman and Henny Youngman, have the veteran performers' love of pleasing an audience with routines that used to be antic but are now antique. By now, surely, they have performed Satisfaction more times than Judy...
...director, the point of his remorseless close-ups of Jagger & Co. isn't exposé but celebration. Shine a Light is a tribute to the glamour of survival. That's something Scorsese knows in his bones. In nearly 40 years of documentaries, he has looked outward--by studying Jagger or Dylan or Armani or his own family--and found insights into himself. And when he shares them with the world, it's more than nonfiction art. That's docutainment...