Stoned

Stoned tells us about the life and early death at 27 of Brian Jones who founded and actually named the group. I do remember it back in 1969, that there was such controversy around it I did not know. It seems as though the Stones went on without any pause or at least that's how it appeared in America.

Part of the problem with this film is that Brian Jones is not presented as an especially likable figure. It seemed to me that his love of all kinds of hedonistic pleasure took over and ruled him. What started as creative differences between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Jones just eventually came down to the fact that Jones would rather party than work. Not that those two guys ever lived like monks, but you do have to please the public with your music and that requires working on it and on a product to please said public. It's why the Rolling Stones are still a hot act in almost 50 years of performing and not on the nostalgia circuit either.

Leo Gregory plays Jones and some really good casting was done with him and those who played the rest of the Stones. Paddy Considine is Frank Thorogood, Jones's estate builder and general factotum who was fired the day Jones was found in his pool. Whether he had help from Thorogood or anyone else is still fodder for speculation.

I agree with another reviewer who said the sound was of bad quality. That that reviewer was from the UK says something because I would be tempted to blame it on their accents. I well remember when the Beatles first came to America they were unintelligible with their Liverpudlian speech pattern which was not something American ears heard that often. But here it's just bad sound recording.

Maybe it was his hedonism over all way of life, but I could not develop a rooting interest in Jones as I could with say Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin and I'm not really into that music.