Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

preppy-3 Back in the 1990s Boston showed this little disaster. I'm not a Stones fan but just had to see this for the title alone. It was sold out and it was kind of fun just waiting in line. It was a two cinema place (this was before the multiplexes took over) and the other cinema was showing some mainstream film. There were two lines--one for CS Blues and then the other movie. At one point the usher came out and bellowed at the top of his lungs, "This is the line for C***sucker Blues." Almost the entire line broke out laughing! That was the most fun I had that night cause this movie itself is pretty dull. Just b&w and color footage of the Stones on their 1972 concert tour. It's also incredibly depressing and there are scenes of drug abuse. I'm not rating this since I'm not a Stones fan. If you love the Stones you'll probably love this. But a casual viewer (like me) will probably be bored.

MisterWhiplash Like a handful of Rolling Stones fans, I found the film C***sucker Blues through bootlegging. There was just no other way around it; there has been so much written about how this was the 'unreleased' Stones documentary, that it was much too controversial and shocking to be released- had actual sex and drugs really depicted hardcore without a flinching camera lid- and that it was even suppressed by Mick Jagger and the Stones. Having now seen the film, it becomes clear that it isn't unfair to figure on why it never seen the official light of public day. It is pretty graphic with the sex (chiefly on a plane we see some groupies getting it on with some members of the Stones crew, I don't think they were the Stones themselves having the sex, although they were hilariously shaking tambourines and beating drums like some tribal ritual), casual with pornographic detail in the nudity, and the drug use- primarily coke and heroin but also a little grass- is all real and done almost like it's nothing at all.So, to play devil's advocate, there is a reason for the Stones why something like this wouldn't be good for their 'image', whatever that might be, as opposed to Gimme Shelter which despite the Altamont nightmare was crafted by true masters of the documentary craft (the Maysles brothers), where as director Robert Frank crafted a scatter-shot, collage-like assemblage of footage, veering between avant-garde and home movie. Maybe it could have gotten a release in a true underground level, but the fact was, and remains, that they are one of the biggest bands ever, regardless of their notorious times.And yet, there is also another argument, and this even more-so could be said for today, that C***sucker Blues, in revealing what's shocking mixed with the banal dealings of hotel rooms and the fly-on-the-wall style on back-stage, is important in retrospect. This way of rock and roll life simply doesn't exist anymore, with the BIG press being Dick Cavett and the sex and drugs and groupies just there, and the attitudes so casual. It's seeing life on the road and life in the hotel rooms and life on the stage and in little private moments with this band and those around them, and on a pure rock and roll movie level it's definitely the most primitive in construction. Artistry, however brief (i.e. slow-motion shots of a Exile on Main Street billboard), gives way to Frank just being there and getting everything he can, however mundane it might seem to be. Why not let today's audiences, more than three decades later, take a view into the unfiltered time capsule? Granted, as mentioned, Frank is no Maysles, so the camera-work sometimes looks amateurish (the sound guys occasionally tap the microphone just so that the editor probably knew where to cut) and, sadly, it's probably not too much of a wonder why he didn't work again outside of the lowest of low-budget art-house pictures and shorts. But he does manage to capture, for those Stones fans who would be so dedicated to seek out the film (or, for that matter, be one of the two dozen more or less that get to see it at private screenings commissioned by the Stones each year) not just some of the finest/craziest moments in Stones history (i.e. Richards and friends, in now as a cliché today, throwing the TV out the hotel room window), but just rock in general.Contrary to what Jagger said in a recent interview about one of the reasons he clashed with Frank, that there wasn't enough live music footage, there's a good plenty of live performances, if maybe not as many as some fans might expect. There's awesome cuts of Brown Sugar, half of an intense Midnight Rambler, Happy, Street Fighting Man. But probably most joyous of all is seeing, almost as a total surprise, Stevie Wonder playing a kind of medley with the Stones, starting with Uptight (Everything is Alright) and going into Satisfaction. This is pure musical ecstasy, of people going full-throttle to put on a show for the crowds, but also just digging the music so much that it looks like nothing else matters. If only for scenes like that, amid the masses of footage of the randomness and fun and down time of touring, is C***sucker Blues an achievement worth seeking this dangerous, crude piece of non-fiction. 8.5/10

CULTEGUY I like the Stones older music, not so much in love with the dudes that I would defend them though. This movie starts good, or fair enough. I didn't mind initial scenes of excess-- was to be expected from what I had already heard about the film...Problem; heroin taking, groupy fondling, and much of the gabbing wasn't done by the Stones but by some dude, who knows who the hell he was, who was enjoying the excess. So I have to agree with Mick and the gang, this movie's exploitive in that it features them, and keeps cutting to some scumbag getting his kicks from the attention he got out of association. Not my bag.The Stones are stoned, who cares. Best line, when Mick is messing with some 16MM cameras and looks up at the documentarian, in a very stoned out scene, saying 'Do you wear the same socks everyday?'Worst is the scene that looks like something out of a Bucky Beaver 8MM porn stag film... Don't worry ma, I didn't see anything because obviously they hadn't invented razors back then...Rent "Give Me Shelter" instead (if you haven't seen it on DVD.) Trust me, if you were missing out I'd tell you.

ericl-2 Sheer brilliance from Robert Frank, one of the great visual artists of our time. Let's say right at the start that the concert footage (the only portions of "CB" in color) captures some of the Stones' best performances ever on film, including a splendid "Midnight Rambler" and a wonderful medley of "Uptight" and "Satisfaction" with Stevie Wonder.But the meat of this film is in the off-the-cuff, life-on-the-road footage, shot in a beautiful, grainy black and white. Other important filmmakers worked with the Stones before and after (J-L Godard on "One Plus One," Hal Ashby on the regrettable "Let's Spend the Night Together"), but this is the great one because it does the opposite of glamorizing the band -- it reveals the quotidian nature of their antics on the road. Lots of outrageous things happen: roadies shoot up, Keith Richards throws a TV set out the window and displays himself in various states of extreme intoxication and/or nodding off, groupies are abused on the tour bus, etc.But Frank reveals it all in his unique deadpan style, letting you see the band members as individuals carrying on an everyday existence rather than as celebrities. In his camera, the excess is all of a piece with the mundane details: Jagger sitting on his hotel bed ordering a bowl of fruit, a conversationless walk along a road, etc.Frank doesn't deglamorize his subject, either -- despite the squalor of some of what he shows us, he isn't out to debunk the Stones and their hangers-on, but to reveal them to us as part of everyday life and the spectacle they put on as a workaday component of the larger spectacle society feeds to the masses as entertainment. The effect is a little like the messier backstage scenes of such films as von Sternberg's "The Blue Angel," Bergman's "Sawdust and Tinsel," or Fellini's "Variety Lights," where the everyday routine that goes on behind the making of an illusion seems somehow harder and crueller than it would in any other setting. But it's life, as Robert Frank observes it in our airbrushed, late-capitalist world.The wonderful last shot, as Jagger throws his arm into the air amidst an explosion of lights and camera flashes, ends it with a flourish, but by now we've seen the mess behind the flash. This film grows you up.Officially, "CB" was the film of the Stones' 1972 US tour, but for murky reasons (one hears it was the shooting-up sequences that did it) the band barred its release and only allows it to be shown occasionally. In its place, the relatively uninspired "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones!" was released. Too bad -- catch "CB" if you can, or seek out one of the many bootleg videotapes circulating, although the color repro on the latter can sometimes be lousy.