Let’s Spend the Night Together – DVD Review

DVD Reviews, Reviews

The eighties were a wonderful, unique decade that housed awful fashion, terrific music, and classic films. The Rolling Stones, fresh off of the Some Girls album – which some argue made them relevant again in the age of punk rock – their 1978 US Tour, and their Emotional Rescue album, the Stones toured the States once again, with a record-breaking arena tour in 1981. From September to December, The Rolling Stones would tour all across the United States, breaking sales records for the year. The Stones recorded a few of the live concerts, which resulted in this DVD – Let’s Spend the Night Together and the live album Still Life.

Mick Jagger and the rest of The Rolling Stones perform 25 songs on this concert DVD, and the track list is below. This film has no story, no acting, and no script. Unlike The Doors’ film, which was a dramatization of the band, Let’s Spend the Night Together is simply a recording of two separate concerts from the 1981 arena tour. Here is the track listing (in alphabetical order):

20 Flight Rock
All Down the Line
Beast of a Burden
Black Limousine
Brown Sugar
Going to a Go-Go
Hang Fire
Honky Tonk Women
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
Just My Imagination
Let It Bleed
Let Me Go
Let’s Spend the Night Together
Little T & A
Miss You
Neighbors
Satisfaction
Shattered
She’s So Cold
Start Me Up
Time Is on My Side
Tumbling Dice
Under My Thumb
You Can’t Always Get What You Want

With Let’s Spend the Night Together, the viewer gets exactly what he or she would expect: a filmed concert. The “story” of this concert is told through the various editing of clips from two separate concerts, as well as a few behind-the-scenes clips. The two concerts in question are from Sun Devil Stadium in Phoenix, Arizona, and the Brendan Byrne Arena in Meadowlands, New Jersey. Most of the film is watching Mick Jagger get crazy on stage, dancing his heart away. There are only a few clips that show the band backstage, before they perform, which is disappointing because these are the most interesting of the clips in the film, and help break the monotony of just watching Jagger and the rest of the band. For hardcore Stones fans, watching Jagger kick around the stage for an hour and a half will be a blast, but for casual audiences, Let’s Spend the Night Together can get boring quickly.

There is no denying that The Rolling Stones are excellent musicians, and this music is some of the finest from the genre, but given that The Stones toured for three months, the fact that only two concerts were recorded and used in this movie is a letdown. There could have been a bigger use of backstage footage to mix things up as the movie went on, but instead, director Hal Ashby chose to stick with mostly following Jagger around the stage.

Since there is no story to talk about, and no acting to critique, all I have to go on is the editing choices of director Hal Ashby. Ashby decided to make this movie experience as close to “being there” as possible. The problem with this is that unless the viewer is sitting with thousands of other screaming Stones fans, drinking out of those cheap red cups and getting bumped from all directions by obnoxious audience members the “being there” experience is lacking, and the end result is that Let’s Spend the Night Together becomes monotonous, leaving the viewer wondering why they didn’t just pop the live CD in their player instead.

This is the type of film – a concert film – that begs for 5.1 surround sound, but unfortunately Lionsgate only delivers 2.0 stereo audio in English. The music sounds good in the stereo audio format, but would have been great if it used 5.1 to allow the viewer to experience more closely how it felt to sit in the audience at these incredibly large concerts.

This DVD is presented in 16×9 widescreen presentation with a 1.85:1 ratio, and looks fine on a high definition television. The quality of the film is a bit grainy, but that is because it was taken from live footage of a concert nearly thirty years ago. The first concert, in Arizona, is especially bright with colors, and these come up clearly in the DVD. Never fear: the tackiness of Mick Jagger’s kneepad tights comes out with crystal clarity.

The back of the DVD claims there is a theatrical trailer and a stills gallery, but after viewing the movie on two separate DVD players – one being a computer – I was unable to access these features. There are two trailers that open the DVD, but neither of these are for Let’s Spend the Night Together. There was no option that says “Special Features” on the main menu of the DVD, nor was there any when I loaded the disc onto a computer. If this was an oversight by Lionsgate, it was a big one.

It isn’t that Let’s Spend the Night Together is a bad film, it just has a specific audience in mind: the hardcore Rolling Stones fan who wants to own their music in any format possible. Mick Jagger is fun onstage, but watching him jump around gets old after a while, and there isn’t much else to break it up. If Ashby splices more backstage clips into the movie, the pacing would have held up better. Where he did use backstage clips, and even clips from the bands younger days during “Time on My Side”, the movie was fun and interesting. The majority of the film, though, was spent watching Jagger and company. There are some that crave this sort of thing, and for those folks, Let’s Spend the Night Together is a hit.


Lionsgate presents Let’s Spend the Night Together. Directed by: Hal Ashby. Starring: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Ron Wood, Bill Wyman. Running time: 87 minutes. Rating: PG. Released on DVD: November 2, 2010.

Branden Chowen is, first and foremost, an actor. He is in his final year of graduate school, where he will (hopefully) soon receive an MFA in acting to compliment his BFA in the art. He spends his free time watching and reviewing movies for Inside Pulse Movies, and We Love Cult. He is also one of the co-hosts for The Drive-In, which is the official podcast of Inside Pulse Movies. He is an avid horror fan, and will spend time watching just about any horror movie that looks interesting. You can contact Branden by email at bchowen[AT]insidepulse[DOT]com, or follow him on Twitter @Psymin1.