stoned

[KLAXXON]

Ten years in the making, director Stephen Wooley's story of the original Rolling Stone is a powerful and compelling drama that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Brian Jones was more than just a 'Rolling Stone', he was their founder member, their leader, their visionary and their most gifted musician.

The face of the sixties revolution, his blonde ambiguous style and considerable talent inspired enormous curiosity.

Director Stephen Wooley, has spent the last ten years researching events surrounding Jones's suspicious death, and this film charts the rise and eventual fall of one of Britain's original rock stars.

Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll abound in Stephen Woolley's highly entertaining Stoned, about Rolling Stones founding member Brian Jones. The guitarist's wild and wicked ways - offspring by five different women and a drug habit which makes Pete Doherty look like Cliff Richard - is stylishly captured, as are the final few months in Jones' increasingly screwed-up life. Leo Gregory (Green Street) delivers a charismatic turn as the man who really made the 60s swing before becoming rock'n'roll's first lifestyle casualty.

Stoned is most definitely not a biopic about the Stones themselves. Mick'n'Keef are supporting players here, and the film isn't even that interested in Brian's music (Jones was a prodigious talent, playing at least 30 instruments). In essence it's a case study of the haves and have nots in 60s Britain, pitting middle class Brian against working class Frank Thoroughgood (Paddy Considine). As Frank and his team tackle the never-ending task of rebuilding Brian's house (at Pooh Corner - it was formerly owned by AA Milne), the builder gradually becomes seduced by Jones' lifestyle. Until, that is, the cash starts to dry up...

"A CELEBRATION OF A WASTED TALENT"

If you can remember the 60s, as the cliché goes, you weren't there. Luckily Stephen Woolley has lots of iconic movies to act as memory aids, and a great soundtrack that references Jones' blues influences. Witty - the script is by Bond scribes Purves and Wade - and thoroughly engrossing, Stoned is ultimately a celebration of a wasted talent who lived fast, died young and left a beautiful corpse. Here's one rock pic that won't fade away.

1969. On the verge of being sacked from The Rolling Stones by Jagger (de Woolfson) and Richards (Whishaw), band founder Brian Jones (Gregory) wallows in wine, women and self-pity in his English country mansion. Shortly thereafter, he's found dead in his swimming pool...


Having spent ten years developing Stoned (which originally bore the title The Wycked World Of Brian Jones), producer Stephen Woolley elected to direct what had become a labour of love. The script went through a series of rewrites, and the finished version, penned by James Bond scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, interestingly takes the form less of a straight rock star biopic than an homage to trippy ’60s cinema — most obviously Performance, in which Jagger starred (and reportedly modelled his burnt-out musician character on Jones).

Accordingly, Stoned features a good deal of nudity, much tricksy camerawork and a kaleidoscopic rock ’n’ roll soundtrack, the latter employing modern covers of early Stones classics by the likes of The White Stripes. These retro stylings are used not just to evoke Jones’ hedonistic lifestyle, but also to paint black, as it were, the butt-end of the ’60s, when the hippy dream had turned sour.

It’s all anchored by a spirited performance by Leo Gregory as Jones and a sultry one by Monet Mazur as girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, with Paddy Considine putting in a typically impressive turn as Frank Thorogood, the labourer secretly charged with keeping Jones on the straight and narrow.


More than just another dead-celeb biopic, this is an effective evocation of the era in which Jones lived and died.


Leo Gregory ... Brian Jones
Paddy Considine ... Frank Thorogood
David Morrissey ... Tom Keylock
Ben Whishaw ... Keith Richards
Tuva Novotny ... Anna Wohlin
Amelia Warner ... Janet
Monet Mazur ... Anita Pallenberg
Luke de Woolfson ... Mick Jagger
David Walliams ... Accountant
David Williams ... Speecy
Gary Love ... Jeff
Johnny Shannon ... Landlord
Melanie Ramsay ... Mrs. Thorogood
Rüdiger Rudolf ... Volker (as Rüdiger Rudolph)
Ralph Brown ... Gysin



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