GUN N’ ROSES
“Sympathy for the Devil,” in Interview with the Vampire (Geffen Pictures). At the film’s close, as a car speeds across the Golden Gate Bridge, this most menacing of all Rolling Stones songs comes on. It is the most menacing less because of its themes than because of the impossible certainty in Bill Wyman’s bass, taking your feet out from under you, hurling you toward a destination you can neither credit nor resist—I mean, it moves like nothing else. The performance is so rich Jean-Luc Godard could build an entire movie around the emergence of its arrangement (his 1968 Sympathy for the Devil has just been released on video by ABKCO). But here, at the end of a film that gets stronger—more menacing—as it goes on, instead of the thing itself there is, by Geffen Records’ own, a horrible imitation: generic, cloddish, ham-fisted and, in Axl Rose’s singing, hysterical, as if the end, the end of the vogue for his band, is all too plain. For the movie it’s a major false note: Lestat would have better taste.
