Beyond the Multiplex

The Beastie Boys' fan-shot concert film: For frat guys only? Plus: Matthew Barney's latest ... starring Bjork and a whole lot of Vaseline.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Beastie Boys, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Bjork, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

March 30, 2006 | An "authorized bootleg" concert film by a hip-hop, jazz-funk, hardcore punk band. A low-budget detective film that injects Dashiell Hammett's trademark hard-boiled sensibility into a Southern California high school, circa 2006. An enigmatic, nearly wordless spectacle set aboard a whaling ship, from the man anointed the greatest artist of his generation. And then there was the really weird movie I saw this week, in which Jiang Qing, aka Madame Mao, returns from the grave to visit the discos of Shanghai and defend her beloved propaganda operas of the Cultural Revolution.

It's spring, and I hope the flowers are out wherever you are. They're sure as hell blooming on the indie-film calendar, and with the festival season just starting and new releases rolling out by the bucketful, the main danger right now is missing Something Really Good. So our backlog of nominations for great little movie theaters in unlikely spots will have to wait. Weep not, gentle readers, for the Parkway of Oakland, Calif., the Dipson Market Arcade of Buffalo, N.Y., or the Bookshelf Cafe of Guelph, Ont.; their day will come. (As always, I welcome new suggestions.)

Onward. This is one of those weeks that, like the big new shopping center out on Route Whatever, offers something for everybody. As Dr. Johnson once observed, when you grow tired of watching intriguing but flawed films made by overly ambitious, egotistical people, you grow tired of life. OK, he didn't quite put it that way.

"Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!": Everything they do is funky like Lee Dorsey
Various levels of hype have been applied to the Beastie Boys' mostly fan-shot concert film, "Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!" -- yes, it's the only title in film history to include both a semicolon and an obscenity, a Beastie touch if ever there was one. Shot by 50 different audience members all over New York's Madison Square Garden during an October 2004 show, "Awesome" has been dubbed an "authorized bootleg" and the first-ever full-length concert video of the blog generation.

Never mind all that. Handing out a bunch of video cameras to fans was a predictable, if imaginative and highly contemporary, extension of the fan-performer feedback loop that characterizes so much of pop culture over the last 40 years. And of course two more things had to happen: The group actually had to get onstage and play, and then somebody had to edit that 100-plus hours of raw video, much of it undoubtedly pretty rough going, into a movie.

That somebody was Beastie Boy Adam Yauch (under his longtime alter ego identity, Nathanial Hörnblowér), and what he's come up with, after a year of editing, is pretty much the state of the art in concert films. It captures, first and foremost, a house-rocking performance. If you like or admire or even just tolerate the B-Boys' peculiar mixture of old-school hip-hop, self-mocking Catskill shtick, beer-bong party music and New Age sincerity, "Awesome" delivers all those commodities with relish.

Despite bouncing around between what seem like infinite points of view, "Awesome" never feels incoherent, or at least no more so than the subjective experience of being in the Garden that night presumably did. Sometimes we're right next to the stage, watching MCA (Yauch), Adrock (Adam Horovitz) and Mike D (Michael Diamond) strut around in semi-retro emerald-green Adidas jumpsuits while their legendary DJ, Mix Master Mike, works the turntables.

Sometimes we're so deep in the nosebleed sections that the band members are distant, pin-size icons and the action is all around us; the dude in the maroon USC cap flowing the lyrics to "Hello Brooklyn" or "Pass the Mic," or the girl in the spaghetti-strap top who eerily echoes Mike D's dance moves. (Later, when the band announces its last song, she, or possibly someone else who looks like her, will scream into the camera: "Last song? That's bullshit! I need more!") Seeing this movie in a big theater full of fans will really be fun.

In fairness, a significant proportion of the actual concert footage, and nearly all the backstage material, was shot by five professional videographers with D.V. cameras. Yauch essentially uses the fan videos to create the sweaty texture of crowded concert-hall reality, as well as for comic effect. There's the guy who films his bathroom break, in considerable detail. There's the overly enthusiastic fellow who tells everyone he meets, "Hey, this is for the DVD! Come on, everybody! Get excited!" (No one seems terribly impressed.)

Yauch and his band mates use this film to make fun of themselves and their audience in roughly equal measures, and I guess that's fitting; if any band represents the now-aging demographic raised on MTV and "The Simpsons," it's the Beastie Boys. But there's nothing knowing or mocking about the overall dance-party atmosphere here, or the sheer entertainment value. The Boys go from those 1988-style Adidas outfits to tuxedos (for a jazz-funk instrumental interlude), then back to rap before closing the show the way they began their career, playing three-chord guitar rock (with a dedication of "Sabotage" to George W. Bush).

There's also no element of mockery in the impressive, mind-altering arsenal of 21st century editing tricks Yauch has up his sleeve; the director of "Jimi Plays Berkeley" could only dream lysergic dreams about stuff like this. We go right into the wood grain of the bass guitar during the instrumental number, dude! Suffice it to say that at certain kinds of parties during the 2006-07 academic year, certain guests will sit through this film three, four, maybe five times.

I'm no judge of these matters, but clearly at this stage the Beastie Boys aren't the cutting edge of rap or rock or any other field. Their once-revolutionary status as the only authentic white rappers has been consolidated into its own peculiar niche; judging from this concert, their audience is overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly wholesome in a beery, post-collegiate kind of way. As critic Nelson George long ago observed, the audience for chart-topping rap acts has always been whiter than most outsiders supposed, but in the case of the Beasties, most of their black audience has grown up or moved on to newer performers.

Sometimes, though, performers and artists become more interesting after the heat of novelty has faded a little. "Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!" offers a half-accidental career overview of a band that blended punk sincerity and brash, materialistic hip-hop attitude from its creation, and so captured the imagination of a middle-class audience that was never sure, from one moment to the next, whether to fight, to party, or to find some way of combining the two. I don't know where they'll go next or whether they're still relevant. But who cares? After this movie, the Beasties and their fans, camera-totin' or not, are left drenched, exhausted, delighted.

"Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!" opens March 31 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with more to follow.

Next page: Dashiell Hammett goes to high school