Awesome; I Shot That!
½*/****
directed by Nathanial Hörnblowér
by Alex Jackson Given that I was about halfway through a really nasty cold when I saw The Beastie Boys' Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!, I probably wasn't in the right frame of mind to judge its merits. With that disclaimer in place, this has to be the loudest movie I have ever seen. At the end of the ordeal, I felt as though band members Mike D, Adam Horowitz, and Adam Yauch had burrowed inside my brain and gone to work with an iron frying pan. I'll cop to preferring masochistic cinematic experiences in general and getting angry and frustrated by movies that want little more than to cheer me up–but from now on, I'm going to draw the line at Beastie Boys concert films. At their 2004 Madison Square Garden show, The Beastie Boys passed out cameras to fifty audience members with instructions to shoot anything that interested them; Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! was culled from their footage. It sounds like a pretty daffy idea, but the results are much better than you would expect–or, more accurately, they seem to reflect the vision of director Yauch (credited as Nathanial Hörnblowér). The visuals are every bit as aggressive as the music: they push you down, smash your skull against the pavement, and don't stop until they see the pink stuff. There are few moments where The Beastie Boys are not performing and there are few shots that don't underscore the music. It's cinematic, it's fast, and it leaves you bruised and wounded. Even outside of the headaches, based on what I've seen here I don't think I really care much for The Beastie Boys. Their pop-cultural references are broad and easy: Scarface, Star Wars, "Star Trek", Jackie Chan, high school proms, Nintendo, a viral video of boxing cats; they dedicate "Sabotage" to President Bush, and while the then-ten-year-old song does have a nice timeliness to it, it's still not particularly brilliant social commentary. I wish I could confirm this, but I think it was ex-Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh who said that punk rock could never take off in the States because the kids have too many toys to play with. Yeah. Hip-hop, the other half of The Beastie Boys' musical DNA, could never take off in the suburbs, either, for more or less the same reason. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! is a film full of empty rage borne of a toy-drunk culture made by toy-drunk children. It's a portentous act of arrogance against good music, good filmmaking, and good taste.
