Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!

This film is pretty old for a festival film (having had its premiere in January 2006) but it is so ideal for screening in cinemas that we just had to show it. It is a recording of a concert by the Beastie Boys in Madison Square Garden, recorded on 9 October 2004. At the start of the concert, 50 fans were given a digital camera and the film is made up of a clever mood cut by editor Neal Usatin from that 75 hours of material. The director was a certain Nathanial Hörnblowér, pseudonym of MCA, in other words Adam Yauch, founder and one of the three Beastie Boys.
The show starts with a scratching DJ Mixmaster Mike, while the amateur camera crew starts filming: the concert, very often crazed audience and even the toilets. The three Beasties, masters in collage music, Mike D, Adrock and MCA, with tracksuits and baseball caps, enthusiastically performs songs from their six albums. The editing keeps piling up the pressure – at a certain point we even see all fifty images at once – and by the end, the music transforms from electronic hip-hop to real funk. In other words, an unforgettable concert experience in which the notion of sharing the experience of a concert band and living through it as an individual are imitated perfectly. Or, as James Rocchi wrote in his review: ‘When I walked out of the packed Sundance Film Festival press screening, I was amazed my clothes didn’t smell like weed and spilled beer.’ (EH)