Disclaimer: The above video has strong language.
While Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme created focused, precise documentaries for the Band and Talking Heads, director Nathanial Hörnblowér (the pseudonym of the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch) took the opposite approach for this Beastie Boys film. The band handed out 50 digital video cameras to fans at a 2004 show at Madison Square Garden and let them do whatever they wanted. What they wanted was to get close to the performers (some of the more daring videographers attempted to blag their way backstage), use conventional freeze-frames and enthusiastic (to put it mildly) zooms to cover the concert as well as film visits to the bathrooms and beer vendors. Fans produced 75 hours of footage, which was edited to fit the concert’s professionally mixed sound track; the result is 90 minutes of raucous exuberance that the New York Times compared to a “cell-phone video camera having an epileptic seizure.” Lord only knows what Demme made of it.
TIME’s take: “Bring your: Right to party and a camera.”
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