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.”
Arguably more a faux documentary-comedy-movie-musical than a traditional concert film, A Hard Day’s Night captures a band just as it began to wow the world back in 1964, as evidenced by the unbridled joy in every frame of director Richard Lester’s love letter to the Fab Four. And while there are traditional band-on-the-road sequences (Ringo going AWOL, an opening scene in which the band is mobbed attempting to board a train), the climax of A Hard Day’s Night‘s in the end, is a concert. When the hordes of teenage girls in attendance scream along with “She Loves You” — some with tears streaming down their face — it’s a reminder of how, even in their early innocence, the Beatles were a force to be reckoned with.
TIME’s take: “It’s a surprise the picture isn’t a mess and a miracle it’s so funny, expert and joyous.”
Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show “Family Feud” has died. He was 79.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
