![]() There’s a clip of a local television show featuring Afrika Bambaataa, and a young Ad-Rock sneaks into the studio audience to request that Bam play “Cooky Puss,” the Beastie Boys’ first single. We see grainy video of the band performing at the Kitchen in New York, reading their rhymes off of torn notebook pages. There’s a ton of cool footage, particularly of the band’s earlier years. But that’s not the point of a film like this, which is equal parts memorial, reflection, and celebration. Certainly anyone who’s read 2018’s Beastie Boys Book (and if you haven’t, for the love of God, go read Beastie Boys Book) won’t really find much here to change their basic idea of who and what the Beastie Boys were. In typical Spike Jonze fashion, the film is loose and anarchic yet deceptively well-controlled, its fourth wall always in varying states of permeability.īeastie Boys Story doesn’t contain any bombshell revelations. The result is a warm and intimate film, and one that I frequently found myself wishing I could experience in the IMAX format, which I can only imagine was intended to re-create the original live theatrical experience. There are no talking heads weighing in on the band’s significance, no corny montages, and there is no Behind the Music–style canned drama. The two men narrate their own careers, with a generous amount of archival footage of the band that goes back to its very beginnings. ![]() (Other, thoroughly unexpected guests do show up, but not until very late in the film.) In typical Jonze fashion, the film is loose and anarchic yet deceptively well-controlled, its fourth wall always in varying states of permeability. The film was shot at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn and is essentially a live, two-man show between the two surviving Beastie Boys, Michael Diamond (aka Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (aka the King Ad-Rock). The format of Beastie Boys Story is fairly unusual. I found myself thinking about all of this while watching Beastie Boys Story, a new film directed by Spike Jonze that was originally supposed to open in IMAX on April 3 but will now debut exclusively on Apple TV+ on April 24. They were that band that you’d always wanted to be in, one of the many qualities that made the death of Adam Yauch (aka MCA) in 2012, at age 47, so devastating for so many people. Here were three childhood friends who’d started a band, gotten huge, and through it all managed to maintain an unconditional love for music along with a self-evident and intensely inspiring love for one another. But one of the biggest was that they seemed to so joyously embody that particular fantasy, perhaps more than any act of their era. There are many reasons that the Beastie Boys meant so much to so many people: They were cool, they were funny, and they were brilliantly creative. “Why did the Beatles break up?” is a question that’s likely been asked by billions of people since April of 1970, and most explanations tend to ignore the most obvious answer: The Beatles broke up because they were a band, and breaking up is what bands do. Take the most famous example, the Beatles, which, after all, is pretty much where this fantasy stems from. Bands almost never get big, and among the tiny fraction that do, that initial romance of creative fellowship quickly runs into the reality of individual egos, divergent ambitions, and various financial entanglements. Of course, as anyone who’s ever actually been in a band can tell you, it never really works that way. ![]() How the PGA Tour Is Beating Back Its Saudi RevoltĪaron Rodgers’ “Darkness Retreat” Took Place in a Room Equipped With, Uh, Lights There Is a Simple Answer to This Stupid Controversy. Serial’s Great New Podcast Is Going to Infuriate Listeners
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