Awesome; I F---in' Shot That! (2006)

As if trying to reassure us that hip-hop and rock & roll come not from a corporation but, you know, from the people, the Beastie Boys handed out video cameras to 50 members of their audience during a 2004 show at Madison Square Garden and then proceeded to cobble together an entire concert movie from the shaky, jagged, tilted, electro-grain footage shot by those fans. It sounded like a marvelous idea, but Awesome; I F---in' Shot That! boils down to a performance film with abysmal sound in which you rarely get to see a good, revealing close-up of the stars. Instead, the movie all but sanctifies the experience of sitting 78 rows away from your favorite band and wishing that you were close enough not to have to watch them on the monitor. The editing, and the psychedelic tinting, perfectly captures the Beasties' relentless groove, and there are any number of funny diversions (a trip to the men's room, a shot of Ben Stiller rapping along in the audience), but after a while I kept wishing that Awesome; I F---in' Shot That! would just drop all the proletarian camera gimmickry and allow a clown prince like Adam Horowitz (a.k.a. Ad Rock), the missing link between Jerry Lewis and Eminem, to get even further in your face.

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