One of the two worst things about arena concerts is the crowd. The other is that the band are too distant. Rather than conjure these drawbacks away in the typical concert-video manner to produce a non-experiential, smoothed-over souvenir, Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! turns them into virtues. By having 50 audience members distributed throughout Madison Square Garden film the performance, Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch, Awesome;’s director, achieves a variegation denied more-conventional concert documentaries.
Shots of cavorting spectators, trips to the men’s room, concession stands; these are what you’d expect from the premise. The key to the film is the rough visual quality of the raw footage. (The audio is crystal-clear.) Yauch takes the graininess as a cue to degrade the image further, subject it to an arsenal of filters (saturation, negative, halos, color draining, shaking, the works), and collage it. The result has both organic flow and visual excitement.
The music? I’m not competent to evaluate the hip-hop numbers. I liked the funk songs and the scratch DJ (Mixmaster Mike).
