Movie Review

Beastie Boys Story relives rap group's history in unique style

For many people who grew up in the 1980s and ‘90s, the Beastie Boys had as much influence on the music world as any other superstars. Owing to their unique style and chosen genre, they weren’t consistent hitmakers, but when they delivered something great, it was as memorable as any other song out there.

Beastie Boys Story, the new documentary by director Spike Jonze on Apple TV+, is predictably unlike any other music documentary you’ll ever see. There are no talking heads giving their opinions on the band, coupled with clips of the band through the years. Instead, band members Mike “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Ad Rock” Horovitz are shown telling the Beastie Boys’ story themselves live on stage over the course of several nights at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn.

Yes, they show clips of themselves and others over the course of their 30+ year career, but they’re delivered in a style that’s designed to maximize entertainment rather than just recite the facts. Hearing the story straight from the surviving band members’ mouths — founding member Adam “MCA” Yauch died of cancer in 2012 — instead of in a traditional documentary style makes the film immeasurably more impactful.

Diamond and Horovitz are relatively buttoned down in their presentations, but that’s to be expected of two men who are now in their mid-50s. It’s also a great juxtaposition to their admittedly immature younger selves, and the film is full of them calling out themselves and Yauch for being doofuses or disrespectful during their early years.

One’s reaction to the film will likely lie in how invested he or she is in the band itself. For hardcore fans, there likely aren’t any huge revelations. For those, like me, who have always enjoyed the band’s music but never became superfans, there are multiple tidbits that are, if not shocking, hugely interesting.

That includes how the band grew to despise their most famous album, License to Ill, with joke songs like “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)” and “Girls” taking on a life of their own when the band became successful. Or how Yauch was the driving force of the band, leading them in directions that both defined their uniqueness and maintained their popularity through the years.

Given that Diamond, Horovitz, and Jonze are the ones putting on the show that was turned into the movie, there is no “other side of the story.” So when they detail how Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin, the founders of the Def Jam record label, cheated them out of royalties for License to Ill, it is told without any perspective from Simmons or Rubin. That information would be valuable to know, but wouldn’t necessarily fit in a film like this.

In the end, it’s the reliving of the songs and how they were created that carry the day. “Fight for Your Right,” “No Sleep till Brooklyn,” “So What’cha Want,” “Sabotage,” “Intergalactic,” and more remain as invigorating as when they were first released, even if we only get to hear snippets of most of the songs.

Fans like the ones who packed the Kings Theatre will love Beastie Boys Story the most, but the personalities of Diamond and Horovitz and stories they tell are enough to draw in even non-fans. It might have unimaginable 34 years ago, but the Beastie Boys are elder music statesmen worthy of veneration in a great documentary like this.

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Beastie Boys Story premieres on Apple TV+ on April 24.

Beastie Boys and Spike Jonze in Beastie Boys Story.

Beastie Boys and Spike Jonze in Beastie Boys Story

Photo courtesy of Apple TV+

Beastie Boys and Spike Jonze in Beastie Boys Story.

Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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