Friday, 8 February 2008
Portrait of a teen spirit
Kurt Cobain film a haunting document of artistKatherine Monk, Canwest News Service
Published: Friday, February 08, 2008
Kurt Cobain: About A Son
Directed by AJ Schnack.
Rating 3 out of five
Speaking over gloomy shots of big green trees, low clouds and strip mall hell, the disembodied voice of Kurt Cobain floats through AJ Schnack's About A Son with pensive clarity as though the late Nirvana frontman realized his time was short, and the time to speak his truth was nigh.
He refers to suicide several times over, and even talks about the idea of putting a gun to his head, but always with a coda: It would be a bad thing to do because he's a father, and he has a lot to lose.
Those are the moments in Schnack's rather loose film that have the most power because they offer the front door to Cobain's many demons, and drag us down the spiral staircase of his inner life, where he seemed to wage a never-ending war against his own unhappiness and perpetual misanthropy.
"I couldn't stand people," we hear Cobain say, many times, as he attempts to explain why drugs offered him so much comfort. But people weren't the only thing on his hate list.
He also hated dogs because they "are too willing to please you could do anything to them," as well as jocks from high school, idiots from small towns and music that wasn't trying to push the envelope.
Selected from more than 25 hours of taped interviews conducted between December 1992 and March 1993 by official band biographer Michael
Azerrad, these Cobain memoirs offer up a fully formed picture of who the enigmatic musician really was without flinching at the ugly bits.
Whether we're listening to him reminisce about how people assumed he was gay because he hung out with a known homosexual during his teen years, or how he walked down the street in his dad's sneakers playing Beatles music on a bass drum, or how Courtney Love is the only one who really understands his sense of humour and thinks he's funny, Cobain both affirms and negates rock 'n' roll cliche as a completely self-absorbed personality who learns to loathe the persona he's become.
You can hear Cobain's frustration as he tries to create emotional and symbolic distance between himself, and every other fallen rock god who crashes and burns in fame's fast lane.
For a moment, you almost believe him, too but that's what makes the reverie so compelling. We know how it all ends, and by hearing Cobain attempt to rewrite his own last chapter brings a different tint to the misery.
He clearly knew the dangers, and he tried to move in the opposite direction, but somewhere along the way, lost his taste for the constant struggle between survival and surrender.
For this reason, as a haunting document from a spectral source, Schnack's film is an important piece of pop culture history that deserves attention. Also, for anyone who still has a candle burning in the Cobain window, About A Son will bring a sense of long-awaited closure to a rather ragged and messy finale.
For the casual observer, the movie will be challenging because it so carefully avoids the devices of its own documentary form. Without a scrap of archival footage or even still photographs showing Nirvana and Cobain in action, the movie may prove frustrating for those who are not intimately familiar with the people and places discussed in the film.
The ambient visuals of the northwest are very pretty, but surprisingly ineffective when it comes to bringing context to the film, and specifically Cobain's world view. Some shots work better than others, but it's hard to shake the feeling the filmmakers steered clear of archival footage and all Nirvana music because they didn't want to deal with the hassle of rights and clearances.
The result is an impressionistic essay on Cobain that makes a great audio experience, but a rather uneven visual one despite all the revelations along the way.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Source: www.canada.com/calgaryherald
Labels: NIRVANA NEWS IN 2008
posted by kanx1976 at
04:04
![Come as You Are [SINGLE] [EP] (CD)](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/06/ComeAsYouAre.jpg)
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