Awesome, I Fuckin' Shot That is a pure adrenalin rush of a movie whose enjoyment doesn't require you be a fan of rap music, black or white, a fan of The Beastie Boys, or a fan of anything except un-adulterated pleasure in one 90-minute nonstop gulp. It's described by band members Adam Yauch, Michael Diamond, and Adam Horovitz as an "authorized bootleg recording," since 50 Hi-8/digital videocameras were given to fans attending the October 9, 2004 Beastie concert at New York's Madison Square Garden. While the music was recorded in ultra-high tech, the visuals sample everything captured by fans, from very shaky shots filmed while dancing, to close-ups of the band, to just about anything. Directed by head Beastie Yauch (aka Nathanial Hornblower), the footage is surprisingly steady, and the effect is akin to being dropped out of a flying saucer onto an alien planet whose inhabitants turn out to be friendly and very frisky.
In a time when the music business is in bad shape — having been sliced and diced, segmented, ghettoized, bootlegged, downloaded, pirated, stolen and just badly managed — Awesome, I Fuckin' Shot That restores some of the raw power that all pop forms seem to have at birth. The sight of three 40+ musicians really working up a sweat for the hometown folks, in an ancient arena that has seen it all, cannot be topped, climaxing in a film-stopping highlight when band members gallop from backstage to the entrance of the main auditorium, to rock out with their crowd.
The relatively low-quality images with their white-out overexposures have the advantage of being kind to aging bad boys. Seen through these lenses, the Beasties could once again be imagined as the cheeky suburban brats who fired up a huge fan-base in the mid-80s. Some of those fans were quite shocked to see that the Beasties were white.