Kurt Cobain - About a Son dvd movie.|
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List Price: $19.99 Our Price: $11.99 You Save: $8 Features • Color • DVD-Video • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 2006 DVD Release : 19 February, 2008 |
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Kurt Cobain - About a Son description Following in the deeply idiosyncratic footsteps of Last Days, About a Son plays more like autobiography than documentary. Gus Van Sant's feature extrapolates moments from the life of Kurt Cobain (with Michael Pitt as a musician named Blake), while A.J. Schnack’s non-fiction film adheres closer to the facts, but advances a more radical Koyaanisqatsi-like approach. First off, Cobain supplies the narration, but the filmmaker avoids pictures of the alternative icon until the end. (He culled the voice-over from interviews conducted by author Michael Azerrad for Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana.) Beyond-the-grave narration isn't a new concept--see Tupac: Resurrection--but Schnack (Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns) ups the ante by excluding talking heads, concert footage, and other staples of the genre. Instead, he uses still and time-lapse photography to explore Cobain's Northwest, i.e. Aberdeen, Olympia, and Seattle. The artist's unguarded reflections create a sense of intimacy as specific locations illustrate his words. Conversely, the lack of portraiture and self-penned music generates a feeling of absence. The soundtrack combines an ambient score from producer Steve Fisk and Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard with Cobain favorites, like David Bowie, Cheap Trick, and the Vaselines (available on a separate CD). For more specifics, interested parties can always turn to tomes by Azerrad, Gina Arnold, Charles R. Cross, and Everett True. About a Son doesn't presume to provide a definitive portrait, but Schnack's rigorous avoidance of convention results in an experience far more dream-like than depressing. --Kathleen C. Fennessy |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Innervisions |
| It's nearly impossible to be a pop culture aficionado living here in Seattle and not be reminded of Cobain's profound impact on the music world. Every April, around the anniversary of his death, wreaths of flowers and hand taped notes begin to appear on a lone bench in a tiny public park sandwiched between the lakefront mansions I pass on my way to work every morning. Inevitably, I will see small groups of young people with multi-colored hair and torn jeans, making their pilgrimage and holding vigil around this makeshift shrine, located a block or two from the home where he took his own life.
"About a Son" is a reflective and uniquely impressionistic portrait of Cobain's short life. There are none of the usual talking head interviews or performance clips here; in fact there is nary a photo image of Cobain or Nirvana displayed until a good hour into the documentary. Nonetheless, director A.J. Schnack is holding an ace; he was given access to a series of surprisingly frank and intimate audio interviews that Cobain recorded at his Seattle home circa 1992-1993. He marries up Cobain's childhood and teenage recollections with beautifully shot footage of his hometown of Aberdeen and its Washington logging country environs. As Cobain's self-narrated life story moves to Olympia, then inevitably to Seattle, Schnack's POV travelogue follows right along. The combination of Cobain's narrative voice with the visuals has an eerie effect; you begin to feel that you are inside Cobain's temporal memories-kicking aimlessly around the depressing cultural vacuum of a blue collar logging town,walking the halls of his high school, sleeping under a railroad bridge,sitting on a mattress on a crash pad floor and practicing guitar for hours on end. The film is almost an antithesis to Nick Broomfield's notorious and comparatively sensationalistic documentary "Kurt and Courtney". Whereas Broomfield set out with a backhoe to dig up as much dirt as quickly as possible in attempting to uncover Cobain's story, Schnack opts for a more carefully controlled excavation, gently brushing the dirt aside in order to expose the real artifact. And again, in spite of the relative dearth of actual visual images of its subject, "About a Son" succeeds in giving us a thoroughly intimate portrait of the artist. I also should give a nod to the fantastic soundtrack (although Nirvana themselves are conspicuously MIA). A unique and moving rockumentary. |
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