>>REVIEW
KURT COBAIN ABOUT A SON
Movies that Matter Mini-Festival
DIRECTED BY AJ Schnack
Thursday, March 15
University of Calgary, 6 p.m. (MFH 162)
The latest film in the Movies that Matter Series, Kurt Cobain About a Son is a bit like the documentary version of scrapbooking. Every good scrapbooker knows that you don’t just collect images of people, you collect images that represent people or elements of people. That is exactly what Director AJ Schnack does.
The film consists of a series of images depicting the places where Cobain grew up, the scenes that he was part of and the emotions he felt, all used to give context to the creepily disembodied voice of Kurt Cobain taking us through the story of his life.
The audio is taken from a series of interviews that took place over the winter and spring in the small hours of the morning. The interviews conducted by Michael Azerrad for his book, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, show all sides of Cobain, from self-important ‘people are dumb and I hate them’ outcast, to a musician torn between wanting to play pop songs and wanting to be accepted.
Not so much a biography as a chronologically ordered series of musings, Cobain’s dialogue is as naked a depiction as has ever been shown of the notoriously guarded musician. Not all of what he says sounds like the absolute truth, but the exaggerations often tell more than the truths.
The visuals do at times look a bit too much like random stock footage, one lumber mill sequence in particular is reminiscent of those horrible documentaries shown in junior high schools when the teacher’s lesson plan ran short. Though the style takes a bit of getting used to, and there are certainly some bumps in the road, the collage of footage and words becomes more comfortable as the movie progresses and moves fluidly by the end.
The film is also aided by a fantastic score that includes all of Cobain’s influences from CCR to The Vaselines, following the progression of his musical tastes and awakenings from Aberdeen to Seattle.
Like any scrapbook, it is only interesting to people that are already invested in the subject matter. Anyone who doesn’t like Nirvana to the point of owning at least one bootleg live recording is going to find little more entertainment than they would watching their uncle’s vacation slideshow. For fans of the band, however, the film is an interesting and unique look at one of music’s most compelling figures. |
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