Beastie Boys Story hits right emotional notes

An up-close-and-personal look at the Beastie Boys tops this weekend’s most entertainment new releases, previewed by Vicky Roach.

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An up-close-and-personal look at the Beastie Boys tops this weekend’s most entertainment new releases.

BEASTIE BOYS STORY

Three stars

Director: Spike Jonze

Starring: Mike Diamond, Adam Horovitz and Adam Yauch (picture)

Rating: M

Running time: 120 minutes

Verdict: Hits the right emotional notes

Fame, fortune, betrayal, substance abuse ... the basic template for this “live” documentary is as familiar as a 12-bar blues progression.

What marks Beastie Boys’ rags-to-riches story apart from others of its ilk is the relaxed intimacy with which it is recounted

Surviving members Mike Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) appear on stage at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn without any props — apart from two stools and a giant screen.

A scene from the documentary Beastie Boys Story.

A sympathetic audience of middle-aged, hard-core fans knows their story so well, the giant auditorium feels more like a cosy lounge room.

Up in the control booth, long-time friend and collaborator Spike Jonze is an unseen, Wizard of Oz-like presence, working the pulleys and levers to animate the pair’s pared-back narrative with a treasure trove of archival footage.

The Beastie Boys Story — a streamlined version of Diamond and Horovitz’s best-selling 2018 memoir — unfolds basically in chronological order.

It’s the tale of three skinny white boys from New York and one very cool chick (original band member Kate Schellenbach), who by their own admission, they wound up treating very shabbily. There are moments of such extreme adolescent audacity, you can only shake your head in disbelief.

Booked to open for Madonna when they only had a handful of songs in their repertoire, the punk rockers-turned-rap artists modelled themselves on World Wrestling Entertainment’s theatrically arrogant villains, big noting themselves to the press and bad-mouthing their peers. The visual punchline to this anecdote is a cracker.

Adam ‘Ad Rock’ Horovitz and Michael ‘Mike D’ Diamond on stage in a scene from Beastie Boys Story.

“Packaged” by producer Rick Rubin and Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons, the Beastie Boys enjoyed meteoric success with their first album, Licensed To Ill, touring with Run DMC and performing in huge arenas.

But somewhere along the way, Diamond and Horowitz reflect, they wound up turning into the sort of people they had meant to send up in their unintentional frat boy anthem “(You Gota) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)”.

And so, after an extended break, they moved to Los Angeles and took control of their own creativity.

After disappointing record sales for the band’s follow-up album, Paul’s Boutique, they set up their own studio in Atwater Village, where Check Your Head and Ill Communication were recorded.

Diamond and Horovitz tell the Beastie Boys’ extraordinary story with just the right amount of self-deprecating humour.

But it’s their deep respect and genuine affection for absent band member Adam Yauch, aka MCA, who died of cancer in 2012 at the age of 47, that gives this documentary its heart. A celebration of love and friendship ... tempered by nostalgia, grief and regret.

Now screening on Apple TV+

MIDNIGHT FAMILY

Four stars

Director: Luke Lorentzen

Starring: Fer, Juan and Josué Ochoa

Rating: MA15+

Running time: 81 minutes

Verdict: Compelling, real-life drama

IT’S the ambulances that do the chasing in this gripping, fly-on-the-wall documentary, set in Mexico City. The paramedics do what they can to survive the ride.

Paced like a thriller, but with the heart of a social-realist drama, Midnight Family exposes the cracks in a broken health care system where just 45 public ambulances serve a population of 9 million.

Enterprising emergency medical technicians plug the gaps — hampered by corrupt police offers, bureaucratic red tape and impoverished or disgruntled clients.

The Ochoa family operates a private ambulance in the wealthier suburbs of the bustling metropolis.

A scene from Mexican documentary Midnight Family.

It’s a precarious existence in which they must juggle the often-competing demands of doing their job and earning a buck. There are days when they don’t even make enough to cover petrol.

Fer, who has health issues of his own, is the nominal head of the Ochoa household. But his capable, charismatic, and far-from-camera-shy son, Juan, runs the show.

It’s Juan, for example, who attempts to set some boundaries for his younger brother, Josue, who would much rather hang around in the back of the ambulance with the older men than attend school.

The Ochoas spend their nights monitoring the emergency channels. When a call comes through, they race the other private ambulances to the scene of the accident.

Seventeen-year-old Juan is almost as addicted to these hair-raising chases as he is to saving lives.

If the attending police officers don’t block their passage — at one point, one of them threatens to arrest Juan if he doesn’t pay a bribe — the men strap the victims on to stretchers and bundle them into the back of their ambulance.

Father and sons give their ambulance a push on another nighttime run.

While director Luke Lorenzten doesn’t spell out the arrangement the Ochoa family has with the city’s private hospitals, they have to make their money somehow. And it’s clear that they are rarely reimbursed by their patients. But financial self-interest doesn’t rule out empathy

There’s a moving exchange in which a young woman who has been badly beaten up by her boyfriend asks for a hug.

And a harrowing sequence in which a grief-stricken mother accompanies her critically injured daughter in the speeding ambulance as it weaves in and out of the traffic.

The young woman, who has fallen four storeys, doesn’t make it.

As Juan recounts what happened over the phone to his girlfriend, in rather graphic detail, Fer awkwardly approaches the bereaved mother about payment.

Resisting the temptation to tie up all the loose ends, Lorenzten ensures the characters’ plight stays with us long after the credits have rolled.

Compelling, sobering and deeply humane.

Now screening on DocPlay

ALSO SHOWING

EMMA

Three and a half stars

125 minutes (M)

SPOILT, shallow, meddlesome … Emma Woodhouse is Jane Austen’s most ambivalent heroine, which makes her strangely appealing.

In contemporary parlance, she might rightly be described as a bit of a “princess” – a quality Amy Heckerling zeroed in on in Clueless, an inspired contemporary remake.

But alongside Elizabeth Bennet’s fierce moral rectitude and Elinor Dashwood’s noble self-sacrifice, Woodhouse’s (Split’s Anya Taylor-Joy, pictured above) determined dilettantism is perversely liberating — she’d rather rescue a pet foundling than, say, practise her scales.

And there’s an inherent good-heartedness to the character, which is reflected in her tender regard for her widowed father – played here by Billy Nighy, whose trademark wry humour delivers a few good chuckles.

Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma Woodhouse in Emma.

This latest version of the last Austen novel to be published in the author’s lifetime is smart, confident, handsome, and occasionally cheeky — there’s a scene in which Emma lifts her Empire-line gown to warm her bare buttocks by the fire (while petticoats were non-negotiable in the Regency period, drawers, it seems, were optional).

There are strong performances, particularly from Taylor-Joy, who lends depth and nuance to what is essentially a superficial character, and Beast’s Johnny Flynn (below), as Emma’s filthy rich love interest, whose earthiness balances his character’s aristocratic sense of entitlement.

A deliciously unstuffy costume drama.

Now available on Premier video on demand. Full home entertainment release June 3

Originally published as Beastie Boys Story hits right emotional notes