Ostensibly about the ultra-obscure New York art-punk scene of 1977-82, this cleverly edited film is really a meditation on originality and nostalgia.
Comment
05/27/06
Kill Your Idols (2006)
38 %
Reviews Counted: 13 Fresh: 5 Rotten:8 Average Rating: 5.1/10
Runtime: 75 mins
Synopsis: A comprehensive survey of some of New York City's post-punk bands, this documentary is equal parts art and music. It starts in 1972, pauses briefly in 1982, and stops in 2002, looking at influential acts during that timeline. The No Wave bands of the early '70s make up the first segment of the... [More]
Genre: Musical & Performing Arts
Starring: Arto Lindsay, Lydia Lunch, Glenn Branca, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Gogol Bordello
Reviews
1 - 13 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
Top Critic
Written, photographed, produced, edited, and directed by 26-year-old visual artist S A Crary, Kill Your Idols enjoyably documents the so-called No Wave scene.
05/27/06
Top Critic
This is little more than a sketchy portrait of two fascinating cultural moments with only geography and 70-ish minutes of celluloid connecting them.
09/01/06
Kill Your Idols then takes a misguided swerve into the current downtown New York rock scene, so that it can spend more time preaching about the anarchy of the good old days than it does revealing them.
07/12/06
Discordant documentary on New York's "No Wave" art-punk music scene begins in fertile territory but squanders everything with a lengthy and ill-considered comparison to more recent bands.
07/11/06
The film is well done, capturing a brief, unimportant moment in musical history.
07/08/06
The documentary enters more dubious territory when it tries to present today's more consumer-friendly post-punkers (like the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs) as some sort of successors.
07/07/06
...an atonal love letter to a single corner of the culture - one built, in the words of singer Lydia Lunch, on 'beauty and truth and filth.'
07/07/06
S. A. Crary's music documentary examines New York's No Wave scene of the late 1970's an offshoot of punk, the anti-New Wave.
07/06/06
Top Critic
Crary takes the usual talking- heads- and- archival- footage approach, which isn't really a problem, though the film's whirlwind approach is.
07/06/06
Kill Your Idols pulls a few punches, tempering its respect for No Wave values like extremity and contentiousness with a more 2006 concern for not actually offending anyone in particular.
07/05/06
Reminds you that for every Sonic Youth, there's a hundred bad New York bands that can't play their own instruments.
07/04/06
The film's construction isn't groundbreaking but the shrill freakshow of talking heads is revealing, conveying how revolutionary spirits can spread their own form of oppressive bile.
06/26/06
1 - 13 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
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