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Perhaps the question didn’t need to be asked, but that doesn’t mean the answer isn’t worth a half-hour of your time. In 2011, the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch (who passed away from cancer on May 4 at age 47) premiered the 30-minute film Fight For Your Right Revisited, which shows what happens in the aftermath of their apartment-demolishing video for that epochal party anthem. In short, the Boys—played by Seth Rogen, Danny McBride, and Elijah Wood —get chewed out by an elderly couple (Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon), go on a beer-hurling rampage, and eventually pay the price for their misdeeds.
It’s the video-short equivalent of name-dropping, but still contains much of what was best about the Beasties and Yauch. There’s the hep self-consciousness that plays on a high level of irony without losing its intrinsic humor, and also the culture-blender mashup of cheap gags and period-specific retro-nods which was their signature video-and-music style before the rest of the world caught on.
The film might play like an overextended Funny or Die piece at times, but the absurdist tone and clean directorial style are reminders of how deeply involved Yauch was in the film world. Going beyond directing videos for the Beasties (under the name Nathanial Hörnblowér), in 2008 he co-founded Oscilloscope Pictures, which has since released some of the greater American indies of recent years, from The Messenger to We Need to Talk About Kevin.
