Editor Reviews:

Description:
Featuring: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Sonic Youth, Theoretical Girls, DNA, LIARS, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Gogol Bordello, flux information sciences, Lydia Lunch, Black Dice, Swans, A.R.E. Weapons, foetus and Glenn Branca.

Plot Outline: First-time filmmaker S.A. Crary shares a complex history of New York's art-punk scene. This compelling documentary weaves together a timeline for an aggressive movement allowing the players to reflect in the moment. With interviews from such punk rock icons as Teenage Jesus & the Jerks bassist Jim Sclavunos, bandmate Lydia Lunch, DNA's Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth and others from the late '70s/early '80s art-punk explosion. Exclusive interviews with these originators and a new generation of practitioners -- from the Grammy-nominated Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Black Dice to Liars to Gogol Bordello -- reveals a consistent hunger for invention through subversion, motivations that come into cacophonous focus in the new and archival concert footage bridging the interviews. What also comes out is a depth of retrospection amongst the older generation that puts the younger generation's musings in a context that will surprise even the most plugged-in of scenesters. By documenting art-punk in the same spirit as the movement itself has played out, Crary has created a compelling reference for a movement that defies them and managed to stay true to its spirit in the process.

DVD Features:
· Over 60 mins of exclusive interviews and performances
· Additional live clips and music videos
· Photo galleries
· Weblinks
· Trailers

Rating : - A WOLF IN WOLF'S CLOTHING (4.5 stars)
(4.5 stars) Superficially about the ultra-obscure New York art-punk scene across the past three decades, this cleverly edited film is really a meditation on originality and nostalgia. Made by jack-of-all-trades director S.A. Crary (who directs, shoots, edits, and produces the film) and famously rumored to have been budgeted in the three-figure range, the film's a slickly edited and surprisingly gorgeous tribute to New York's vibrant musical community. From even the opening credits, Kill Your Idols has an attitude in step with the music scene it's surveying, its images and pacing offering a cool reflection of its subject matter. Like the bands it covers, Kill Your Idols is constantly experimenting with form and challenging audience expectations and documentary tradition. Crary splices together interviews so deftly and playfully that the different artists seem to continue each other's thoughts; he goes so far with this technique as to have them alternating words, particularly when listing occurs, etc.. It's a neat technique, one that engages the viewer and creates parallels across generations and geography. The result is not just a documentary ON an artistic movment, but an artistic statement itself--a tone poem to innovation and creative inheritance that serves up its brutal truth with wit and humor. The great success of Kill Your Idols is that it's not just another pre-scripted history of details you can easily source in Wikipedia entries--it's a mishievous commentary and sincere investigation into the notion of history itself. A small, but standout piece in the cluttered world of music documentaries.