† NillaMora †

From Steve Ramos at indieWIRE:

"Taped conversations between Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain and music journalist Michael Azerrad form the attention-grabbing center of director AJ Schnack's otherworldly documentary "Kurt Cobain About a Son." The true highlights of the film, more than Cobain's never-before-heard commentary on life, death and the price of sudden fame, are Schnack's artful technique, pinpoint editing, clever animation and beautiful collage of Pacific Northwest landscapes and everyday Seattle people."

Also at indieWIRE, an interview with director AJ Schnack.

A fallen building at the mill where Kurt Cobain’s father worked in “Kurt Cobain About a Son.”

It’s hard to know who the audience might be for the documentary oddity “Kurt Cobain About a Son,” but I bet its subject, the guy who’s still being called on to entertain us even after his death, would have hated it. 

Directed, if that’s the right word, by A J Schnack, the film weds about an hour and a half of audio interviews by the journalist Michael Azerrad with a stream of pretty visual images of places and unidentified people shot in and around where, for much of his too-short, 27-year life, Mr. Cobain lived, loved (if never enough, it seems), labored, played guitar, shot heroin and created beautiful, angry, popular music with…

Rolling Stone magazine has posted a list of what they call the 25 most underrated guitarists. Taking the top spot is multi-instrumentalist Prince, with Nirvana vocalist Kurt Cobain taking the second place. The list includes a number of figures from bands like Kiss and Fleetwood Mac, but also includes The Clash's Mick Jones, The Smiths/Modest Mouse Johnny Mar, John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins and that kid from Silverchair.

Statistics show that the average rock fan spends roughly 4.7 hours per year arguing over who’s the greatest guitarist of all time (see: Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time). We asked you who’s most criminally left out of those discussions — in other words, who are the most…

Courtney Love has hit out at Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl, claiming that Kurt Cobain "loathed" him.

The song "Let It Die" on Foo Fighters new album Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, is widely assumed to be about the relationship between Kurt and Courtney.

It contains the lyric: "A simple man and his blushing bride/Intravenous, intertwined...You're so considerate/Did you ever think of me?"

Writing on her MySpace page, Courtney said: "As for that drummer, well he's hit on me so many times. He's just a very very conflicted guy about me, which is why he continually writes songs about me to hear he 'hates' me more than 'anyone else'.

"Kurt loathed HIM more than anyone else (except a journalist). In his will he made a codicil that Grohl was no longer a member of Nirvana. I just ignored the guy and will continue to."

She added:…

The voice of a generation talks like a regular guy in About a Son by Camille Dodero   Pity the fool hired to scribble the DVD-jacket copy for Kurt Cobain: About a Son—the film sounds horrific on paper. It's a 92-minute experimental documentary about the endlessly lionized "alternative" icon that doesn't include a guitar lick of his music, a testimonial from anyone personally acquainted with the man, or even Cobain's likeness—that is, until the final scene. Plus, the film's director is A.J. Schnack, whose most notable credit is a rock doc about They Might Be Giants. It's like entrusting James Dean's legacy to a Don Knotts biographer. Never mind that the producer is fond of saying, "The whole idea of this film is not to look back at Kurt, it's to look into Kurt." Rape me, my friend.

In truth, producer Michael Azerrad was Kurt's friend—at least as much as Truman…

Kurt Cobain "crowd surfs" in a photo taken from the documentary film "Kurt Cobain About A Son," by AJ Schnack. Credit: Charles Peterson Courtesy: Sidetrack Films/Bonfire Films of America.  
by Brian Brooks

Director AJ Schnack's doc "Kurt Cobain: About a Son" is probably the closest thing to an autobiography by the former Nirvana lead singer as possible. The film draws upon a series of…

A scene from AJ Schnack's "Kurt Cobain About a Son." Image courtesy of Sidetrack Films.

Taped conversations between Nirvana front-man Kurt Cobain and music journalist Michael Azerrad form the attention-grabbing center of director AJ Schnack's otherworldly documentary "Kurt Cobain About a Son." The true highlights of the film, more than Cobain's never-before-heard commentary on life, death and the price of sudden fame, are Schnack's artful technique, pinpoint editing, clever animation and beautiful collage of Pacific Northwest landscapes and everyday Seattle people. "About a Son" lacks the storytelling energy to pull in audiences only half aware of Cobain's music and 1994 suicide. For music documentary devotees and Cobain's passionate fans, "About a Son" will serve as a dazzling coda to Cobain's creative legacy.

The highlight of "About a Son," perhaps the very reason Schnack made the film, is the interview recordings between Azerrad and Cobain…

October 3rd, 2007
(NY; LA release: Oct. 5) AJ Schnack Unknown Unknown

From Ken Fox at TVGuide.com:

Aside from a few black-and-white photographs, Kurt Cobain never appears in this documentary, nor is a single note of his music ever heard. Instead, filmmaker AJ Schnack's hauntingly beautiful film is a bold and successful attempt to recover the human being who disappeared under the heavy mantle of "face and voice of a lost generation," and whose life has been increasingly overshadowed by his sensational early death in 1994...

Cobain is forthcoming, particularly about his drug use and hatred of the press, and while his voice sometimes sounds woozy (most of the interviews were conducted between midnight and dawn), it's always intimate, articulate, enormously empathetic and at odds with the lost-boy frailty of his appearance. Schnack sets Cobain's words against time-lapse cityscapes, domestic still lifes, rotoscoped animation, Charles Peterson's famous Grunge-scene photos and portraits of the ordinary denizens of Aberdeen, Olympia and Seattle, the kind…

Rocker Dave Grohl almost turned his back on music after Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994.

Grohl, who played drums in the legendary group, was devastated by Cobain's suicide and admits his career as the Foo Fighters frontman came about almost by accident.

He says: "When Nirvana was finished I didn't really know what to do. Our lives and our world were turned upside down.

"It's hard to imagine playing music after something like that. It was hard for me. I had always written and recorded songs by myself. I wouldn't really play them for anyone.

"(So) after Nirvana was finished I spent a lot of time just travelling around and thinking, and then I thought, 'I know what I will do. I'll book six…