Free Tibet

In their most recent incarnation as hip-hop crusaders, the Beastie Boys formed the nonprofit Milarepa Fund with the royalties from two songs on their Ill Communication album, setting off a string of massive-scale benefit concerts, live albums, and now a film to raise awareness about the plight of the Tibetan people and their exiled leader, the Dalai Lama. Although Milarepa's heart has consistently been in the right place, its products have been flawed -- a tradition that continues with Free Tibet: The Motion Picture.

Purportedly a documentary record of the first Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco in 1996, it doesn't work as a concert film. The performances, by the Beasties, Sonic Youth, Rage Against the Machine, the Foo Fighters, Fugees, John Lee Hooker, and others, are few and far between, sometimes heavily edited, and otherwise perfunctory (Björk, her sublime weirdness in full bloom, and Beck, doing some of his One Foot in the Grave material, are the notable exceptions). And as a piece of propaganda it's only half-successful: video footage of Chinese human-rights abuses against Tibetan monks is affecting, but the Milarepa folks don't explain why a rock concert represents a solution.

What we end up with is a disconnected sales pitch with a neat soundtrack. Framed by copious talking-head footage that chronicles the birth of Milarepa and details the tenets of Buddhism, Free Tibet most resembles a late-night infomercial peddling the Dalai Lama -- who doesn't really need the publicity now that his face is plastered all over those Macintosh billboards.

-- Carly Carioli