The Target Shoots First

Needing cash to pay the rent, 22-year-old Wilcha, an assistant product manager (music marketing), took his camcorder (a graduation present) into Columbia House, the biggest music mail-order firm in the US, and emerged with the raw materials - footage and experience - for this home video essay on corporate office culture and the mainstream assimilation of rebel culture. The wayward trajectory of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain's time in the public eye provide a backbone to the diary story - it was Nirvana's appeal to the alienated that Wilcha was brought in to harness. There's little here that comes as a surprise, and more analytical depth would have helped the film, but as personal testimony, it's sympathetic and honest.