Alan Jackson Video:

				Salesrank: 195566
		Our Price: $59.95
		Used Price: $79.99
		MPAA Rating: Media: DVD

Editorial Review:
A striking and harrowing documentary about fame, drugs, pop culture, and celebrity, Nico Icon casts a harsh light on the underground world of pop art and music in the 1960s and 1970s through the prism of a girl who lived too hard and died too young. The German-born Nico is presented as someone who never fit in, no matter what she was doing, from her career as a fashion model in the 1950s (including an appearance in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita) to her tenure in the 1960s as one of the cast of characters in artist Andy Warhol's "Factory" to her stint as a backup singer for Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. Most of the film concentrates on her sordid relationship with her son with French actor Alain Delon and her decline into heroin addiction and obscurity. This visually innovative and challenging documentary doesn't judge her but uses her life to illustrate the excesses of the world around her. Nico Icon will be a revelation for those interested in the world it depicts. --Robert Lane

Nico Icon [Region 2] Reviews:
Factory Girl
2009-10-05 - "Nico Icon" is a fascinating documentary about Andy Warhol's Factory Girl icon-- the mononomous Nico. A cold,Teutonic diva, she had grown up in harrowing times in the waning days of WWII. She came to New York City, fearful of her own beauty. Andy Warhol found her presence magnetic, and had her sing with his startup band the Velvet Underground. She was on the forefront of experimental rock. She clashed stylistically with Lou Reed and John Cale, but she made their album one of the most notable ever made.

Nico eventually struck out on her own. Lou Reed was her paramour for awhile, then Jackson Browne who was her collaborator for "Chelsea Girl." Ironically, while Nico was one of the first fashion icons, she was also one of the first fangirls. After meeting Jim Morrison at a party,she built a shrine to him, lighting votive candles--WHILE HE WAS STILL ALIVE. They were briefly lovers--but it's understandable the Lizard King had such a powerful pull on women.

Nico's solo career was a long spiral of self-destruction. She was proud of her ravaged skin, the needle marks on her arms, her deteriorating teeth. She brought tons of heroin on her tours.

"Nico Icon" is a tragic documentary. It's compelling, melancholy viewing.

Life is very long
2008-12-25 - The cover nearly says it all: "goddess, pop star, jukie, icon." The film is spliced with interviews with legends like John Cale and Andy Warhol talking about one of their peers. Peppered with pictures of one of the most beautiful singers ever, the film is also one of the seamiest this side of "Bad Lieutenant" or "Requiem For A Dream." Vicious in her editing, filmmaker Susan Ofteringer quickly jumps from scenes of the beautiful Nico in the late 60s and early 70s, wooing Jim Morrison and Jackson Browne, to the decayed Nico of the mid-80s when she was shooting junk in tour vans and pulling knives on band members. The film sets up those crazy days of youth when everyone was beautiful and indestructible and could live on rumour and reputation and even keep a small child in tow. The interviews with John Cale, who sings a song (for Nico?) are just as haunting as the images of the woman, with her unearthly speaking and singing voice. Also interviews with those no longer with us, like Andy Warhol or Sterling Morrison, are fantastic, as are select cuts from the Warhol films that feature the Velvet Underground and Nico. One blip is the interview with Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock, a bohemian in Paris, whose credentials and connection to Nico are a bit mysterious. Why is he in the movie?

A Harrowing Descent Into Hell.
2008-09-26 - I don't know if I can say that I "enjoyed" "Nico Icon," this has to be one of the most depressing, hellish falls of a beautiful star ever recorded. This is not a film that will inspire gladness or even much admiration in the viewer, instead it is a dark meditation on how boredom and drugs destroyed one of the great visual icons of the late 1960s. It should be praised for capturing both a haunting portrait of a doomed artist and for diving deep into the darker side of the flower power era. The Beatles, hippies, even Vietnam, never make cameos in this film, and they shouldn't.

"Nico Icon" chronicles Nico's rise and fall beginning during her young years as a modeling phenomenon, gracing covers and ads with her tall, captivating presence. Director Susanne Oftenringer unearths some rare, priceless photos and film clips of the pre-Velvet Underground Nico where she looks like a gorgeous German precursor of the kind of glamourous starlets promoting perfume we see today at the local mall. But there was already a kind of depression inside of Nico the film tells us, she was very much alone with herself and confided in few people.

Then comes New York and the Velvet Underground, the film gives us a fascinating look inside the world of Andy Warhol, The Factory and the birth of new forms of music which continue to influence the sounds of today. We hear and see rare clips of Nico singing, although her voice wasn't pitch perfect, she had a knack for good 60s pop. With the Underground she dived into darker, heavier territory, the usual classics are here including "All Tomorrow's Parties" and "Venus In Furs." Figures like John Cale and Danny Fields share their observations of Nico as a captivating figure who neverthless kept to herself. There are some especially fascinating moments where we learn about her affair with Doors frontman Jim Morrison, apparently Nico believed Morrison was the only person who truly understood her. Fields describes Morrison and Nico's first night together, including hair pulling and naked tip-toeing.

It is after the 1960s that "Nico Icon" then turns really ugly as we see the fast crash and burn of our muse. Frightening interview clips show the toll drugs and booze took on Nico's beauty, by the 1980s she strolled around with rotten teeth and damaged skin, looking more like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist" than the Nordic beauty that seduced Lou Reed and Bob Dylan. We meet Nico's grown son Ari, who's life was poisoned from the beginning by his mother, she even turned him on to heroin, the vice that eventually consumed her. All this is captured with a haunting tone in the editing and music, with a lot of organ music framing the final sections of this harrowing movie.

"Nico Icon" is a rarity in films about the 60s. A lot has been said about the kind of youthful energy and hope of the times, or the revolutionary movements that enflamed the world, but here is one film that ignores the cliche 60s talking points and yet captures the history of the era so well. Nico in a sense WAS the 60s, a beautiful beginning with talent and promise, followed by a tragic downfall. This is more than anything however, the portrait of one person and her life. It is a life I doubt many of us would want to live, Nico comes across as a nice person who hated the world, people, and was bored with life itself, finding escape in drugs and hopelessness. Eleven years after it was originally released, "Nico Icon" remains the definitive portrait of a true icon's birth and demise.

Best and Beautiful
2007-05-20 - How great it is to see Nico singing, talking.

Also features Nico's aunt as she recalls Christina's youth and how the both knew she'd become the successful Nico, model, singer and poet.

Her son Ari recounts tales with his mother "Heroin is a killer" he says.

Many of Andy Warhol's clique also speak of their personal memories of her, including Viva and John Cale

This documentary is very interesting even if you are not a fan Of Nico.

Haunting, and achingly beautiful...
2006-12-19 - This is one of those exceptional documentaries which takes as its subject someone whom virtually no one would want to know on a personal basis, and yet turns that subject into someone you can't help but be fascinated by, and even feel affection for. Regardless of how rabid a Nico fan you are (and I'm pretty rabid, myself), it's hard to assert that she wasn't an extremely difficult person to know, to say the least. I venture to say, though, that this film is as close as most of us will ever come to knowing what she was like, as it is a clear eyed portrayal that refuses to romanticize her personal struggles and unkindnesses, while at the same time not condescending to 'drugs are bad and gee, wasn't she weird?' cliches.

In another review, someone mentioned that Nico probably simply didn't care enough to live. I think that there is something to this; however, I would tweak that claim slightly to say that, perhaps, Nico never really saw herself as living in this world at all. She dwelled somewhere very near the curtain that separates this world from 'The Other'. Nico perhaps saw her physical beauty as a supreme twist of cosmic irony: the one thing about her that everyone seemed to agree on, and that was her meal ticket for years, was the least tangible and 'real' of phenomena to her.

In any case, Nico's music is exceptionally beautiful, and this documentary gives plenty of examples of that, as well as rare and revealing footage that you really can't find elsewhere. Even if you're only a casual Nico fan, or fan of documentaries, I highly recommend "Nico Icon".