With today’s theatrical opening of the documentary Hit So Hard , Movieline is pleased to revisit its coverage from the film’s New York festival premiere on March 28, 2011. — Ed. Courtney Love shrugged. “We’ve been in lots of rooms together,” she said to a packed theater of moviegoers at the Museum of Modern Art, where Hit So Hard , a documentary about her band Hole (and, more specifically, drummer/addict/survivor Patty Schemel) had its New York premiere Monday night. The crowd laughed, steeped in nostalgia and recognition — not that Love was talking about this room or this crowd. Love was talking about the members of Hole themselves — herself, Schemel, guitarist Eric Erlandson and bassist Melissa auf der Mar, reunited for the New Directors/New Films festival screening. Hit So Hard ‘s director, P. David Ebersole, had earlier repeated the fest’s talking point about the event being the first time all four had been “in the same room” in 13 years, and many of the evening’s attendees — casual viewers and die-hard Hole fans alike, many dressed in faded black merch-table artifacts from Hole’s 1997 Celebrity Skin tour — had been drawn in for the express purpose of seeing what drama might transpire. How would the quartet respond to the home-movie evidence of debauchery, chaos and self-destruction? How would the erstwhile intimacy and contemporary candor reflect on the band members and their work? Would Courtney Love even bother to show up? Indeed she would, because ultimately Hit So Hard isn’t a rock expos
