The Hangover, Todd Phillips’ return to fratastic form after the disappointing School for Scoundrels, marks itself as an aesthetic step up for the Old School director right from the get go. With moody, pensive music playing on the soundtrack, the opening credits play out over a montage of Las Vegas By Day — giant cranes breaking the skyline of dull towers, Godzilla-size advertisements for “talent” like Marie Osmond baking in the sun — fading into the more palatable, glittery, and familiar images of Vegas By Night. This tells us right away that The Hangover means to say something about the contradictions of the city in which its set, and particularly the contrast between the Vegas myth of endless nights of full-on debauchery, and days spent nursing head-splitting regret at all-you-can-eat buffets. But Sin City presents Donnie and Marie is only the half of it: more importantly for The Hangover’s purposes, Vegas is a city constantly in construction, creating and erasing its own totally manufactured history,  a vacation spot paradoxically designed to provide inspiration for amateur photographers, which simultaneously boasts of its ability to send the same tourists home without memories that they could relate in mixed company.

In other words: the whole goal of the contemporary trip to Vegas is to come home with a digital camera full of evidence that you had a bunch of fun that you can’t recollect and certainly are not going to talk about. So when Phil (Bradley Cooper) Stu (Ed Helms) and Alan (Zack Galifinakis) wake up in their suite at Caesar’s the morning after Doug’s (Justin Bartha) bachelor party to find that their room is trashed and they’ve been left to care for a wandering chicken, a live tiger and a mysterious baby, the initial assumption is that this detritus is Vegas business as usual. Why can’t they remember anything that happened the night before? As Phil puts it, “Because we obviously had a great fucking time.” So great that the groom has gone missing.

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Making her way to Sundance next month with her debut feature, Palestinian/Jordanian-American director Cherien Dabis, who was on the festival circuit last year with her terrific short Make a Wish, tapped her experiences growing up Arab in a small Ohio town during the first Gulf War when writing Amreeka, a bittersweet, comedic look at otherness. The film, which went through Sundance and Film Independent’s various talent development programs before going in front of cameras last year, will bow at the Eccles later this month. In the meantime we caught up with Dabis to discuss what she watched while prepping her new film, learning about classical music and just what Wong Kar Wai and Prince could do together. …Read more

Beyonce’s video for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” may have already garnered nearly 20 million views on YouTube, but it’s not the best of the many great music videos of 2008. Here are five that are better –– and none of them rip off Bob Fosse. You can see my picks for the 5th through 10th best videos of 2008 (yes, including Beyonce) at my blog, alsolikelife.com/shooting.

5. Killer Mike featuring Ice Cube, “Pressure” Directed by Giovanni Hidalgo

One can only imagine how many hours director Hidalgo spent ripping and mixing clips off the internet, cable news, and who knows where else, but watching the result is like a long night’s cram session for a Black liberation theory class in the space of a song.

The sheer breadth of footage is breathtaking, flashing everything from archival newsreel to Hollywood clips to graphic crime videos. The shock-and-awe montage makes it hard to arrive at a coherent thesis for grappling with the laundry list of social ills laid out by both the lyrics and visuals, full of jarring juxtapositions that radically recontextualize familiar images and figures into an alternative universe of hip-hop resistance. Even Barack Obama doesn’t come away unscathed: his “Yes We Can” iconography is eventually followed by a clip of him dancing with Ellen Degeneres that’s as ingratiating as Stepin Fetchit. The lasting effect is a purposeful distancing from the daily stream of images that spoon-feed us into complacency, something that viewers of any race or background can take to heart.

As Ice Cube says, “I’m here to deprogram you.” A machine gun spray of media-fueled dissonance, “Pressure” accomplishes in six minutes what took Oliver Stone’s JFK three hours.

Zoom in on: 2:46. The juxtaposition of Saddam Hussein and O.J. Simpson at their respective trails exemplifies the mad method of this video: a knee-jerk provocation, an inspired association, or both.

Compare to: Terry Lynn, ”The System”

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• Charlton Heston died last weekend.
• Prompting Kevin to recall the best trailer mashup of all time.
• And making it a bad (or good) time to announce a new Ben-Hur miniseries dedicated to his honor.
• On Film Couch: Indie cinema has become cliched.
• Karina attended the Sarasota Film Festival, where she reviewed Throw Down Your Heart and Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story and they paid tribute to Liv Ullman.
• Then she went directly to the Moving Image Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing.
• Meanwhile she found time to pre-order the Mister Lonely book tie-in.
• A few anticipated films allowed our expectations to be lowered a bit, as Maggie Gyllenhaal dumbed down the Dark Knight marketing campaign and a script leak dumbed down Oliver Stone’s Bush biopic.
• I support Uwe Boll’s filmmaking (however, the number of people who want him to die stop making films is now up to 180,000).
• Congratulations to the Webby nominees.
• Pierrot Belmondo is 75.
• Errol Morris makes fiction comedically while James Cameron makes 3D seriously.
• New York was only well represented on film in the 70s. Undestroyed, anyway.
• Watch an Alicia Keys documentary for free.
• Watch a Kanye West video using 2046 footage he may have gotten for free.
• Watch an unspectacular yet wonderful clip from Tarsem’s The Fall.

A post from Big Screen Little Screen turned me onto a music video created by Kanye West’s editor, Derrick Lee, using footage of 2046 for Kanye’s “Flashing Lights.”

It’s almost sacrilege to not watch this in High Definition, but the video remix still shames the original Spike Jonze helmed spot.

I couldn’t say it better myself. Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 is a long, visually indulgent meditation of love in bad timing, grief and the futility of anything else in life to play love’s substitute. In some way, Derrick Lee’s editing was able to grab the essence of love lost in what you might call a world of “affluent dystopia.” A hyper-realized city, like Tokyo or LA, where lives and opportunity are crammed together so tightly it would seem that making connections would be easy, but it’s only become harder. Human intimacy is the new luxury nobody can afford, but people spin their wheels faster. They collide but never connect. In short, repurposing footage from 2046 for “Flashing Lights” brought new meaning to a song I’d normally switch off.
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Brandon Soderberg has a great post on No Trivia about the Spike Jonze/Kanye West video that debuted last week, “Flashing Lights”, and how it relates to the director’s other music videos for hip hop artists. There’s a lot of great analysis in the post, but I thought it was interesting that, in what’s essentially an auteur analysis of Jonze as an anti-Hype Williams, Soderberg give authorial credit for one of “Flashing Lights”‘ key elements not to Jonze, but to Kanye:

The model in the video, Rita G, is gaining an insane amount of press- which in and of itself, shows how “exploitation” of women for videos is way more complicated than old-fashioned feminists would have us believe- and is a kind of sprucing-up of the classic video chick. She has the thicker body, which is way more attractive than the classic rock image of the rock video chick or the sexless but cute and super-safe “hot” but not too hot indie chick staple, but Kanye puts her in lingerie instead of underwear and gives her actual poise and confidence. The video girl now takes actual center-stage, no longer being only ass and titties but the thematic and emotional focus of the video too. It’s a kind of “revenge of the Gold-digger”, as Rita G’s modern mixed with vintage lingerie were first seen in Hype Williams’ video for ‘Gold Digger’, Kanye’s most explicitly negative song about women (and one of his biggest hits…surprise surprise).

The video is so much about costuming (everyone’s talking about what happens with the shovel, but it seems even more significant that before the model enacts her revenge, she shrugs off a fur coat and what appears to be a designer dress, only to set them on fire before returning to the car to perform the video’s violent climax) that Soderberg is totally spot on to read what the model wears as a vehicle for the clip’s ideology. But how are we to know that this was a decision made by the author of the song and not by the clip’s ostensible director?

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Fimoculous points to “Part 1″ of “Flashing Lights”, Spike Jonze’s method of paying the mortgage whilst struggling to finish Where the Wild Things Are/new music video for Kanye West. Rex brands it as “basically hip-hop’s ‘November Rain’”, but I see it more as a Colin Farrell-less Miami Vice. So, yes––even though I’m no Kanye fan, I totally love it.

…that, and other revelations about what celebrities blog about, courtesy of this feature on Gawker. Surprising: 36% of all celebrity blogging is devoted to “shameless self-promotion”; I would have pegged it at 70 or 80 percent. Not so surprising: statistically, blogging celebrities devote exactly as much virtual ink to “indecipherable rants” as “Republicans.” Nice graph, but I have to say, I’m SHOCKED that the Gawk squad let Jeff Bridges’ use of the word “netiquette” slip by un snarked-upon.