Bright Lights After Dark’s Tom Sutpen on a lesser-known earlyish work from Paul Thomas Anderson, starring then-girlfriend Fiona Apple:
“Across the Universe” is a music video produced in connection with an immensely obvious and stupid movie of the late-nineties entitled Pleasantville (a film Anderson otherwise had nothing to do with); and if you have to call it something…you could say that you were seeing the one perfect expression of post-Christian martyrdom our culture has seen fit to cough up.
(Please excuse the reblogging––I’m weeding through an obscenely overstuffed post-vacation feed reader with one lobe and making Comic-Con plans with the other. In order to add a tiny bit of value to this post, here are some lazy links to a few other videos that PTA made for Apple: Fast as You Can; Paper Bag; Limp. Servicey!)
About a week ago, a YouTuber posted an unofficial music video for the first single off Scarlett Johansson’s album of Tom Waits covers, “Falling Down,” made up entirely of footage from Lost In Translation. Now the official video for the song is making the rounds (see above), and although it’s made up of all new footage, the concept is basically the same as the fan clip. It’s a day-in-the-life of Scarlett…shot on a day when Scarlett happens to spend a lot of time pensively staring out of windows, rolling around on beds, hugging an older dude and having her photo taken by a Japanese man. Watch. Discuss.
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’s2046 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. …Read more
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?
While I was in Park City, Film Forum hosted a two-week run of Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s high-design, dream-like classic about the reunion of a man and woman who may or may not have had an affair the previous summer. The Playlist hit one of the last screenings before the print hit the road for rep houses around the country (check your local listings blah blah blah), and was reminded of the music video for the 1994 Blur song, “To The End”. I was a huge Blur fan in the mid-90s, but didn’t see Marienbad until 1999 or so, so that’s my excuse for never having made the connection. But The Playlist is right––”To The End” is “a direct pastiche homage” to Marienbad, except in many ways, a music video is a much more ideal format than a feature film for the elliptical tyle and nebulous substance that’s being borrowed.
See the video above; there’s a clip from Marienbad at The Playlist for comparison.
Twitch links to this animated Beringer ad directed by Oliver Gondry, as evidence that the recently announced animated collaboration between Michel Gondry and his son is not “purely a case of nepotism and fatherly favor.” But I’m pretty sure Oliver Gondry is not Michel Gondry’s son, but his brother. My previous research suggested that the son working on the film is 16 year-old Paul Gondry; meanwhile, a search for “Oliver Gondry” turns up several references to the above time-lapse music video, which would seem to have some vague stylistic similarity to the Beringer ad, and which is alternately credited to “Oliver Gondry” and “The Gondry Brothers.” Am I wrong? If you’ve got any airtight info on the Gondry family tree, do pass it along.
The Playlist passes along word that Sonic Youth’s cover of The Carpenters’ “Superstar” has made it onto the Juno soundtrack album. The song plays a key role in my favorite part of the film, the friendship between Ellen Page’s pregnant teen and Jason Bateman’s 30-something would-be adoptive father, through which Juno learns perhaps the most important lesson of being a wise-beyond-your-years teenage girl: you can only be precocious and adorable and interested in some older dude’s past life as a minor rock star for so long before said older dude starts getting That Look in his eyes every time you come ’round.
Still, it seems a *little* weird that a song that was originally recorded for a compilation disc would now end up on another compilation disc. Or maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. The whole point of this post was to have an excuse to embed Dave Markey’s video for the song, which I love, and have loved since I was Juno’s age.
While you wait (and wait and wait and wait) for further word on Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, take a look at this Donnie Darko-inspired video for “What’s a Girl To Do” by Bat For Lashes [via Ultragrrrl]:
