The Dead Weather - Treat Me Like Your Mother

Ray Pride links to the above video, directed by Jonathan Glazer (director of Birth, Sexy Beast, and countless iconic music videos) for the first single off the new record by The Dead Weather, a supergroup of sorts featuring Jack White of The White Stripes and Alison Mosshart of The Kills. On the first couple of listens, I felt the record was a bit too steeped in the more annoying tendencencies of both of those bands, but this video might turn me around, because it is awesome.

In semi-related news, The Kills version of “Willow Weep For Me” from Only the Lonely is featured on a new iTunes-only compilation featuring contemporary covers of Frank Sinatra songs.

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Yesterday, guest blogger Kevin Lee put two shorts by members of the Court 13 collective on his list of the 5 Best Music Videos of 2008, Benh Zeitlin’s clip for O’Death’s “Lowtide,” and MGMT’s “Time to Pretend,” directed by Ray Tintori. For those unfamiliar with these guys, Zeitlin’s the director of the much-lauded short Glory at Sea, on which Tintori is credited as writer and production designer; and Tintori directed the 2007 festival hit, the Wes Anderson-does-Frankenstein-in-the-style-of-Guy Maddin short Death to the Tinman, which Zeitlin also worked on. The filmmakers, who are mainly based in New Orleans, also worked on the Obama campaign earlier this year, and made a couple of videos for that cause.

Tinman is one of my favorite shorts of the past few years, and I’ve embedded it after jump. You can currently watch the 25-minute Glory at Sea on YouTube, thanks to Wholphin.

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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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As Fantastic Fest gains in prominence as a must-attend spot on the festival calendar, the special events organized by Tim League and friends are becoming as notorious as the wide-ranging selection of international genre and exploitation films on the official lineup. From shooting lessons to field trips to far-flung barbeque joints, to multiple karaoke parties and totally unofficial after-after parties in the hotel suites of celebrity attendees, the only criticism of the festival that keeps coming up is that there’s actually too much fun to be had, too much to do.

But this is not necessarily a Fantastic Fest-specific problem; with the Alamo Drafthouse chain itself, League has created a year-round home for Too Much Fun for not just cinema nerds, but anyone who likes to wash their pop culture down with copious amounts of beer. This became evident yesterday afternoon when, after a screening of the paraplegic serial killer film Late Bloomer (about which more, later), I snuck out of the Alamo South Lamar to head across town to the Alamo Ritz for Michael Jackson Thrill the World, a sing-a-long, dance-off and drinking contest set to the music video masterpieces of the King of Pop.

But contrary to appearances, the point of the evening, according to host Henri Mazza, was not to have fun. “I don’t care if you have a good time,” he said. “The most important thing tonight is that you learn how to do “Thriller.”

The Alamo is getting together a contingent to try to break the record for the “largest group synchronized “Thriller” Dance,” and they’re also hoping to attach “upwards of 2,000″ “Thriller”-dancing zombies to the back of next month’s Day of the Dead parade. After letting the crowd warm up with a one-minute dance contest (which the young lady above lost in spite of her sartorial dedication to the endeavor) and by singing and dancing along to videos like “Bad” and “Rock With You,” the Alamo brought out a dance teacher to train the wannabe zombies for their future engagements.

Watch three or more Michael Jackson videos back-to-back-to-back and, whatever you think of the man or his music, it’s impossible to deny that no pop star has ever really tried to top him in terms of sheer scope. And even when he’s very, very bad, he’s compelling. The several minutes of narrative exposition tacked on to beginning and end of “Remember the Time” are ridiculous, but audaciously so: it’s no “Thriller,” but that Jackson thought that this –– an epic set in ancient Egypt in which he plays a mysterious shape-shifter who makes out with Iman under the nose of her husband Eddie Murphy and slave Magic Johnson –– was a good idea is, in a way, thrilling.

Though it took the crowd a while to get into it, by the time MJ was yelling about meeting a love interest “in the park, after dark,” a good portion were on their feet, laughing and singing along. Maybe it was the beer, maybe it was the majesty of the choreographed dance. Maybe it was that, in hindsight, all of the pretentions within the Jackson canon––from traditional heterosexuality to the dominatrix-outfitted teenager trying to prove he’s tough in the Martin Scorsese-directed “Bad”––make us feel like we’re privy to an inside joke. Regardless, like so much else at Fantastic Fest, Thrill the World felt like an illegal amount of fun.

See more pics at our Flickr page.

This is it, the day we’ve been waiting for two full decades (or, at least, since we first heard it was happening back in December): the Huey Lewis plot song written specifically for the David Gordon Green-driected, Judd Apatow-produced stoner comedy Pineapple Express has hit the web! The Playlist first posted a clip of the song last night; today, Whitney at Pop Candy points to the full thing, available for streaming or download on MySpace.

It’s very much in classic Huey Lewis plot song mode, complete with gratuitous hand claps and sax solo. It’s not as directly narrative as, say, “Back in Time” (above), but it’s slightly more literally connected to the film than, like, “The Power of Love.” A sample from the chorus: “How did we get into this mess? Pineapple Express! Can’t deal with this stress! Totally gone, cause we’re on, Pineapple Express!” It is the best, and it is also totally the worst.

As we’ve discussed before, plot songs take the science of the source cue to a new level. After the jump, a brief, video-guided journey through plot song history. Let us know what we’ve left out.

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Even those who were less than enthused by Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness when the film debuted at Sundance had good things to say about the film’s soundtrack, which uses early-to-mid-90s hip hop to set the mood of New York City circa 1994. The Playlist’s post on music used in the film gives me the justification to do something I’ve wanted to do for my entire professional film blogging career: post the video for Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend.” Sure, The Wackness might have Mary-Kate Olsen and Ben Kingsley making out in a phone booth, but the story of Biz and a girl named BlahBlahBlah is a true romantic epic.

At the Guardian, Andrew Pulver laments the fall Derek Jarman (and the personal, high-art cinema he made and represented) from cinephile fashion. He blames this in part on the revival of the commercial British film industry:

One problem is the seismic shift of the cinematic landscape since Jarman’s death in 1994, the same year that saw the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral. One of Jarman’s main weapons had been that, in the Thatcher era, there was no one else putting out Britain-centred product so enthusiastically. His small-scale, personalised vision undoubtedly helped him survive the 1980s and, to some extent, prosper. But with the revival of the commercial end of the British film industry, the very people who most resented Jarman’s productivity regained the initiative. After his death, his cinematic influence virtually vanished.

The idea of Jarman as a “Britain-centred” filmmaker reminded me of one of the things I found most frustrating about Derek, Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton’s collaborative, impressionist doc on their late friend, which I saw at Sundance last month (Pulver mentions both Julien and Swinton but not the film, although I have to imagine this post was in part motivated by Derek’s premiere this week in Berlin).

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The music video is primarily a medium of close-ups and wide tableau, with very little in between. In its traditional, performative form, framing is designed to either be tight enough to confirm lipsynch accuracy, or far away enough to properly present multiple bodies in slickly choreographed motion.

I am convinced that no director of music videos has worked the close/wide divide better than David Fincher. To be fair, I haven’t seen Zodiac, but I could take or leave his previous five feature films. In my mind, Fincher reached his creative and technical peak between 1989-1990, when he was directing music videos for Paula Abdul, George Michael, Billy Idol and, most impressively, Madonna. Is any image filmed in 1990 more iconic than this frame, from Fincher’s video for Madonna’s “Vogue”?

Fincher’s best video works actually function in part as tribute to the very concept of the close-up glamour shot, and he reached his absolute peak using Madonna as a more-than-willing sponge for the visual detritus of the studio era. Three of his Madonna videos (”Vogue”, “Express Yourself” and “Oh Father”, all of which made the Top 15 of Slant Magazine’s Top 100 Greatest Music Videos list) are so good that even now, 18 years on, watching them occasionally sparks a tear in my eye. A fourth Madonna/Fincher collaboration, “Bad Girl”, is incredibly silly, but still compulsively watchable. Even in Fincher’s lesser works, it’s the close-ups that punch me in the gut. In terms of his Madonna videos, Fincher’s close-ups are the most intimate images of the star that we’ve ever known.

Notes on Fincher’s signature close-ups after the jump.
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In anticipation of seeing Anton Corbijn’s Control at Toronto next week (FYI, that film took a couple of prizes at the Edinburgh Film Festival this past weekend), I’ve been watching some of Corbijn’s music videos on YouTube and iFilm. In the late 80s/early 90s, Corbijn was to go-to guy for Euro-bands looking for something grainy and either black-and-white or in washed-out color, in which they could sulk bitterly whilst stalking around either city or countryside, surrounded with what looked like low-rent Helmut Newton girls in various 80s costumes, and eventually resolve some of the underlying tension and hostility in some suggestion of light S & M.

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I’ve previously expressed concerns that Google’s renewed commitment to cracking down on copyright infringement will have a disastrous impact on YouTube and GoogleVideo potential as teaching tools/living media archives. Today, via CinemaTech, comes this Wall Street Journal article (if you’re not a subscriber, try this link) about people hired by companies like Viacom to seek out and request the removal of copyright content from YouTube.

The company profiled says they earn as much as $500,000 a month from each of the media companies that employ them. Most of their focus seems to be on removing music videos that have been illegally uploaded by MTV viewers, and comedy sketches illegally sourced from Comedy Central. Since many of these videos are available for legal streaming on MTV’s Overdrive and other sites, you have to wonder: since the average YouTube “pirate” surely doesn’t care enough about a company like Viacom to try to deliberately hurt them, why would they bother uploading these clips at all? Why would anyone want to watch a choppy YouTube clip of Same Girl when MTV.com has the same video, in a slicker player and at a higher resolution?

My guess is that a big part of it is the demand for embeddable clips — you can link to MTV.com’s videos, for example, but you can’t display them on your own blog or MySpace/Facebook page. A big part of the appeal of watching online videos is being able to share them. Teenagers especially seem drawn to the practice of using YouTube clips of their favorite music videos and funny scenes as building blocks in constructing their online identities. When you’re 16, your MySpace page is your personal portal, your social resume, the one-stop shop where friends and crushes can receive all your sanctioned information. If you were that 16-year-old, would you really want to have to “express yourself” by directing your friends to go check out all your favorite videos on Comedy Central’s website?

My big concern with the YouTube crackdown is that it will make it impossible to share hard-to-find media detritus: rare interviews and TV clips, scenes from films that aren’t on DVD, etc. It’s nice to see Delaney heavily imply that media companies are taking a hands-off approach to fan-altered clips containing copyrighted content, and just about anything else that could reasonably fit under Fair Use. There’s a sense that the big media conglomerates have had to pick their battles. While Viacom pays $100,000 a month to make sure that clips of Chappelle Show aren’t allowed to circulate, there seem to be an awful lot of four-month-old, camcorder-sourced clips from subsidiary Paramount’s Disturbia.

Another interesting tidbit from the story: employees at the company hired by Viacom blow off steam by sharing vintage oddities. “They combat the monotony by passing links to quirky clips around the office,” Kevin J. Delaney writes. “One recent oddball favorite was a video of a flamboyant German disco-era group performing in Genghis Khan-inspired outfits.” Surely, somebody somewhere owns the copyright to that, too.