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”

…Read more

Since we last visited Trailers From Hell way back in July, the site has beefed up its offerings, and now boasts commentaries on classic adverts for films by Stanley Kubrick and Howard Hawks, as well as lovable schlock like The Revenge of Frankenstein and The Fiendish Ghouls. And thanks to a BoingBoing blurb, today I revisited the site and began to delve into the small catalogue of trailers boasting commentary by director John Landis.

Landis, whose unusual filmography spans comedy classics (Animal House), epic music videos (Michael Jackson’s Thriller) and, with the NYFF selection Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project, documentary, never fails to fill his TFH commentaries with probably long-forgotten backstage anecdotes. They’re usually too mundane to be really juicy; over the above, absurdly long trailer for Psycho, Landis seems way more interested in gossiping about Alfred Hitchcock’s daily lunch menu (which apparently included an entire bottle of wine and a steak) than in taking about the film itself. “What can I say?” Landis laughs. “It’s the best Psycho movie ever!” We’ll give him that.

Here’s another one for the horror fans: The House Next Door contributor Kevin Lee is producing a series of video essays based on this definitive list of the 1,000 Greatest Films. His most recent installment tackles Inferno, Dario Argento’s horror classic about architecture, identity, and death-by-cats.

In Lee’s mind, Argento’s style contains “a touch too much camp in its perversity to be truly horrifying.” He instead “locates [his] pleasure” in Argento’s emphasis on place and space, recasting Inferno as something like “a horror version of an Antonioni movie.” But whereas Antonioni was concerned with the psychology of his wandering women, Argento’s female protagonists, though similarly traumatized, are little more than graphic elements, “as abstract as the concept of red or blue.” It’s really fascinating stuff. You can check out all of Lee’s videos here, or read his blog here.