Music videos tend to come in a few generic flavors: (a) pop divas singing with backup-dancers, (b) boy bands singing while serving as their own backup dancers and (c) rockers howling while they sort of dance. For variety, musicians sometimes (d) try to get deep and artsy by filming their video in black-and-white. Whoa.
Truly different music videos are rare.
The exception: 30 SECONDS TO MARS rocks at almost every music video they do, but that’s because Jared Leto is a legit Hollywood actor who knows how to make big honking movies, much less short films. The man has an Oscar and such.
So whatever you think of Iggy, she does put effort into her music videos. FANCY was a nice riff on the movie CLUELESS, and now she pays homage (hipsters: go fight about how to pronounce that word) to the classic KILL BILL movies.
This is all good movie-music karma, since KILL BILL has one of the most epic soundtracks of all time.
A protester in Hong Kong takes part in the Umbrella Revolution. Flickr photo by Doctor Ho.
Images are more powerful than words.
That’s why the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong became global news. When somebody says “What’s happening in Hong Kong?” you don’t picture crowds of people with signs, which could be a protest in Manhattan or Mumbai.
You picture umbrellas.
Maybe one umbrella, like the photo above. Or thousands of umbrella.
But you see umbrellas, and they mean something, because it’s what protesters are using ward off tear gas and pepper spray while they march for free and open elections, like they were promised.
Right there, the terms of the debate are framed. You sympathize with the protesters, who are organized and determinedly non-violent. Students taking part are doing their homework and picking up trash from the street.
Citizens might have used something else, say garbage bags, to protect themselves from tear gas and mace. It wouldn’t be the same.
The simple, common umbrella is a powerful symbol and tool. It’s not fancy. It’s not expensive. Everybody, rich or poor, has an umbrella.
You don’t need to join a political group. All you have to do is grab an umbrella from your hallway closet and walk outside. People around the world, folks who don’t speak the language or understand Hong Kong history and politics, they all the message.
The pilot episode of GOTHAM tried to pack three hours of characters, action and material into one hour, which is more like 42 minutes with all the commercial breaks.
Did I like it? Absolutely.
Was it 10 pounds of plot shoved into a 5-pound bag? Yes. And part of that couldn’t be helped.
However, we now have Episode 2, in capital letters, to reflect upon and answer the question: Can the writers and showrunners keep this thing exciting while slowing it down and giving key characters more screen time?
Here’s the trailer for the pilot, and while this trailer is well done, it doesn’t do justice to how much they tried to pack into it.
And for comparison, before we chat, check out the promo for Episode 2:
So how did they do? Just fine.
In fact, this is one of the rare shows where Episode 2 is better than the pilot.
Why? This time was slower in a good way. They gave villains time to chew the scenery, with the best bits being the slowest scenes.
The second show reminded me of how Quentin the Tarantino ratcheted up the suspense, higher and higher, with the opening scene of INGLORIOUS BASTERDS.
And that’s only a taste of that scene. It goes on and on, and you don’t care that nothing seems to be happening, that’s it’s simply two men at a table with a glass of milk, talking. Because there’s crazy tension and conflict there without a single gunshot or explosion. Michael Bay would go deep into withdrawal, right?
But slow can work. Slow burns are often the best burns. Gunfights and making things go boom doesn’t mean anything unless you give it meaning.
BREAKING BAD understood this perfectly. There was no shortage of blood on the floor of that set, yet Vince the Gilligan and his creww always took their time to carefully plant setups and build up that tension before finally paying them off.
One of best examples of Chekhov’s Gun ever comes from a literal gun, an M60, they planted in the trunk of Walter White’s car, not knowing when, why or how that gun would go off later in the last season. Brilliant!
If you love music, and music videos, you start seeing patterns.
Here’s what I’ve learned from dissecting lyrics and making fun of music videos: it’s easy to put them into categories, both amazingly awful and insanely great, and there are SIX KINDS, because I say so.
The six types are:
1) Boring Pop Songs
These are trite little pieces of drivel, sung by boy bands, Justin Bieber and Britney Spears, written at a fourth-grade level because they’re meant to be consumed by seventh-graders.
It’s the kind of thing that makes the average Madonna song look deep.
What’s the acid test for Boring Pop Songs? If you do a “find and replace” in word for “oh baby” and half the lyrics disappear.
2) Pretentious Pop
Vivid imagery that’s poetic, yet confusing. That’s your basic recipe for pretentious pop, which is equally bad whether it’s (a) some boy band trying to get deep or (b) Sting trying to show everybody he went to college, and yes, I adore the Stinger, so that’s said out of love, because he usually hits the mark. Related: Sting nails it with WHY SHOULD I CRY FOR YOU?
Here’s some infamous nonsense from The Decemberists, who specialize in Pretentious Pop:
Fifteen lithesome maidens lay Along in their bower Fourteen occupations pay To pass the idle hour
3) Cryptic Yet Meaningful Goodness
AMERICAN PIE is the best example of this. Are the lyrics deep and confusing? Absolutely. Yet if you dig deep into it, line-by-line, they make sense.
This sea otter has style. Completely at ease and comfortable in his own fur. Well played, sea otter. Carry on. Photo by Guy Bergstrom.
There’s something about otters that’s inherently interesting. They’re like water-cats, but as playful as dogs.
If you’ve visited aquariums or zoos with a glass shebang that lets you see them, they’ll do games with you, racing from side to side. And there’s all kinds of footage of otters playing in the wild, sliding down mud hills or snow. I used to love monkeys as a kid, and hey, they’re still fun to watch, but the otters are the one animal who seem to just have a surplus of joy.
Also, they are crazy photogenic. There’s an entire site dedicated to photographs of otters, and they found this photo earlier and put it up. Because otters are just that cool.
Typically, I usually dive into the lyrics of a song, dissecting the true meaning of ELECTRIC AVENUE or parsing every line of Vanilla Ice’s unappreciated classic, ICE, ICE BABY, which was tarnished only by his lame followup song about ninja turtles and his habit of trashing sets and terrorizing TV journalists, though now Vanilla is all grown up and remodeling houses on television or whatever.
This music video by Vic the Mensa is the rare beast where the visuals are more worthy of dissecting. Check it out.
Vic does something unusual here, turning a music video into a short film where his character repeats the same scene in a nightclub again and again, with different choices and results.
If you’re a screenwriter, you’ll start throwing out RASHOMON references and point out how this is nothing like MEMENTO, since that movie reversed the order of all scenes. To get technical, this music video is more like GROUNDHOG DAY or THE EDGE OF TOMORROW, which the studios are renaming LIVE, DIE REPEAT instead of the original comic title, which is far more superior – ALL YOU NEED IS KILL.
Back to this video: This piece by Vic is far, far better than the typical music videos where (a) the lead singer looks mournful while he croons about lost love, (b) the lead singer tries to look sexy while backup dancers gyrate, or (c) random things happen in slow motion because the director thought it would be awesome to hire a bunch of art students do smash eggs on their heads and such, making the video somehow deep.
I appreciate how there are new twists every time, with the sequences lining up with Vic’s lyrics.
He avoided all the usual clichés and gave us something different. Well played.
A book, movie or TV show can be technically good and awesomely boring at the same time. Example: every CGI-crazed “blockbuster” in the last 10 years that cost $250 million to produce and generated $50 in ticket sales at theaters. Stuff like JOHN CARTER OF MARS and AVATAR (the cartoon, not the blue monkey saga) and five zillion other movies you don’t remember and didn’t see because they stank up the place.
So take a look at this, the Best Ad for a Restaurant in History:
The ad does a number of things badly on purpose.
The special effects look like they were put together by a 7th grader who started teaching himself Adobe After Effects yesterday.
The script itself put 1,792 grammar teachers in treatment.
This actor’s body language could not be more awkward.
Casting aside his accent, which I loved, the actor’s inflections keep going astray.
The editing and production values, let’s be honest, stink.
The great thing about the Series of Tubes is that so many people are sifting through so much stuff, you’re bound to find random bits of awesomesauce. Things you would never intentionally seek out.
John Lindo is wonderfully random bit of awesomesauce, and I am happy to do a little Friendly Friday shout-out to him.
Watch this, then let’s talk about why it works, and why it went viral.
This works because there’s a massive gap between expectation and result.
As an audience, we’ve been trained to think of professional dancers as size zero models that come in male and female. They’re young, tanned and costumed. They dance with the stars, and sometimes date the stars.
John is proudly the opposite of all that. He looks like an average middle-aged dad from the suburbs and shatters your every expectation. He’s full of joy, competence and confidence. I’m not a dance expert or fan, and I’d happily watch more videos of him, and try to learn a bit from him. My wife would go nuts. If we men were crazy smart, we’d do Fight Club on Tuesdays and Thursdays, then get John to teach us to dance like this on Mondays and Wednesday while our bruises fade, then we’d surprise our wives or girlfriends on Friday nights. Continue reading “Age and size matter not — attitude is everything”→
Tunnel below a castle in Luxembourg. Photo by Guy Bergstrom.
Castles are the best — but hard to shoot. The light in tunnels and dungeons is usually terrible. This passageway was a happy exception and I love how the shadows intersected.
This is part of a huge network of passageways beneath fortifications beneath a castle guarding the river in the capital. A great position. There was no cover, no way to get up the cliff, and there were cruder tunnels carved into the rock with firing positions. An interesting place. I’ve seen a lot of castles and this one was both ancient and well-preserved. Continue reading “Photo of the Day: A castle passageway in Luxembourg”→
I counted around 15 students inside, on top or hanging from the back of this autorickshaw. It’s the Indian version of a cab, with three wheels and a lot more excitement than boring Yellow Cabs back home. With the right driver, an autorickshaw ride can be like a Formula One race through side streets and packed traffic. Photo by Guy Bergstrom.
If you travel to India, autorickshaws are everywhere, working as cabs and hauling cargo. They have three tiny wheels, itty bitty engines and are more like motorcycles than cars, but they’re cheap and useful, especially in big cities.
The Red Pen of Doom 