Music Video of the Day: Sour Girl by Stone Temple Pilots (2000, dir. David Slade)

Posted on June 29, 2017 by Valerie Troutman

My introduction to Stone Temple Pilots was the album Tiny Music…Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop–not my recommended way to start listening to STP. I remember liking this song, but when I bought the album, it felt generic and instantly forgettable.

The video for Sour Girl on the other hand is still something I remember to this day. Apparently, despite the fact that they look like a creepy version of Teletubbies, they were inspired by a dream that Scott Weiland had. At least that’s according to the Wikipedia article that draws from the Songfacts page on the song and video. The song was written about his divorce from his first wife. I’m assuming this is the same wife who he wrote Interstate Love Song about since according to Scott Weiland’s memoir [Not Dead & Not for Sale: A Memoir]:

[About Sour Girl]: “Everyone is convinced that it’s about my romance with Mary [Forsberg, second wife],” Weiland writes in his autobiography Not Dead and Not For Sale. “But everyone is wrong. ‘Sour Girl’ was written after the collapse of my relationship with Jannina [Castaneda, first wife]. It’s about her. ‘She was a sour girl the day that she met me,’ I wrote. ‘She was a happy girl the day she left me… I was a superman, but looks are deceiving. The rollercoaster ride’s a lonely one. I pay a ransom note to stop it from steaming.’ The ransom note, of course, was the fortune our divorce was costing me. And the happy state, which I presumed to be Jannina’s mood, was because she had finally rid her life of a man who had never been faithful.”

[About Interstate Love Song]: “She’d ask how I was doing, and I’d lie, say I was doing fine.”
“I imagined what was going through her mind when I wrote, ‘Waiting on a Sunday afternoon for what I read between the lines, your lies, feelin’ like a hand in rusted shame, so do you laugh or does it cry? Reply?”

That explains the bleak video, why she is returned to a happy-looking state while in the dark world of the video, and why Weiland is left in the dark world with the creepy creatures.

Considering Weiland’s life and the meaning behind this song and video, it’s interesting that it was directed by David Slade. You might remember him as a producer and director of episodes of American Gods and Hannibal. He also directed The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010).

Yari Schutzer was the production manager. Schutzer seems to have worked on around 25 music videos as well as some movies.

Martin Coppen shot the video. He has worked on at least 25 videos. Since his credits date back as far as 1988, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are many more.

Bronni Bakke was the casting director, which I guess mean she picked out Sarah Michelle Gellar and the people in the suits. She worked on The Bogus Witch Project (2000) and a few other things. According to her IMDb profile, she “impersonates Britney Spears, Marilyn Monroe, Felicity Shagwell and Lara Croft.” From what I can find, it looks like she passed away in 2016 from breast cancer.

Enjoy!

30 Days Of Surrealism:

Trash TV Guru : “Hannibal,” Episode 1 : “Aperitif”

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Okay, here’s the deal — if you follow my “writing” (am I being too generous already?) either here on TTSL, on my own site, http://trashfilmguru.wordpress.com, or on other places where my “byline” (again with the generosity!) occasionally appears such as dailygrindhouse.com, geekyuniverse.com, or what have you, it’s probably become apparent to you by this point that I don’t talk TV that much. Movies? Sure, all the time. Comics? Yeah, what the hell, I opine on those plenty, as well. But TV? This is, to my knowledge, a first. A new frontier. A new era. A new beginning. A bold, vast, wide-open, new horizon.

Okay, now I know I’m being far too generous. And grandiose. So I’ll cut it the fuck out right now.

Seriously, though, there’s a reason I don’t talk TV that much — I don’t watch TV that much. Alright, fair enough — I more or less never miss a Wolves or Wild game, so what I mean to say is that I don’t watch series TV that much. It’s just not my bag. Even with DVR and cable on demand, both of which negate the need to be in front of your screen at a set time every week, it’s fair to say that continuing, serialized television just ain’t my thang for the most part. I’m a die-hard Doctor Who fan and have been since age, I dunno, six or seven, but my absolute, long-standing love for that show precludes me from saying what I really think about its current, depressing, lowest-common-denominator iteration too publicly. And I watch The Walking Dead and Bates Motel but Arleigh and Lisa Marie, respectively, have got those bases covered around these parts already. I’d been kind of wanting to dip my toes into the metaphorical waters of TV criticism on this site for awhile now, but there just didn’t seem much to be much point.

Then, I heard that the network suits at NBC had become either adventurous or desperate enough to green-light a series based around Hannibal Lecter, and furthermore that said new series was actually good, so I figured here’s my chance. Fair enough, the new show, simply (and unimaginatively) called Hannibal, shared a title with Ridley Scott’s genuinely atrocious entry into the Lecter cinematic canon, but why hold that against it? Especially since the territory it was going to mine, the backstory set before both the very best (Michael Mann’s Manhunter) and very worst (Brett Rattner’s Red Dragon) of the cannibal shrink’s celluloid exploits, seemed ripe for mining. Plus, rumor had it that the first episode was going to be directed by David Slade, who gave us 30 Days Of Night and Hard Candy, two films I absolutely loved (we won’t hold the Twilight flick he did against him).

So, I figured, here it was — a show I could get in on the ground floor of and review every week for the edification of you, dear Through The Shattered Lens reader, whoever you are.

Confession time — I still missed the first episode anyway, despite my best intentions. The Wild were playing that night, so sue me. But I dutifully watched it on Comcast On Demand the next evening, and went in with pretty high hopes. It seemed that pretty much everyone liked this thing, from the most cynical corners of the internet to the most pompous and self-important to the most populist to, frankly, the dumbest (Entertainment Weekly, for instance, raved about it). Yup, everybody seemed to be in agreement — TV is bad bad for you, except for Hannibal.

So, yeah — maybe my expectations were too high. Maybe I just don’t “get” how series TV works. Maybe I stupidly wanted it to look and feel like Manhunter on, probably, a fraction of that film’s budget. And maybe — just maybe — I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, but I thought that episode one of Hannibal, titled (again rather unimaginatively) “Aperitif,” sucked.

The setup, developed/dumbed down for television by series semi-creator Bryan Fuller (Thomas Harris should still get the lion’s share of the credit in my book) probably should work (and maybe on paper it does) — FBI special agent Will Graham, here played by Hugh Dancy (he of the bloodied glasses in the photo below) is paired with noted psychoanalyst Dr. Hannibal Lecter , here played by Mads Mikkelsen (he of the refined table manners pictured above) by Bureau big-shot Jack Crawford, here played by Laurence Fishburne (he of the admittedly rather uptight appearance pictured far below). Yup, Graham and Lecter are, for all intents and purposes, partners.

Cool, right? And let’s just for the time being leave aside the fact that Dancy is no William Petersen circa the mid-1980s and that Mikkelsen is no Bryan Cox (still the best screen Lecter, I don’t care what anybody says) or Anthony Hopkins. This is TV, we gotta set our sights lower. But even making allowances for all of that, this was still a thoroughly lifeless, clinical, dull affair. Mikkelsen’s Lecter is closer to the version seen (by those who actually did bother to see it) in Hannibal Rising, which I guess makes sense given that he’s still in the early stages of his cannibalistic career here, and by that I don’t just mean that his vaguely eastern European accent is still present. I mean he’s not the older, accomplished, seen-it-and-done-it-all super-genius criminal of the Cox and Hopkins variety — he’s still, for lack of a better way of putting it, nothing but a pompous ass who happens to eat people. Which I guess makes him more interesting than a pompous ass who doesn’t eat people, but only marginally so.

As far as Dancy’s interpretation of Graham goes, he probably does a better job in the role than Ed Norton did in Red Dragon, but the ultra-trendy twists Fuller gives the character — placing him somewhere in the autistic disorder spectrum, making him single so he can apparently spark up a love interest a few episodes down the line with co-star Caroline Dhavernas — are both unnecessary and, frankly, kinda patronizing. A lot of people seem to love the the way that this show has Graham mentally “re-live” the murders he’s investigating (all of which in this opening episode supposedly take place in my home state of Minnesota — probably by way of either rural California or Vancouver) by re-casting himself in the role of the killer, but I found it to be pretty gimmicky, to be honest, and already thoroughly predictable by the second time the conceit was employed. I’ll take William Petersen’s anguished-and-angry version of the character from Manhunter any day of the week, even if I did promise not to hold the series to the same standards as the films.

And, since I opened that door anyway — one thing that both Michael Mann and Jonathan Demme understood about Hannibal Lecter that, frankly and depressingly, no one else has seemed to be able to figure out is that, underneath his civilized and erudite trappings, this is essentially a blackly comic character. The greatest flaw of Hannibal the TV series — even greater than the lame-as-hell, wrapped-up-way-too-quickly-and-conveniently murder “mystery” here in episode one — is its insistence on continuing the humorless, morose trend previously established by Ridley Scott, Brett Rattner, and whoever the hell it was who directed Hannibal Rising. Fuller and Slade just plain don’t seem to get this guy at anything beyond the most surface level, and that’s a shame, because apparently we’re in for 12 more weeks of this shallow, thoroughly unsatisfying interpretation of the character.

Or, should I say, you are. My days as an armchair TV critic are over (at least for now). Hannibal had a few good things going for it, I suppose — particularly Laurence Fishburne’s spot-on take on Jack Crawford and the nifty little scene where Lecter feeds human meat to Graham (unbeknownst to him, of course) — but not enough to get me to tune in for more. I’m going back to what I know best. CSI with a cannibal just doesn’t do it for me. Now, Cannibal Holocaust on the other hand —

Quickie Review: 30 Days of Night (dir. by David Slade)

Posted on March 5, 2011 by Arleigh

30 Days of Night is pretty much a siege movie with heavy elements of horror and gore. Siege movies always succeed and fail depending on whether the tension and dread built up from the beginning of the film suspends the audience’s disbelief. Siege films like The Thing and Romero’s Living Dead trilogy works well because right from the get-go we see the tension build not just on the location the cast are put in but within the besieged survivors as well. Survival becomes that much more difficult due to human frailties and an inability to work together bringing the whole group down. The monsters outside are bad enough, but sometimes it’s the survivors themselves who must share the blame.

David Slade’s (director of the excellent Hard Candy) movie does a very good job of bringing the initial tension and dread the comic brought to life in its first chapter. The story takes place in Barrow, Alaska which happens to be located within the Arctic Circle. This location allows it a very peculiar yearly event of having pitch-black night which lasts for a period of an entire month. The movie begins just as the town of Barrow prepares for this month-long prolonged night. Most of the town decide to move down south for the month where the night doesn’t last as long, but enough stay in Barrow to give it a semblance of life and activity.

The build-up of the characters in 30 Days of Night marks one of the weaknesses in the film. There’s barely much characterization in distinguishing one Barrow, Alaskan from another. The lack in character development from all the characters whether human or vampire doesn’t invest the film with anyone we want to see make it out through the night and into dawn. Even Danny Huston, a very underrated and overly capable actor in past films fails to elevate his lead vampire character Marlowe beyond it’s genre trappings. Known only as The Stranger in the credits, Ben Foster’s Renfield-like character edges between caricature and genuine creepiness in his performance. Foster knows he’s in a genre movie and has fun with the character. He’s the only one to truly take on his character and roll with it.

I now get to the subject of the vampires themselves. Most vampire movies seem enamored in portraying the vampire as some sort of seductive, fashion-obsessed, or in the case of the Anne Rice-type anachronistic in their dress, with an unnatural immortality they either live as hedonistically as possible or bemoan their cursed existence. Then there’s the more recent trend that Twilight has brought into the vampire mythology and it’s not good. There’s never been a true portrayal of the vampire as a pure, hunger-driven monster with an appetite to match their status as one of folklore and legend’s top-tier boogeymen. Slade goes for speed and agility in his vampires instead of hypnotizing and mesmerizing their victims. The vampires in this movie owes much to the frenetic and over-amped infecteds of 28 Days Later.

The attack itself and the subsequent siege worked well enough in the early going. There were some great overhead shots of the town’s people losing it’s fight during the initial feeding frenzy as the camera shoots the scene high overhead. The only thing Slade had a misstep in terms of the siege itself was after those first couple of nights. The rest of the 30 days didn’t seem to show enough desperation on the faces and bodies of the last few survivors. Really, the only way the audience even knew a couple weeks have passed were the caption telling them how many days into the month-long night has passed. I think with some better editing and a better sense of structure in the middle section of the movie to show time actually progressing the movie would’ve been better on so many levels.

All in all, 30 Days of Night was just good enough to be a fun watch. The premise itself was original and put a new spin on the vampire genre that has rarely been tapped. The performances were pretty average with no one bringing the whole film down with a misstep performance or raising the bar with a great one. The final product had a chance to be something great, but just ends up being a good and original take on the vampire story with elements of Night of the Living Dead.