When it starts you think it’s just going to be another suburban sprawl video, with the ennui-stricken kids and the empty swimming pools and the workaholic father and the pill-popping moms. And I’ve got nothing against existential dread but, when the video started, I wasn’t expecting this to be anything that I hadn’t seen before.
And then Ned showed up.
Ned is the little alien thing who is watching Tyler and Josh while they’re cleaning the pool. It’s really impossible not to love Ned. I mean, Ned is adorable! And the way that Ned comes out of hiding and then quickly ducks back into hiding reminds me of the way Doc acts whenever he’s playing with me or Erin. Of course, Doc doesn’t like water so he probably wouldn’t be near a pool. Doc’s thing is to get underneath the couch and then try to grab you whenever you walk by. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I’ve fallen asleep on the floor, just to wake up with Doc trying to pull my hair out of my head.
Anyway, Ned is obviously pretty picky about what type of water it’ll dive into and that’s probably a good thing. A friend of mine once swam in a pool that hadn’t been properly cleaned and her eyes were so bloodshot afterward that I basically had to stop being her friend until they cleared up. They were like seriously freaking me out.
I love the closing shot of this video. Ned and Tyler, hanging out in the swimming pool.
This is another of those videos that I like specifically because it’s totally surreal and how you interpret it will probably depend on what type of mood you’re in when you view it.
Is this video about being trapped?
Is this video about breaking free?
Is this video about the sad face starting at you from the wall?
Is it about longing or is it about being owned?
That’s up to you to decide. I just like the idea of everyone being stuck in a mentally-projected maze. Whenever I see a video that featured an overhead shot of a maze, I’m reminded of one of my favorite scenes from The Shining, the one where Jack stares down at a model of the Overlook’s famous hedge maze while Danny and Wendy wander through the real maze. Briefly, it appears as if Wendy and Danny are actually in the model. Who knows, maybe they are?
Mazes are a great metaphor for …. well, just about everything! There’s very little in life that can’t be represented by a maze. Of course, in The Shining, the maze represented not only Jack’s twisted mind but also the way that time inside the Overlook twists back in on itself.
By this point, everyone should know that I have a weakness for surreal music videos, especially when they’re in black-and-white and they involve an overhead shot of a maze. So, my selection of this video for music video of the day should come as a shock to no one.
I like this one. The eyes remind of Salvador Dali’s famed work on Hitchcock’s Spellbound. For that matter, they also remind me of Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet. One of the plot points of Four Flies is that the identity of the killer has been preserved on the victim’s retina.
(Though that’s scientifically impossible, you might be surprised to learn that there’s quite a few people who believe that can actually happen. In fact, I was recently reading about a police interrogation in which the cops got a guy to confess by telling him that they had found his image preserved in his victim’s eyes.)
Of course, you really can’t talk about eyes in cinema without mentioning Lucio Fulci. One of Fulci’s trademarks was that almost every film featured either an eye getting popped out of a head or otherwise split in half. I have to admit that, after seeing Zombi 2, I am now incredibly protective of my eyes.
With this year’s Sundance Film Festival getting underway in Colorado, I’m going to be spending the next two weeks looking at some films that caused a stir at previous Sundance Film Festivals. Today, I’m taking a look at the 2018’s Searching.
Searching tells the story of David Kim (John Cho) and his daughter, Margot (Michelle La).
David thinks that he has a close relationship with his daughter but, in reality, they’ve been drifting apart ever since David’s wife died two years earlier. Now, Margot is away at college and David is alone at home. They still communicate, of course. They message each other on Facebook. They Skype. David sill sends Margot money for her piano lessons.
And yet, even if he can’t bring himself to fully admit it, David knows that they’re not as close as they once were. Their conversations are often awkward and he doesn’t really know much about the friends that Margot has made at college. Too often, he finds himself starting to ask her about what’s really going on in her life, just to then erase the message before sending. One night, when Margot tells David that she’s going to a friend’s house for a study group, he has no reason not to believe her. It’s not until Margot fails to return from studying that David is forced to confront how little he actually knows about his daughter’s life.
As a film, Searching is set almost entirely on smartphones and computer screens. Considering that the movie could have just as easily been called Unfriended 3: Searching, this is a surprisingly good and emotionally resonant film. We watch as David helplessly sends out messages to his daughters, messages that are destined to be unanswered. We watch as David looks at old pictures and videos of the family he once had, searching for some sort of answer hidden in the past. And, as we watch all of this, we come to realize that David is not just searching for his daughter’s whereabouts. Instead, in a world dominated by social media, he’s also searching for a human connection, for something more than just a tweet or a cryptic status update.
Of course, the film does occasionally threaten to take its format just a bit too far. Sometimes, you really do find yourself wishing that David would just get offline and go outside and look for his daughter. (Actually, he does do that but, because of the film’s narrative structure, we don’t really get to witness it.) By the time David is having nightly FaceTime sessions with the detective (Debra Messing) assigned to his daughter’s case, you can be excused for fearing that the film’s style is going to end up collapsing in on itself.
Fortunately, Searching is held together by the lead performance of John Cho. Whenever Searching threatens to veer into self-parody, Cho is there to bring it back on track. Before this film came out, I guess Cho was probably best known for appearing in the Star Trek movies. Searching made him the first Asian-American to headline a mainstream thriller in Hollywood and Cho gives such a sympathetic and compelling performance that you’re willing to excuse whatever flaws might be present in the film’s narrative. Because he’s played by John Cho, you want David to find his daughter. You want him to find that for which he’s searching.
Today’s music video of the day is one of those video’s that I think works best if you imagine that everyone in it is dead and that the video itself is taking place in Purgatory.
It’s seriously not that outlandish an idea. There has to be some sort of entertainment in Purgatory and the bartender certainly appears to have seen his share of singers and drinkers.
Another possible option is that this video is taking place at the Overlook Hotel. Again, the ghostly atmosphere would seem to suggest that we’re in another world, one that probably running parallel to ours. It’s very easy to imagine Jack Torrance sitting at the bar, watching the singers and wondering why Grady keeps denying having been the caretaker.
And, of course, there’s always the chance that we’re visiting a section of the Black Lodge. Or maybe we’re at the Roadhouse again….
Well, regardless of where this atmospheric video is taking place, enjoy!
We’ve seen the future and wow, there’s a lot of trash.
Seriously, that’s the main thing that I’ve noticed about movies set in the future. No one ever picks up after themselves. You would think that we’d have robots cleaning and polishing every inch of the Earth but apparently, WALL-E was a lie.
Even with that in mind, though, I still cry every time that I watch WALL-E. Damn, that’s a good movie. It totally should have been nominated for Best Picture. Between that and not nominating Three Identical Strangersfor Best Documentary, I don’t know what’s wrong with the Academy….
Anyway, this song appears on the soundtrack of a movie and no, it’s not WALL-E. Instead, it’s from Alita: Battle Angel, which was written and produced by James Cameron and directed by Robert Rodriguez. The movie’s coming out this February and maybe it will replace the Valentine-shaped hole that’s been in our soul ever since the Fifty Shades trilogy came to an end.
Or maybe not. I just hope it’s good!
Anyway, the video is a party in a futuristic rubbish heap. I don’t suggest trying this in your own neighborhood landfill. Party clean, everyone.
With this year’s Sundance Film Festival getting underway in Colorado, I’m going to be spending the next two weeks looking at some films that caused a stir at previous Sundance Film Festivals. Today, I’m taking a look at the 2018 documentary, Three Identical Strangers.
It’s generally agreed that last year was a great year for documentaries. Between RBG, Would You Like To Be My Neighbor?, and Free Solo cleaning up at the box office, 2018 was the year that proved the audiences were willing to pay money to see reality captured on film. For me, there was no better documentary released last year than Three Identical Strangers.
Three Identical Strangers starts out like a Hallmark movie and then slowly turns into a horror movie. In New York, in the early 1980s, three young men who have previously never met discover that they’re triplets. At first, they’re a media sensation. Young, handsome, and charismatic, Edward Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafran become instantly celebrities. We watch archival footage of them appearing on a talk show and talking about how they discovered each other and everything that they have in common. They all smoke the same brand of cigarette. They all tend to have the same fashion sense and interests. All three of them smile while announcing that they’re single and they like women, which causes the audience to break into applause.
It was the 80s and we’re told that meant sex, drugs, and rock and roll. There are the three brothers at a club. There they are walking down the streets of New York, with three huge grins on their faces. There they are making a cameo appearance in a film with Madonna. Soon, they’re opening up a restaurant together, they’re getting married, and they’re starting families of their own….
And yet, as we watch all of this happy footage, we’re also watching present-day interviews with David Kellman and Robert Shafran. It’s impossible not to notice that, in the present, both of them speak in voices tinged with weariness. In the present day interviews, neither one of the brothers smile. Both of them have their guard up. To put it simply, neither one of them appears to be particularly happy.
It’s also impossible not to notice that Edward Galland, who is frequently described as having been the most charismatic of the triplets, is nowhere to be seen.
While the three triplets are becoming celebrities, the families that adopted them are wondering why they never knew about the other brothers. All three of the brothers were adopted through the same adoption agency and, interestingly, all three of them were put into families that had just recently adopted a daughter as well. One brother was given to an upper class family while another was adopted by a middle class family and finally, the third brother was given to a lower class family. It quickly becomes clear that this was not a coincidence.
Instead, the three brothers were a part of a social experiment, one designed to see how growing up at different economic levels would effect them. And, as quickly becomes clear, Edward, David, and Robert weren’t the only part of that experiment. Under the direction of psychologists Viola W. Bernard and Peter B. Neubauer, several sets of twins and triplets were separated for the exact same reason….
To say anything else about this haunting documentary would run the risk of spoiling it. It’s a thought-provoking film, as well as a rather disturbing one. Watching the film, it’s impossible not to mourn for the childhoods that the brothers lost. At the same time, you do find yourself wondering if all of the triplets’s subsequent problems can be blamed on the experiment or if they would have happened even if they all had been raised in the same family? The documentary leaves the answer to that question ambiguous. Much like the triplets, the audience is left wondering what could have been.
Oddly, Three Identical Strangers was not nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar. Well, that’s the Academy’s loss because this film was the best documentary of a very good year.
The 4 and a half minute video below is guaranteed to bring tears to your eyes. It certainly did to mine. It’s the story of a dancer and it’s also the story of a father’s love for his daughter and the way that we can all live on through music, art, and memory. It starts with a dancer — according to the video’s YouTube description, her name is Fiona — dancing and then takes us into the past, showing us how her pianist father supported her dreams until he eventually fell victim to his own mortality. The film ends with her achieving her dream, along with her younger self, and the sound of her father’s composition playing in the background.
And it’s really nicely done. The scenes of Fiona dancing are flawlessly combined with the flashbacks to her father, creating a true sense of a dancer living in the moment while still surrounded by her memories and how she came to be the person who is now on stage. It’s a tribute to not just her father but also to everyone who has ever supported us in our dreams, whether those dreams were artistic or something else. It’s a heart-felt and sentimental tribute and you can check it out below:
This may not be one of Gwen’s more popular videos but I like it because, like her in this video, I’m usually up at 4 in the morning.
Of course, in the video, Gwen’s up at four in the morning and looking totally put together because she’s waiting for her lover to return. They’ve had a fight. He’s left her. And now, she can’t sleep. Not even going for a drive through the early morning darkness helps.
Myself, when I’m up at 4 in the morning, it’s mostly because I got wrapped up either reading or watching something and, for whatever reason, I lost track of time. Usually, around two, I always say, “I really should get some sleep …. but let’s see what’s on TCM!” If it turns out to be a classic film noir or an old horror movie, there’s no way I’m going to sleep.
Even worse is when I’m trying to turn off my TV but I accidentally click the button for Netflix instead and, before you know it, I’m watching old episodes of Degrassi: The Next Class. Then suddenly, I’ll realize that it’s not five in the morning and I’ve spent an hour yelling, “No, Maya! Zig’s no good for you!” at the TV. That’s happened more times than I want to admit.
Much like Gwen, I usually react to discovering that I’ve stayed up too late by walking around the house. Usually, I end up accidentally kicking a wall while barefoot or tripping over a stair. Once I wandered out in the backyard and somehow managed to lock myself out of the house. Of course, I was only wearing my beloved Pirates t-shirt and it was like 21 degrees outside so I quickly came to regret not getting to bed at two.
So, my point is, I like this video because I can relate to it. In fact, I’ll probably think about it a few hours from now, when I realize that it’s 4 a.m. and I’m still awake.
This video for Kill the Lights finds Britney Spears being — what else? — hounded by the paparazzi so she promptly flies off into space and goes to another planet. Unfortunately, it turns out that the entire universe is apparently obsessed with robbing Britney of her privacy.
This concept behind this video was the result of a fan fiction contest, in which people were asked to send their ideas to Britney’s management, via her website. The winner of the contest was a girl from Argentina, who titled her submission “Known Everywhere.” Believe it or not, I came very close to entering this contest myself. You have to remember that this was back in 2009, when I was in a much darker place than I am today. As such, my idea was for the video to be an homage to Lucio Fuci’s Zombi 2, with Britney going to a Caribbean island to investigate the death of Justin Timberlake and then getting bitten by a zombified Joey Fatone. My idea was that the video would end with zombie Britney eating Kevin Federline. Personally, I still think it’s a good idea but I never actually submitted it so I’ve got no one to blame for this video but myself.
Still, just imagine if I had submitted my idea and it had been accepted. (Seriously, I totally would have won if I had entered the contest.) Not only would Britney now being getting credit for the zombie revival but she’d probably also would have gone on to do any number of horror-themed music videos.
So, basically, I made a huge mistake by not submitting my idea and now the world is suffering.
Through the Shattered Lens