But Not Tonight is a good example of the type of music video that used to dominate MTV, the movie soundtrack video. Depeche Mode recorded But Not Tonight for the film Modern Girls. The video cuts between scenes of the band performing and scenes taken from the movie, which is why Virginia Madsen, Daphne Zuniga, and Clayton Rohner are so prominently featured. The video did well on MTV, which didn’t translate into the movie becoming a hit.
While the movie was directed by Jerry Kramer, the video was directed by Tamra Davis. Davis was a prolific video director before moving into feature film and television directing.
But I thought that the music video for Movies by Alien Ant Farm had the band jumping into a theater screen? They did. It just took them three videos to get there. Yes, there are three versions of this music video. Why? I know that the third one was shot after the success of Smooth Criminal. That makes sense. Why was this one was replaced? Maybe because it looks like it is in bad taste, cheap, and generic. Just a guess. It could also have had something to do with this part:
Sure, we get that the point is supposed to be that, like the other girls, there’s something monsterish about her. In her case, she grows male muscles when she is turned on. Still, if mvdbase is to be believed, they shot another one that aired in March of 2001, which would coincide with the release of the album the song is on. Maybe that bit bothered people, so they made a new one. Maybe they wanted a more modern look. I don’t know.
Obviously I’m doing this music video today because of the Oscars. I honestly didn’t know that there were three versions of this video. I guess this will finish out February.
Now I have to sort out a little conflicting information. There seems to be no disagreement between IMVDb, mvdbase, and Wikipedia when it comes to the version we all know where they jump into a theater screen. That one was directed Marc Klasfeld who also did Smooth Criminal, and a few other videos for the band. The disagreement is over whether this version, or the next version, was done by Tamra Davis rather than Marcos Siega.
That’s from the second version. M. Siega is director Marcos Siega and R. Nickell is cinematographer Ramsey Nickell. You can see the date as well.
Another way I’m sure this is the first version is that this video fits with the origin of the name of the band. According to guitarist Terry Corso in a Reddit AMA:
“Oh that was just my daydream about planet seeding by entities from other dimensions. bored at work stuff”
The women are the aliens who have come to where they are performing and each member of the band daydreams about each of them turning out to be an alien that tries to have sex with them. It makes sense to me that this was the first version unless someone comes along with additional information.
According to mvdbase, this was Tamra Davis’ last music video. It’s funny to note that while Davis didn’t do the jumping-into-the-theater-screen version, that one does feature the character of Veruca Salt, and she did direct a video for the band Veruca Salt.
Jeff Selis edited this music video. He also did Dragula for Rob Zombie. He’s edited well over 100 music videos, so we’ll see plenty more of his work in the future.
It sure is Groundhog Day. I won’t make the joke that I am sure you’ll hear all day.
As for this video, I had a different one planned originally. I was going to go with another duet that Cher did for a love song. Then I thought it would be worth checking to see if she had ever done a music video for this song before I started writing. Yep! This exists. Why does this exist? Apparently Cher did this for the album The Beavis and Butt-Head Experience. I think I may be traumatized for life now that I’ve heard Cher ask Butt-Head if he feels lucky. Why did she do this? I don’t know. Maybe it was for a comeback after the 1980s were over.
This was co-directed by Tamra Davis and Yvette Kaplan. Davis directed around 40 music videos. She’s also directed numerous films and episodes of TV Shows. Kaplan has mainly worked in animation. She’s done work on other things, but the majority was as a supervising director for the run of Beavis and Butt-Head. She also worked on the movie Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996).
Enjoy this bizarre trip down memory lane. I swear I didn’t pick this out in advance. It fell into my lap at the last minute.
Last year, I started a new blog called Lisa Marie’s Song of the Day. It’s nothing big. It’s just a place where, on a daily basis, I share music that I happen to like. Ever since I started the site, certain people have been giving me a hard time over the fact that they have discovered that I am a total Britney Spears fangirl.
Well, I’m not ashamed to admit it. I love Britney Spears. I always have. Even when I was going through my whole “wearing black and writing dark poetry” phase, I still loved Britney. Her songs are great to dance to and they’re even more fun to sing off-key and at the top of your lungs when you’re taking a shower or driving to or from work. Even better is when you have a family member in the car and she has no choice but to listen as you sing Work Bitch in your thickest rural accent.
(Whenever I sing, I unleash my inner country girl.)
Of course, it’s never just been Britney’s music to which I’ve paid attention. I was jealous of her when she dated Justin Timberlake. I was worried for her when she married Kevin Federline. I was scared for her when she went through her period of public instability. When she shaved her head, lost custody of her children, and was placed under the conservatorship of her father and attorney, it angered me to watch as the media treated her pain as entertainment. When she was diagnosed as being bipolar, I related to her because I knew exactly what she was going through. I even still use the #FreeBritney hashtag on twitter.
So, in short, I’m definitely a fan. But I have to admit that I prefer Later Britney, the one who uses bitch as a term of empowerment, to Early Britney, the one who used to lie about being a virgin.
The 2002 film Crossroads is definitely all about Early Britney.
Crossroads was Britney’s feature film debut and it was also pretty much her exit. The film did well at the box office (and I’ll admit that I paid money to see it … well, actually, I got someone else to pay for me to see it but you get the point…) but the critics absolutely hated it and it still regularly appears on lists of the worst films ever made. For the record, I do not think that Crossroads is one of the worst films ever made. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not exactly a good film but it’s definitely something of a guilty pleasure. Whenever I watch it, I go on a nostalgia trip and that’s always a little bit fun.
In Crossroads, Britney plays Lucy. Lucy has just graduated from high school. Lucy is supersmart and, the film is quick to tell us, a super virgin as well. (There’s something rather icky about how much media emphasis was put on Britney’s claimed virginity. Especially since even her biggest fans suspected there was no way she was still a virgin if she was dating Justin Timerblake…) Lucy was her school’s valedictorian and now her father is looking forward to Lucy going to medical school and becoming a doctor. Lucy’s father is played by Dan Aykroyd. Though Aykroyd is playing a Georgia auto mechanic, he makes no attempt to hide his thick Canadian accent. Good for you, Dan!
Anyway, Lucy is preparing to do what her father wants but then she gets an opportunity to drive across the country with two childhood friends and a complete stranger. In high school, Lucy had little to do with snobby Kit (Zoe Saldana) and pregnant Mimi (Taryn Manning) but, when they were all 10 years-old, they were all BFFs. In fact, they were so close that they even buried a time capsule. Digging up the capsule inspires these three frenemies to hop into a car with Ben (Anson Mount) and hit the road!
Ben, it turns out, has just gotten out of prison but he’s hot and he’s musically talented. The girls are a little bit scared because they think Ben might have been in prison for murder but seriously, Ben is way too cute to be a murderer. Plus, when he reads Lucy’s poetry, he sets it to music.
AND SERIOUSLY, HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE THAT!? I mean, c’mon — every girl who has ever written a poem has, at some point, fantasized about a boy who would put that poem to music and tell her that her words were almost as beautiful as she was.
I mean, there’s a lot of negative things that could be said about Crossroads. I’m not a fan of the way Mimi was portrayed and, towards the end of the film, it almost feels as if the movie is suggesting that she’s being karmically punished for getting pregnant without being married. The film’s emphasis on Lucy’s (and, by implication, Britney’s) chastity feels dangerously reactionary. And, while Britney doesn’t really give a bad performance, she’s still not quite believable as someone who was so busy studying that she didn’t even go to one single party during high school.
But ultimately, this will always be the film where a hot guy took a girl’s poem and spontaneously set it to music.
With the first month of January 2013 almost coming to an end I thought it was high time to introduce a new feature to the site. This one shall be called “Guilty Pleasure” and it will encompass all sorts of entertainment examples that I and those who on the site who wish to participate that they consider a personal guilty pleasure. It could be any film, music, book or games that one considers a personal favorite despite not being highly accepted by critics and the general population, at large.
The first entry to “Guilty Pleasure” is a stoner comedy that I always end up stopping whatever activity I’m doing at the moment to watch. I have it on DVD, will watch it on cable whenever it’s on and if a Blu-Ray version ever gets released I probably would buy it just to have it. This guilty pleasure film is 1998’s Half Baked starring Dave Chappelle and…well let’s just say all one needs to know is that it stars Dave Chappelle. It’s a mary jane flick that’s reached the levels of the Cheech and Chong flicks of the 70’s and 80’s.
My brother and I have seen this film so many times that we could quote scenes from it almost perfectly. I may not be quite the pothead that the characters in this film end up being, but anyone who has seen Half Baked knows at least one or two who fit the different type of stoners we find in it.
In the immortal words of Sampson Simpson: “YES! Cuban B!”
Through the Shattered Lens 