The Director’s Series –
Spike Jonze (Shorts and Music Videos)
Picture: B-
Sound: B Extras: B Main Music Videos: B+
In the 1990s, directors of Music Videos finally began to
be recognized as artists, especially as they branched out (for better or worse)
into feature filmmaking. Many still also
did television commercials, which suddenly became a place where they could be
more creative, as long as it sold the product.
Palm Pictures has launched a new DVD series entitled The Director’s
Series, which is being launched with the three directors who are its
founders: Chris Cunningham, Michel
Gondry and the subject of the debut disc, Spike Jonze.
You many now know him for his more recent feature films, Being
John Malkovich and Adaptation, which essentially are Post-Modernism
101 and 102. Critics were impressed,
most of whom had never seen Jonze’s Videos, and most of whom have no idea what
Post-Modernism is all about. This puts
Jonze several years ahead of most critics and the general public, but many
years behind the cutting edge.
Like his feature film work, Jonze thrives working within
such gray territory and this collection shows that. He has also proven to be a surprisingly smart
character actor, appearing in several of these clips, as well as the underrated
David O. Russell’s Three Kings (1999), and scenes for Ridley Scott’s Hannibal
(2001) that were cut for the theatrical release. They do not even appear on the DVD double
set, but he plays a hapless visitor to a weapon’s show, who sadly meets the
serial killer title character.
The first thing to say about his Music Video work is that
he has a knack for coming up with unforgettable images. One way he does this is to go out of his way
to manipulate the speed of the film, so there is slow motion, or things shot at
speeds other than the song, so they look different when played back at a normal
frame rate. He also goes out of is way
to get film grain where applicable, knowing a Video should not always be shot
on video, even High Definition. That has
helped keep him ahead of just about everyone else in the business.
Then there is the issue of expression and music. One hallmark of his Videos are in its
celebration of sloppy dancing, bad dancing, and any other kind of physical
movement that could be deemed outright embarrassing. In the 1980s, when Music Videos set in, they
had to be shot quickly and cheaply, but they were often hits just the
same. Few seemed to notice the sloppy
dancing, especially in groups. Those who
knew about dance or were used to musicals from Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros. and
M-G-M knew better about MTV, yet this did not impede MTV or the forum’s
progress.
Jonze’s work in the field mocks these videos, most
notoriously the taped Praise You, set to the great Fatboy Slim hit. Jonze assumes an identity as the head of a
very bad dance troop who performs the song their “special” way outside a
Cineplex. The crowd shows their
amusement and even ignorance. This makes
the dancers an easy target, which is the point.
The video is only so good, but it proves a point about human
nature. Those who can’t do criticize,
and those who at least try are not stuck.
This brings us to the deeper impulse of what it is we move
to, and how well we do it. If a song is
unusual, but we like the beat, will be have the bravery to move to it? Why would we be afraid to do so? Why are we worried what others will
think? How much do we live in a society
who wants to punish those who show individuality, want to have fun, and just
simply be free to do as one pleases? It
may not seem this smart and complex at first, since many of the cynical will
write-off anything they deem “foolish”, but that is also a mistake and pat of
the breakdown in really understanding the world around us.
We will apply these ideas to most of the following Videos,
as we now run through them:
Wax – This unforgettable, yet simple
video set to the single by the band California is the cover shot on the case of
this DVD. It is a very slow motion piece
of a man running down a street. At
first, we can only see his legs, and it looks like he may be on fire a bit,
somehow. The very slow pullout reveals
that his entire body is on fire! It is a
stunning image and the how (which ultimately is irrelevant) is never
explained. It also conveys the
hopelessness of the song’s singer and how he feels he made a mistake believing
the myths about Southern California, finding its dark, cold, dead end
side. It is also a vivid image, helped
by the slow motion, but this transfer is a bit soft. Either way, it is a minor classic of Music
Video and holds up very well.
Sure Shot – The Beastie Boys hit has
various speeds, with jerky motions and even stop-motion animation work. The group members often even jump onto the
camera itself, which has the ability to tilt back and forth like a swing. The three angles used to construct the Video
are available on The Criterion Collection double DVD Beastie Boys Anthology (2000),
which also offers this clip with better picture quality. The interesting thing
about this group in Jonze’s world is that they are the only ones who actually
make awkward physical movements look somehow graceful.
Drop – This Pharcide clip is one shot in reverse and
has the band members moving backwards.
Again, awkward movements, but attention getting and clever despite
wearing out it welcome sooner than most clips here.
Cannonball – Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth
co-directed this odd clip with Jonze featuring the female Rock band, stop
motion animation in brief snippets, and a cannonball (or is that a bowling ball
in disguise?) that literally rolls allover the place. Despite the co-director, it meets all of
Jonze auteuristic signatures.
Sabotage – The other Beastie Boys clip,
mocking one of the most awkward looking of all entertainments, 1970s detective
dramas. From the old Quinn Martin TV
series, to the Blaxploitation cycle, to the urban crime thrillers of that time,
they all show their age, and this video celebrates how gloriously bad they all
are. It also looks better on the
Criterion set than here, offering three alternate angles not on this disc. Jonze also did the Beastie’s Ricky’s Theme,
only on the Criterion set.
Da Funk – From Daft Punk’s Homework
debut album, Jonze dresses a guy who looks like McGruff The Crime Dog after
losing his job. There is even a brief
sequel (only on the D.A.F.T. DVD set, in which this video looks better than it
does here), but he takes the song and does NOT think of a narrative for
it. We just get this constantly
interesting series of moments where the dog-guy cannot integrate or find any
happiness. Referentially, it recalls the
Radio Raheme character in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989) who also
is permanently connected to a very loud “boom box/ghetto blaster” portable
stereo, who is also an outcast and has an even grimmer fate than our dig-guy
here.
What’s Up Fatlip? – Fatlip is a solo member of
Pharcide who did this clip with Jonze when the group broke up. This is one of the simplest of all the Videos
here and the least memorable.
Undone (The Sweater Song) – The
great band Weezer benefited greatly from two clips Jonze shot for
them. This one was shot to play back in
slow motion, as the band does their spoof of love songs that hint at lust. The joke is made funnier here, and then a
bunch of dogs show up at the end of the Video!
Great stuff!
Praise You – As already explained above,
it turns out Roman Coppola (a great Music Video director in his own right, who
made an amusing feature film directorial debut with CQ) assisted in this
clips production.
Feel The Pain – This clip features the band
Dinosaur Jr., who drive all over the city looking for a place to golf, which
turns out to be a chore finding nature in the concrete jungle of the city. They also dressed badly as Yuppies/Generation
Xers playing the game, which recalls a bad TV ad that imagines Gen Xers taking
up the sport as if they were Baby Boomers.
The difference in generations is huge and that ad was pulled as an
all-time big failure. This Video was a
hit.
If I Only Had A Brain – Though not a remake of
the famous song from the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz, what better for
Jonze than a song that recalls one of the most awkward dancers in cinema
history, The Scarecrow without a brain?
All the songs have commentary tracks except this song by MC 900ft Jesus,
but the clip is not bad.
Sky’s The Limit – Transplanting casts is always
a way to subvert expectations. There was
an all-midget Western in 1938 called Terror of Tiny Town (Columbia
Pictures), then there was the directorial debut of Alan Parker. Bugsy Malone (1976) supplanted an
adult cast with all children for a Gangster-genre film set in the 1930s, which
also happened to be a Musical. Set to a
song by the then-recently murdered rapper Notorious B.I.G., Jonze forges a
remarkable duplication of the Hip Hop Videos lead off by Hype Williams (see the
DVD of Hype’s clips elsewhere on this site), especially in the way the adults
move. Then, we are watching children,
but it is a tribute on several levels that works nicely.
Weapon of Choice – Jonze decided to do this
Video, despite leaving that world for feature films (at this time?), and for
the great Fatboy Slim record delivers his Masterpiece Music Video. Part of this has to do with it being the culmination
of all the themes he had been working through his whole Video career. The scene is a big hotel, with bad, quite,
lite, Muzak in the background. A man
sits down, starts to hear a beat in the bad music, then starts to move a
bit. Then, suddenly, he begins to
dance. Best of all, that man is
Christopher Walken! This is simply
brilliant, funny, full of surprises, constantly kinetic, fake, has in-jokes,
and shows off one of the greatest film actors of all time. If this is Jonze’s last Video, he went out
spectacularly.
Buddy Holly – Jonze reteams with Weezer and
gets back to 1970s TV. Instead of
detectives, he decides to conjure up the sitcom Happy Days. With lyrics about the Rock legend of the
title, Mary Tyler Moore, and the lyrical clash between all that and “homies
dissing my girl”, the clash is visually heightened further by an impressive
recreation of the Arnold’s food hangout on the show and actual footage intercut
from
the original episodes with Jonze’s new shoot. It even mocks another awkward TV trapping in
this longer version of the video: the commercial break!
Elektrobank – Sofia Coppola is an Olympic
Gymnast in this clip for the hit song by The Chemical Brothers. Of course, like Walken in Weapon of Choice,
it is beyond obvious she is NOT doing all of her dancing. Besides referencing the Kerry Shrug Olympic
victory, it questions the limits on how the graceful movements of such physical
movement could still be confining and limited.
This transfer is on the soft side, suggesting second-generation
material.
It’s Oh So Quiet – The set concludes with this
great Bjork clip, that is a nod to several types of Film Musical: the Folk Musical (inanimate objects coming to life), Operetta
(Umbrellas of Cherbourg), and Fantasy Musicals. It bounces from “reality” to the other forms
in and out, turning on a dime. It also
celebrates awkward, sloppy dancing, and still manages to celebrate the freedom
of all of them. It is a classic and the
right Video to end this set on.
The picture quality is not bad, but is hampered by one too
many clips offered in softer images than they were meant to be seen in. The various aspect ratios are fine
otherwise. All audio here is Dolby
Digital 2.0 Stereo, which usually sounds better than most DVDs with that
configuration. You can experiment with
surround playback, but the Stereo is best.
Other DVDs noted where the Videos are on other collections tended to be
available in 5.1 mixed, or with several music mixes in the case of The
Beastie Boys Anthology. This is also
not a complete collection of Jonze’s Videos, but a really well selected one.
There are many extras here, including a few on Side One,
and nothing but on Side Two. This also
includes a booklet so large, that the single DVD is in a double-sized case not
used enough when such cases are issued.
It is translucent like the cases Plexifilm uses, but this double
actually is made with a piece for a second disc to flip back and forth
inside. The ones we have seen previously
issued have been black plastic, like the single cases that offer this, so they
do not have to issue double cases to begin with. For this release, that flipping holder has
been removed to fit the 52-page booklet included. It has real covers, thick glossy paper, and
expensively reproduced photo print. This
is accompanied by an extensive interview with Jonze.
There is at least one commentary with every Video, save If
I Only Had A Brain, and The Beastie Boys do 40 minutes of silly commentary
on almost all of them, including their 2 clips.
There are also con-camera interview snippets to go with the audio-only
stuff in patches. Pharcide’s Drop
finishes Side One’s extras with an extended behind-the-scenes look. Side two has two shorts by mark Gonzales, a
Video Jonze tried to make for Oasis that they rejected (showing the usual ignorance
form one of the most overrated band of our time and the most overrated English
band of ALL time), a Girl Skateboards film excerpt The Woods from Mouse,
a Fatlip documentary that goes with his lone solo video (31 minutes), a day in
the life of teen cowboys in the short film (29 minutes) Amarillo By Morning,
a mocumentary (34 minutes) of the dance troop form the Praise You Video
called Torrance Rises, and the never used clip Jonze made for Fatboy
Slim’s Rockafella Skank that would be the basis for the Praise You
Video that is surprisingly good.
All that adds up top one of the best Music Video DVDs to
date, despite reservations on some of the picture quality. If Palm Pictures and the producers keep up
the high watermark of quality and content, this will be a landmark series. See more from the rest of the artists in this
series at these links:
Chris
Cunningham
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/522/Work+of+Chris+Cunningham+(Director
Michel
Gondry
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/567/Work+of+Michel+Gondry+(Director
Mark
Romanek
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/2711/Work+Of+Mark+Romanek+(Director
Jonathan
Glazer
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/2712/Work+Of+Jonathan+Glazer+(Director
Anton
Corbijn
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/2731/Work+Of+Anton+Corbijn+(Director
Stéphane Sednaoui
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/2737/Work+Of+Stephane+Sednaoui+(Dir
- Nicholas Sheffo
