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MAGIC_FORMULA
May 22, 2013
August 29, 2013
GREATEST_MUSIC_VIDEO
First, hold-up. If you haven't actually
looked at the greatest music video ever made,
you don't want to read all of this sideways
commentary, hemming-and-hawing about the
source of it's appeal. Don't wallow in
skepticism about the purity of the esthetics,
dive-in, embrace the moment, seize the daisy,
skip this ultimately empty, distant analytic Tis perhaps a pale
meandering for now, and give the pure joy shadow of the true
a chance to wash over you. dionysian ecstasy, but
the real thing is a
Once you *have* seen it, you might compare little hard to take,
it to my *last* pick for greatest music video: anyway.
HYPERDOLLS
(March 18, 2014)
It's disturbing how many of the And long after first seeing it
same elements are in play there: as a kid, I became fascinated
monsters, Japanese girls, and jokey with "The Faerie Twins" (aka
media satire. You couldn't play "The Peanuts") doing the
the two of them back-to-back, Mothera song.
they'd kill each other's effect.
(We went to see Mothera
Am I just some sort of asian-fetish, last Mother's Day...)
kawaii-junkie, godzilla baby,
with tastes effectively hardwired
by identity and upbringing?
It's also distressing to look at
some other work by the same
director, for example his 1997
"Faith No More" video that's a
pretty silly jokey "satiric" Wait, maybe it's an "homage":
rip-off of Hitchcock's movie http://vimeo.com/37349314
Vertigo.
By my usual methods,
I should put this in
a page called "HO_MAGE".
What makes one video work so
well, and the other so stupid, Does the director make
and flat? a habit of raiding
films for material?
It could be that the He often has a very,
AKB48 video works better shall we say,
simply because it has "cinematic" approach:
a slightly wider range:
a lot of the feeling of http://vimeo.com/59921519
absuridity is from
bouncing around between (An EMINEM video with
different genres, channel Sasha Gray...)
flipping through
japanese trash media.
In contrast, doing a Once you recognize formula
video that references as formula, it kills the
a *single* movie magic.
seems much less creative.
But then, that Hyper-Dolls
video, that has a tighter
focus (a satire of super hero
anime and monster movies),
that for me works about as It could be just that
well as the AKB48. I've never particularly
*liked* Vertigo (The
scenes of SF are nice,
but it doesn't make any
sense).
Or maybe the trouble is
that with Vertigo, that
old familiar sensation
of the exotic is lost.
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