Zim-zam, flippy-floppy, jim-jam! Gibby Goo Bop, an overly-enthusiastic, sandal wearing, peace loving, tree hugging entity presents his first ever music video.
Tag Archives: Music Video
SATURDAY SHORT: 8-BIT TRIP
Using Lego bricks for stop motion animation is all the rage nowadays, but we’ve never seen anyone use the technique with as much artistry as Swedish techno band rymdreglage does in this experimental music video. Enjoy Lego wizardry at it finest!
CAPSULE: ODDSAC (2010)
DIRECTED BY: Danny Perez
FEATURING: The music of Animal Collective and a bunch of unknown actors.
PLOT: Zilch. ODDSAC is completely without narrative, or much coherence. The only line of
dialogue is, “Yeah, he hates chocolate. He hates everything but green beans,” spoken by a young girl with a southern drawl. Oh, and there is a vampire.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While it is certainly one of the weirdest pieces of film-making I’ve encountered in awhile, it is not a movie. It is an extended performance art video piece for a new, unreleased Animal Collective album. Although it has some very cool visuals and the weirdness never lets up during the 52 minute running time, I say the art form of music videos should be separate from a list of the best 366 weird movies of all time.
COMMENTS: If you are familiar with the oddball musical stylings of Animal Collective, you would expect a visual album from these guys to be an “out-there” extravaganza. Well… it is. The film is a barrage of acid-fueled, kaleidoscopic visuals that may melt your retinas if you stare too long. Like the band’s music, ODDSAC does not follow conventional structure in its visual montages. At times, it is reminiscent of the experimental art films painstakingly crafted by Stan Brakhage in the early 1960’s. Whereas Brakhage was a pioneer in the experimental film field, Danny Perez is just really good at quick-cut editing and manipulating his visuals into a trippy panorama. At an open-discussion forum after the screening of the film in Los Angeles, Perez and the Collective gang mentioned the influence of John Carpenter’s Halloween. Say what?!? There are elements of horror interspersed with the craziness, but I don’t see any connection to a straight-forward slasher film.
The film is divided into 13 chapters. Each segment features a different song, so essentially it is 13 music videos. The first segment sets a tone of darkness and dread with the creepy song “Mr. Fingers,” which writhes its way around images of a towel-headed man with a red-painted face. Ropes of fire rhythmically swing around him, brightly lighting the pitch black sky. Elsewhere, a young woman claws into a wall, only to be immersed in a stream of oil that Continue reading CAPSULE: ODDSAC (2010)
SATURDAY SHORT: THE FOX AND THE RABBIT (2006)
The band Xiu Xiu (named after the award-winning Chinese film, Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl) is anything but conventional, so it’s only fitting that the strange and innovative Cam Archer should direct the cinematography for their song, “The Fox and the Rabbit”. Instruments, lyrics, imagery: everything comes together in this short to create an experience you won’t take lightly. “When the fox hears the rabbit cry, he comes running… but not to help.”
SATURDAY SHORT: WAKE UP (2010)
Heather Mahler takes us on a fanciful journey through the campus of Snow College in Utah. Energetic, imaginative, and fun; “Wake Up” will be the highlight of your Saturday afternoon. Music by Snyder Mahler.
SATURDAY SHORT: THE TRIP (2009)
As uncomfortable as it is original, Unglewd will challenge your concept of music. Samples of chatter and screeching, accompanied by erratic drums, blend with a slew of distressful images to make this week’s short a bad trip you must experience.
SHORT: MEATBALL MACHINE: REJECT OF DEATH (2007)
DIRECTED BY: Yoshihiro Nishimura
FEATURING: Asami
PLOT: An undead schoolgirl (?) joins three ethnic stereotypes to battle a bare-breasted Meatball Machine mutant in this music video-style short.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Filmed by special effects maven Yoshihiro Nishimura in 2007 as an extra for the Meatball Machine DVD, Reject of Death was made without a net, and without a sense of accountability to anyone who might censor it for content, or for sense. Done in the style of a music video, it displays all the narrative rigor one expects from the form—which actually serves this material well. Add politically incorrect stereotypes to the fast-moving mix of absurdist gore, heavy metal music, and killer boobs, and you have one weird little extra.
COMMENTS: I can only imagine that the correct way to see Reject of Death is to view it before seeing Meatball Machine; not knowing the “rules” of the MM universe likely to boost the already pretty “WTF?” level into the stratosphere. The scene is set by a schoolgirl causally hacking at her arm with a razor, only to find a glowing button encased beneath her flesh. She presses the button, and heavy metal power chords assault our ears. Cut to a scene of a wigged prostitute whose trick turning is interrupted by the whir of tentacles and spray of blood that indicates infection by alien parasites. Intercut those scenes with three ethnic stereotypes—a Native America, and African, and an Asian—wandering bemused around the streets of a Japanese city. Bring all three groups together on a rooftop for a bloody battle royale which sprinkles in kung fu posturing, hermaphrodism, and a nipple that shoots barbed chains into eyeballs, and you have yourself an out-of-control featurette that will score with fans of pop-surrealism and exploitation-extremism alike. Rejects of Death utilizes the thin mythology set up in Meatball Machine, and very well may be an attempt to explain one character’s back story, but it stands apart stylistically from the feature that inspired it. Unabashedly (and gloriously) offensive, the short isn’t special enough by itself to justify a DVD purchase, but packaged together with the feature film, it may be enough to inspire fence-sitters to take a chance on a rental.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“…as good—and in some respects, much better—than the main movie.”–Bill Gibron, DVD Verdict