Alexandra Stan - “Mr. Saxobeat”

  We start out with Alexandra being dragged into a police station. We have no idea what she’s done that she shouldn’t have, but it could very possibly have something to do with the 4 tons of blue eye-shadow that she’s wearing. Some detective with big sunglasses hauls Alexandra across the station and up some very dramatic split-level stairs, and we know right away that those stairs will come in handy when folks break into the inevitable line dance later in the video.

  For some reason, it takes an incredibly long time for Alexandra to maneuver up those stairs. We spend a lot of footage playing around with jump cuts and odd angles, most of which seem designed to highlight the fact that Alexandra has breasts and an apparent fondness for wearing multiple metal belts around her waist. We get glimpses of a couple other ladies being forcibly escorted as well, but they must be backup criminals and we probably won’t get to see much of them until the chorus.

  Three years later, our little party gets to the top of the stairs and Alexandra is shoved into one of those stark interrogation rooms where people get accused of things and have to explain exactly what they were doing at 10:37pm on a Saturday night three years ago. I guess the police must have a lot of questions, because there are about 50 officers crammed in there with Alexandra. (All of them wearing sunglasses, naturally, because the sun is always so bright in windowless rooms.)

  They make Alexandra sit in a magical chair, one that causes her to instantly break into the vocals of the song. She does this for a bit, with more of those fast and quirky camera angles, then she slips out into the hallway and does some minimal choreography to the beat. (This must be a very laid-back police station if you can make everybody wait while you go dance in other parts of the building.)

  Then we’re back in the interrogation room, and the jump shots start piling up. The officers may have had some questions, but they don’t really have a chance to ask any of them because Alexandra won’t stop singing and flirting. She wiggles all over the place, poses sultrily, and makes sure we understand that she’s wearing form-fitting leather. Oh, and all of this is enhanced by her curious hairdo, a style that indicates she must have been arrested during a storm with some pretty serious straight-line winds.

  We also get to see the backup criminals being interviewed, but they don’t seem to be as horny as Alexandra, so we mainly stick with shots of her humping the conference table and trying to keep her eyes open with all that heavy eye shadow. Then we have a montage of more dancing in the hallway, Alexandra artfully exhaling smoke even though we never see a cigarette, and the officers finally getting fed up with all the musicality and aerobics, throwing the girls into a jail cell.

  The backup criminals sit on a cot and pout, but Alexandra opts to just stand at the front of the cell, probably because she’s discovered that shoving her breasts through the bars enhances them even more than the shadowy lighting is already doing. In the midst of this game of pokey, she spies the officer who is on guard right outside the cell. He has unattractive and wispy facial hair, a sure sign that he’s very lonely and hasn’t gotten to use his nightstick much lately.

  Alexandra, being experienced at the needs of men, decides to use home-boy’s yearnings to her own advantage, quickly seducing him with her amazing talents (with some assistance from her backup criminal dancers) and managing to steal his gun, just not the one he wished she would have taken. The girls lock the poor guy into the cell, then race off, Charlie’s Angels style, to do who knows what. But first, of course, they have to pause in another hallway and do the line dance that we knew was coming.

  Eventually, after sneaking around for a bit and posing on some stairs, the girls manage to locate the officers’ locker room, which just happens to be stocked with police uniforms perfectly-designed for endowed women and their sidekicks. This obviously means that we have to have an extended montage of the ladies changing clothes, with shots of bare skin flashing and libidos rising.

  Then the girls, waving guns and heaving chests, storm-troop into some room where there’s a bunch of officers clearly not paying attention to what is going on in their own precinct. The girls tie the guys up using duct tape (they couldn’t just use the handcuffs that are surely lying all over the station?) and then they sashay out, without a single hair mussed.

  There’s one last bit of line dancing in yet another random hallway, then the trio bravely make their way back down that grand staircase, pretending to be real officers and not Victoria’s Secret models showcasing the latest clothing line, “Criminal Crotchware”. We get a glimpse of another guy being dragged into the station, but Alexandra purposefully ignores him. (Hey, is that Mr. Saxobeat?) Then the girls, grinning at each other in triumph, simply walk out the front door, headed to Macy’s for a sale on toaster ovens…


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Colbie Caillat - “ Brighter Than The Sun”

  We start off with a shot of a lovely beach house that only recording stars can afford, then we cut to Colbie standing somewhere outside and letting the sun worship her golden locks as it usually does. Cut once more to what we assume is the inside of the house, and there’s a whole lot of happy people up in here ready for a party. Hay, gurl, hay.

  But first Colbie wants to make sure she has an appropriate and pleasing theme for this little shindig so everyone can relax and enjoy themselves before that first person has had too much to drink and things go all to hell. In between bouts of twirling in the sunlight and lying artfully on a couch, Colbie explains to her posse that we gonna jack things up a bit by bringing the outside inside for a while. Everybody run get some dirt and some plants and some wine coolers!

  And of course all the folks crowded around her think it’s the best idea ever, mainly because Home Girl has top billing and they better be sweet if they want to get hired again. To get even more in the mood, a bunch of people jump up and down in that slo-mo way that means they don’t really know how to dance but they’re supposed to act like it. Then I guess a Home Depot truck pulls up outside, because suddenly the party guests have a full supply of gardening supplies at their disposal. This leads to more jumping.

  Colbie decides its time for more twirling in the sun, so she does some more of that, although she is kind enough to go sing in front of her super-excited posse every once in a while. Meanwhile, the extras who weren’t important enough for the dancing business are running around fervently, potting plants and trimming roses and rolling out sod on the coffee table. (They even use some of the sod on Colbie’s bed, which she briefly sits on and sings like she really loves it, but you know that once the camera turned away she motioned to one of her assistants that that mess better be gone by bedtime.)

  In the middle of all this fun, Colbie orders folks to do that thing where people stand in a circle and clap while some fool tries to bust some moves in the center of that circle. The first guy is all shifty, doing something not right with his shoulders, so I hope Security is keeping an eye on him. Then we have the possibly-drunken girl doing the standard water-sprinkler dance, and some more folks who just like to wear retro flannel shirts and strike poses, because any actual choreography is too tiring after you’ve lugged a bag of fertilizer.

  At the 1:06 mark, a ring of disembodied, clapping hands close in on Colbies’s head while she’s sprawled on the grassy knoll. It looks kind of creepy and I’m not sure I would order such a thing from the menu, but Colbie doesn’t seem to mind the vengeful hands at all. She probably has the right clauses in her contract to protect her at moments like this, so it’s all good.

  And that’s about the extent of it, really. People dancing, Colbie singing and shimmering, and impromptu landscaping. (They even install a lily pond at one point, because you sure won’t make the front page of the society papers without one of those.)

  Side note on that shifty guy: He keeps breaking character and looking directly at the camera instead of pretending to talk to his friends or adore Colbie. (Stop the video at 1:30: That boy is up to no good, even if he does have interesting cheekbones. He is clearly planning to take things that don’t have his name on them.)

  I guess Colbie gets a little tired out from the twirling and her unending natural beauty, so she goes in this one room where they’ve installed a swing in front of the fireplace, because apparently that’s how it looked in her dream. There must be a sign on the door explaining that this is a single-occupancy room, because her frenetic and slightly-soiled friends leave her alone while she wanders about while (what I hope are) butterflies flitter about. Oh, and there’s an orange tree in her Solitude Room as well. Gotta have one of those.

  Refreshed and spiritually-realigned, Colbie leaves the room and is immediately attacked by that vicious ring of hands again, so I guess it’s true that stars don’t have any real privacy. But she’s a trooper, and she claps along with the hands to show that she ain’t scared of people that come up in her grill and get all threateningly rhythmic.

  Meanwhile, other hands are busy all over the place, hurling wads of dirt, sculpting bushes, pruning thorny things, and shoving stems into anything where a stem can be shoved. (On the slutty-girl side of the spectrum, we do have a few possibly naughty nymphs who seem to be slightly turned on by all the stem-thrusting going on, casting smoky gazes at the few men in the room, but that kind of action is really for another type of video.)

  Eventually everyone appears to get bored with the Patty Planter routine and we stop seeing so much of that, focusing instead on the partying and revelry and the shame-potential dancing angle where folks thrust your ass into the middle of the room to see if you can come up with something remotely interesting. While you do get bonus points if your spastic maneuvers actually seem to be going along with the song, the real goal seems to be looking cute and not spilling your drink.

  And that basically takes us through the rest of the video. We do get a few more shots of Colbie strolling about in that spring meadow room like it’s an advertisement for feminine wash, and a couple of remaining gardening tasks, like actually mowing the grass in the living room, because that’s always important, but really it’s now all about the dancing and having a good time in Colbie’s Chalet de Flower Power.

  So dance we do, with everybody grinning so big their heads might snap off, limbo-lines of people snaking through the petunia pots, shifty guy still looking shifty, nobody breaking a sweat even though there are 400 people shoved into one room made to look like a place where Tazan would meet Jane, and one odd moment where Colbie seems to believe that she might be leading a church revival at a Jamaican resort.

  The song starts to fade and the happy guests start to disappear from the shots, which allows the camera to focus and linger on Colbie and her tresses as she finishes the lyrics. Then she goes to lay down on her grass bed and dream about what she can do with her house for the next party.

  Just don’t think about the nasty bugs that are probably crawling around in that sod, Colbie. They probably managed to get all of them out at the gardening center before they brought them over. Probably. Sleep well, Summer Breeze.


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Gabriella Cilmi - “Sweet About Me”

  We start out with Gabriella lying on her back in the middle of a floor, singing the song, so either she’s already drunk or she was absent that day in pop-star class when they talked about stage presence. Based on her hairstyle-choice and nonchalant attitude, I’m guessing that Gabriella probably doesn’t spend too much time caring about what other people might think. (Really digging on that square-headed microphone, though. Go, girl!)

  Cut to one of the band members doing something with drums and wearing an expression that makes it very clear he is not to be bothered until the pizza gets here. Okay, then. Gabriella then drags her butt off the floor and strolls around a bit, while the camera cuts between her and random band-member body parts like elbows and feet, letting us know that the director is pretty laid back about things like composition and structure.

  Wait, was that a quick shot of a guy in a cage? Has he been naughty, and if so, the good kind or the bad kind of naughty? Will there be further discipline? Hmmm.

  Back to Gabriella and the band, with her still strolling about like she’s looking for some really cute shoes at the mall but isn’t all that invested in actually finding anything. Then she manages to come across some guy who is hanging upside down from a pulley, all bound up in ropes and such. (What is going on up in this place?) Gabriella just sings to him for a while and then wanders off, so I guess she sees things like this every day. And the guy doesn’t bother to say things like “I’m in a bit of a pickle, could you help me out?” so I guess it’s all good.

  Gabriella gets tired and has to sit down in a retro red chair for a little bit, so we do that, then she’s up and wandering around again, so she might have some focus issues. She wanders past Cage Boy and then we get to meet another dude tied to a brick pillar, but at least he can still reach his harmonica and is able to play it in the right part of the song, so I’m sure he’ll get a merit badge for that.

  More singing and walking with Gabriella, along with some close-up shots of her face so we can see that she really means it about not being sweet and all (like the bondage thing didn’t let us in on that little tidbit). Then she pauses right in the middle of the song to take a long swig from what might be an innocent water bottle or could be one of those high-end boutique vodka decanters, not sure. All that walking and looking at tied-up men has gotten her a little parched, poor thing.

  Gabriella gets back in that red chair so she can waggle her finger at us and continue having mussy hair, then she strolls around some more because we haven’t finished the tour of her torture boudoir. In this segment of our program, she introduces us to a man sitting up to his neck in a packing crate, covered in that shredded packing stuff that gets everywhere no matter how much you try to control things. (Did Gabriella order him from Crate & Barrel? I guess I haven’t seen that particular catalog.)

  First, Gabriella steals his sunglasses and puts them on her own head, so she’s a thief as well as a somewhat lazy and dried-out dominatrix. Then, horror of horrors, she up and pours the rest of her vodka water all over his asymmetrical-haircut head (which actually makes him look kind of hot, but we’ll save that story for another bedtime.)

  Satisfied with her wet works, Gabriella turns and heads back to the band, sashaying past yet another guy who has been duct-taped to the floor, making him look like a giant, metallic burrito. She doesn’t bother to mess with him, so he must not be her favorite toy at the moment. Or maybe that’s just what turns him on, being ignored and then later getting handed out the window at a Taco Bell drive-thru.

  We wind down the song with Gabriella alternately sitting in her anemia chair and wandering through her band members. Just to catch us up on the things, the camera gives us quick shots all over the room to show us that, yep, girl done got her a bunch of wet men tied up around here. Then, because she’s worked really hard for at least three minutes straight and deserves a break, Gabriella plops down her microphone and heads out.

  But not before she stops at that hanging-upside-down guy, climbs on a box so she can reach the pulley and so we can see her cool-looking boots, and then she unloosens a knot so he can crash to the floor on his head.

  I guess she needed the rope.


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