Miley Cyrus – “Party In The U.S.A.”

  We start out with folks arriving at a drive-in theater as the golden sun is lowering in the sky. This must be a very special drive-in, because not only is it still standing when all the others have been torn down, but everyone here is really young and pretty and thin. Apparently it’s considered socially improper to arrive with anything more than zero-percent body fat. They probably check your weight at the ticket gate.

  Anyway, Miley climbs out of her sporty car, making sure that we see her cowboy boots first, because she’s a country girl and all. (Side note: All of the cars here are sporty and expensive. It seems they also check your financial history at that special gate. You might have to arrive early just to fill out all the forms.) She leans against her car and starts singing, wearing short-shorts no bigger than a stick of gum. I guess it’s no longer necessary to hide the goods until you meet someone special.

  Eventually Miley gets bored with the leaning, so she hooks up with a posse of her home girls, who have been carefully selected to show a rainbow of racial diversity and give the impression that all are welcome in Miley World. (As long as you’re young and pretty and thin, natch.) They strut around for a while, as we get shots of other people getting out of their cars and joining the party. (At no point does anyone seem interested in actually watching a movie, so maybe things have changed since the last time I went to a drive-in.)

  Wherever the girls are headed, it takes a while for them to get there, so we get plenty of shots of Miley’s boots and Miley’s smiles and Miley’s ability to make grown men stop what they are doing and stare at her. Then Miley snatches up one of the speakers from those poles and hops into the bed of a pickup truck. (It’s not her truck, but things like ownership and clothing that serves any real purpose are clearly not important in this video.) It’s time for Miley and her backup posers to give an impromptu concert! (I’m sure this won’t interfere with the movie at all.)

  So Miley rocks it for a bit, and of course the crowd goes wild with adoration, dancing and singing and fist-pumping. (One gentleman gets so excited that he starts doing gymnastics, a response that seems to happen quite often in music videos but never in real life. You try doing a round off into a handspring at a real concert and somebody is going to cut you. Those people paid good money to see the stage, not your airborne ass.)

  Balancing in the back of a pickup while wearing heels is exhausting, so eventually Miley calls for an intermission and she decides to go stand in front of a metal wall. There’s something written on the wall, but it’s hard to concentrate on what it might say, what with all of Miley’s hair and us worrying about her accidentally bending over and getting a surprise flossing situation with those shorts. But Miley is a trooper and she professionally avoids the bending as she continues with the song. She even does some type of modified two-step moves as added entertainment value.

  We cut to Miley wandering around the drive-in by herself, the Benetton girls having run off to do something else for a bit. (Was there a sale at the Ace bandage factory? They could get four or five outfits out of just one roll of that stuff.) But Miley doesn’t mind that they have gone AWOL, because she’s still singing and walking and smiling at everybody, approving of their thinness and prettiness and supposed richness if they got past the screening process at the gate.

  But singing and walking in the dirt is not as much fun as singing and dancing on a stage, so Miley convinces someone to unroll a giant American flag over the movie screen and build her a nice stage just beneath it. (Nobody is ever going to watch a movie in this place, seriously.) This helpful but unseen person also arranges for an airplane to fly overhead and dump tons of confetti over the whole shindig, because it’s really not a party unless there are colored bits of paper in the air.

  Miley does an energetic solo for a bit, with just her and her hair and her microphone that she clearly adores by the way she fondles it continuously. Oh, and the flag. You can’t really miss that flag, which is bigger than some of the states on the Eastern seaboard.

  Cut to later that night, with Miley and more of her carefully-selected friends taking advantage of the playground equipment at the drive-in. She’s got the primo spot, of course, standing in a centrally-located swing, but her friends are still artfully arranged on a nearby jungle gym. Amazingly enough, all the fly girls and fly boys are able to dance and gyrate with complete abandon without plummeting to the ground and ending their careers as dancing extras in music videos.

  The Gymnastics Dude even runs up to perform another one of his hands-free flip things, but it’s not nearly as impressive since he’s on the ground and not clinging to metal bars two stories up like his risk-taking dance-class partners. But if he can pull off that same stunt while on top of the jungle gym, and survive, I’ll buy the man a corn dog, sure will.

  Then we’re back to the stage, where the American flag has been replaced by a giant video monitor, because it’s not really a concert unless you have a giant TV that people can watch instead of the performer. The Benetton girls are back (love the new look, it’s nice that you were able to share one outfit between the four of you) and everybody is super thrilled to be partying in the USA.  The girls are happy to share with us some intense choreography that they learned on the way back from the mall, and Miley is happy to raise her hands over her head as often as possible.

  And that’s pretty much how we wrap things up, with well-toned folks dancing and singing and proving that they have excellent stamina. Even Gymnastics Dude is still at it, suddenly running up and doing a flip-roll thing across one of the tables at the concession stand. (Note to self: Do not eat at that table.) We end the video with Miley back in front of the American flag, proud of her music, proud of her country, and proud of her ability to pick friends that can coordinate with the design theme of any room in your house…

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Madonna – “Burning Up”

  Wow, this one goes quite a ways back, to a time in the early 80’s when I had the energy to dance all night but the only place I could afford to do that dancing was at Wal-Mart. Anyway, here we go…

  We start out with a close-up of one of Madonna’s eyeballs, which can be quite alarming if you’re not prepared for it, then we zip through what appear to be a string of random images. Flowers, lips, modified pickup trucks, a marble bust, and the first of many scenes where Madonna is wallering around in a random parking lot at night. This was made during a time when people who worked on music videos first discovered something called “the editing button”, and these people are whacking at that button like woodpeckers.

  Then we head back to that bust, the non-Madonna one, and we learn that it lights up, so that the eyes glow and it looks like something that menaced  William Shatner on an old Star Trek episode. I’m not sure how we’ll use this information in our lives, but we’ll see. Then we suddenly have Madonna, decked out in the leather and chains that she was so fond of as a freshman, lunging at the camera and then doing a few mad twirls, probably because the peroxide in her hair is still burning her scalp. Then she does something with her arm that makes a laser beam shoot at an otherwise innocent goldfish bowl. I guess she doesn’t care for seafood.

  Next up is a nice Risky Business tribute with sunglasses, followed by another visit to the parking lot, where Madonna is sitting on the ground and holding her legs to keep them from flying open. We get another shot of the sunglasses, which have now become radioactive because Madonna’s lust is so burning, and several more shots of the Parking Lot Madonna, who has finally stopped flopping around enough that she can model her dress for us, which appears to be something inspired by Roman togas, a cute little number that she can easily slip out of later in her career when she decides to pose naked as often as possible.

  Cut to some black-and-white footage where Madonna is supposed to be all sweaty with desire, but some makeup person must have done something she shouldn’t have, because Madonna just looks like she has malaria. The camera pulls back and we learn that Madonna is standing behind a heavy-duty X-ray machine that has enough lights flashing that somebody somewhere must have just hit a jackpot. That’s a little too busy, so we zoom back in to Madonna’s drenched head, and I guess she’s shaking off the malaria because now she has some color in her cheeks. Still a lot of wetness, though.

  Zip to somewhere else, where Sunglass Madonna goes into a dance that requires her to throw some of her many accessories around the room. (Based on the number of rubber bracelets she has on that one arm, this routine could go on for quite some time.) The main motif of the choreography has something to do with Madonna jumping around in a circle and clutching at her trendy half-jacket. Eventually she gets a little tired, so we cut to a dramatic sequence where Madonna is trying to open a door that has far too many knobs. Failing to get the damn thing open, she turns and just sings to us for a while, occasionally yanking on the chain at her throat to let us know that bondage apparently has a very special place in her heart.

  Brief bit where different eyeballs fill the screen. You can user your own judgment on that image.

  Then Bouncing Madonna is standing right in front of the complicated door, and just as it hits us that it appears to be shaped like a rowboat, it turns into one, which is really something that doors shouldn’t do, and suddenly we’re floating on a green sea with Toga-Dress Madonna resting comfortably inside it while she sings. This is followed by several shots of some guy driving an older model car, one of those barge-like things that can seat 12, as he races toward some destination. (Did he get word that Madonna has malaria?) He looks sort of like someone who might have gotten kicked out of Duran Duran for not wearing enough makeup, but that’s probably not important to our story.

  Time to check in with Parking Lot Madonna again, and she’s heavily involved in doing poses as if she’s a swimsuit model, despite the fact that she’s not wearing bathing attire and her ass is rolling around on asphalt instead of sand. (Could these people not afford to fly somewhere with a beach?) But at least she appears to be having a good time, and that’s all that really matters.

  Next up is an image of Madonna in the rowboat on the green sea, lying on her back and floating along peacefully, not bothering anyone. Suddenly, the Duran Duran guy drives by in his whale of a car, somehow managing to not sink as he plods along. (Maybe he used some of those rubber bracelets as floaties?) This is probably a political statement of some kind, but I don’t have enough dance training to fully understand it.

  Now we have a montage of Duran driving along less-watery highways, Madonna becoming super-heated in her Parking Lot of Lust, and Madonna suddenly disappearing from that rowboat (maybe she went to take out more insurance after nearly being killed at sea by a Buick?). Then we focus in on Parking Lot Madonna, who apparently still has a lot of naughty poses that she simply must get out of her system or she will implode. It appears that certain key moves help relieve the sexual pressure, like flipping her multi-hued hair around, crawling around on all fours, tugging in frustration at her clothing, and snarling at the camera whilst in the midst of presumable orgasm with an intensity that no one on the planet has ever experienced before.

  Meanwhile, Duran is still driving around, so I’m starting to think this is not someone you should call if you need him to get somewhere in a reasonable amount of time. His tardiness doesn’t really matter, though, since Madonna is still on fire in the parking lot and is happy to share with us even more ways one can express uncontrolled passion. (I’m surprised she isn’t physically riding the camera by now. I’m sure it crossed her mind.) This part of the her repertoire includes more hair-flipping, posing in a manner that reminds everyone she does indeed have breasts that have certain needs, and undulating in such a startling way that no one will ever use slot 12 in that parking lot again.

  The video comes to an end with slow-ass Duran finally arriving on the scene just as Madonna is eyeing the nearby shrubbery as possible relief, and even though we don’t get to see the discussion that immediately follows, things apparently don’t work out too well for Duran. The final shot is of Madonna driving the tanker away, all alone. I guess she doesn’t like to have sex with people who are wearing more eyeliner than she is…

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Alex Clare – “Too Close”

  We start out with Alex sitting in what might be an abandoned warehouse somewhere, looking vaguely Irish and vaguely poor. He seems to be a little unsettled for some reason, and this might have something to do with the quick images we get of another person pulling on some type of Ninja-biker gear, an intimidating outfit that doesn’t indicate happiness and sunshine. Right off the bat, this doesn’t look like a very healthy situation, so maybe Alex should go sit somewhere else that doesn’t have people preparing for war while creepy music plays.

  But instead of heading out the door like a responsible person, Alex chooses to remain seated and stare at a dilapidated wall, a trashy mess that hasn’t been properly maintained. (Why did the words “honey boo boo” just pop in my head?) We get a full shot of the back of the Ninja (and I’m only assuming it’s a Ninja, since I’ve never actually been one and don’t have all the details) and then a full shot of the front of Alex, who has managed to stand up and move to a better-lit area of the room so we can confirm that he does look vaguely Irish. (I would not be surprised if this turns into a commercial for breakfast cereal or invigorating body soap.)

  The Ninja person has now managed to pick up an intimidating stick-weapon and hold it in front of him, so perhaps he’s about to practice for a “Star Wars” sequel that we haven’t heard about. Whatever he’s about to do, I’m not thinking very fondly of that stick. Couldn’t he have just picked up a beer and handed it to me? I’d feel much better then.

  Now Alex is back in the one room where he likes to sit and stare at the wall, although now we have a bigger shot and can see that there’s also a window in the mesmerizing wall. This means Alex has twice the amount of things to look at, so he’ll probably be entertained for weeks. (There’s also an odd closet off to his right, with broken things and crappy shelving and probably a rusty murder weapon or two from that time in 1947 when somebody got pissed about the unsatisfying results of a card game or a spouse who was playing squat tag with someone whose name did not appear on the marriage certificate.)

  We cut back to the Ninja, front view this time, and we can see that he’s wearing a spooky fencing hat that has been modified to protect one’s face from more than just one of those skinny swords that prancing people use to poke at one another. (The headgear also has a flying-nun enhancement that will probably help the Ninja take off like a helicopter, should the need arise.) Oh look, in the background we can see another evil-priest Ninja walking into the room, sporting the industrial mask and carrying one of those hefty stick things. (Do they shop at the same stores?) I’m thinking these two will probably not be discussing the weather.

  Quick shot of Alex in the other room, singing. He doesn’t know what’s going on, either.

  Back to the more exciting room, where the first Ninja is kneeling on the ground, while Fashionably-Late appears to be walking in a circle around the squatter. (I may not know that much about Ninja etiquette, but I’m thinking I’d be getting my ass off the floor if Darth Vader’s cousin was anywhere near me, holding a weapon and not saying anything. Then Squatty suddenly leaps to his feet and faces the other man so they can both cross swords in a non-gayporn way. They start slowly circling around, sticks still touching, doing some type of intricate routine while they wait for just the right moment to… do whatever it is that they plan to do with those sticks.

  (This is an entire different rumble from what we have in my neck of the woods. Over here, when you want to physically have it out with some fool that has gone too far, you just walk up to them (hopefully when they are drunk and not as light on their feet) and then both of you start beating the hell out of each other with whatever you can find, like rocks and barstools and cue balls and somebody’s weave. It doesn’t have to be pretty as long as somebody finally gives up. None of this formal mess where you follow traditions and send out hand-written invitations.)

  The Ninjas get up in each other’s face (even though they can’t actually see them, what with the Blade Runner tribute-gear) and kind of breathe and push on each other. This quickly becomes boring, even to Alex in the other room, so Alex starts belting out one of the louder parts of the song. This inspires the Ninjas to actually start whacking at each other with their man-toys, which perks things up a bit, but I’m not sure if they are doing things correctly because nobody is losing any blood or teeth, which is how we normally keep score in bar-fights.

  This goes on for a while, with the no-blood and the sense of nothing getting accomplished, so I start hoping that Alex goes back to the quieter part of the song so the Ninjas can break apart, go sit in their corners for a bit, and have other men squirt water at their face. Then one of the Ninjas pokes his stick in the barbecue grill of the other mask and they instantly stop fighting. Wait, was that a foul of some kind? Does somebody have to go sit in a box now?

  But before I can get any answers, we switch gears with the video, and now we have Alex and Ninja 1 and Ninja 2 wandering around in a really dark part of the decaying warehouse. Somebody starts screwing around with the minimal lighting, so we end up with a series of images that look very “Blair Witch”-like (Josh? Josh!! Oh my GOD!!) but don’t really explain anything. (Does a proper Ninja competition include a scavenger hunt? Did they get some breaking intel about where Jimmy Hoffa might be buried?)

  Then Josh, I mean Alex, starts singing again, and the Ninjas race back to the bigger room that has more light and less of chance that you will walk into a spider web and temporarily lose your mind, and they go at it again. (Hey, maybe the Ninjas can only make physical contact when there are lyrics involved. Who knew.) This round goes on for a very long time, so obviously the regulation time periods are quite different from something like boxing, where the rounds are the same length and the women who hold up numbers between those rounds are clearly not virgins.

  The loud part of the song kicks back in, and while Alex gets down with his bad musical self in that room where peasants probably milked cows at some point before deciding to band together and overthrow the Romanovs in Russia, the Ninjas decide it’s time for some Matrix action. We now have freeze-frame shots of them leaping through the air while hoisting their poles skyward. It’s a nice change of pace, but I’m still not seeing any bloodshed or resolution.

  This also goes on for a long time. Stunt-work and trick photography are very expensive. If you’re going to shell out the big bucks, you might as well make sure those dollars show up on screen.

  We briefly zip back to one of the dark and dusty rooms where we had the Blair Witch flashback (Don’t go in the basement!), and we see the Ninjas doing some form of kick-boxing. This doesn’t seem to be as much fun as using the giant chopsticks, so we head back out to the main arena for more of that action. And finally, one of the Ninjas manages to knock away the other Ninja’s stick, so even though we haven’t  seen any blood, at least things seem to be wrapping up.

  The victorious Ninja touches his man-stick to the neck of the loser, and the loser (per the sacred instruction manual, page 43) drops to his knees, and then proceeds to remove his pimped-out Robo-Ninja hood. We see that his head is encased in black rubber that mashes his facial features flat, making him look like somebody left Voldemort out in the sun too long.

  What the hell?

  We turn to Alex for answers. (Did you have script approval on this thing? ) But Alex doesn’t have any answers. Instead, he just stands there in his questionable sweater as the camera pulls back and the screen fades to black…

  Wait! Were those handprints on the dusty wall behind him? (Josh!)

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