Pink – “Try”

  We start off out in the desert somewhere, with Pink crawling along, most of her hair and body covered in different colors. (Think: serious incident at a paint factory.)Then we cut inside a building somewhere, with Pink still rainbow-splattered, and she’s joined by a shirtless man. No introductions are made, but they must know each other fairly well since the guy starts getting intimate with her neck. Or maybe it’s in Pink’s contract that the staff must greet her in in this way.

   Then Shirtless holds her from behind as they move into a dance that you’ve probably never seen before. (Or maybe you have. I’m in Texas, where most communities prohibit the viewing of “art” unless it celebrates oil, cattle, free guns for everyone, the deportation of Democrats, and Jesus. Generally in that order.)

  The choreography starts off slowly, with the couple struggling slightly as they bang into the walls of the house before they seem to get their footing and start strutting about. Shirtless does some interesting body flips with Pink, and then they suddenly race into another room, one that is unfinished but has more room for them to flop about without breaking anything. And flop they do, with the moves becoming increasingly complex, allowing Pink to show us that she has yet another talent that we don’t possess as she hits her marks with precision.

  Meanwhile, we keep getting glimpses of Painted Desert Pink, as she tromps around in the dusty sand and appears to be searching for someone or something. (Like an agent or producer who will quit questioning her artistic decisions and just let her do whatever instead of being annoying.) Pink does pause during her quest to sing here and there, because this is a music video after all, and the dramatic gestures she makes look really great with all that chalky paint.

  Back to the house, where Shirtless is hurling Pink through the air with anger and grace, and she’s hurling herself back with equal doses of each. (Okay, maybe a little bit more on the anger side, because this is Pink and she’s never calm about anything, but only she can make anger look this sexy.) It’s clear that the dance is about their relationship and it appears that there have definitely been some mountains high enough and valleys low enough and both of them better have life insurance.

  We check in with Painted Desert Pink as she sings another round of the chorus, but she still hasn’t found what she’s looking for, despite the fact that she’s being followed around by a production crew and surely somebody up in that mess can point her in the right direction.

  Back to the unfinished house/relationship, where Pink and Shirtless have reached a point in their dancing dialogue that requires Shirtless to throw her on a mattress and then drag her back off of it. This may or may not be an activity that is familiar to Pink, but she certainly performs her part with gusto.

  Quick shot of Pink finally spying someone across the desert plains. Oh? Is it Shirtless? Or just the pizza delivery guy?

  House again, where Pink does a nifty roll into the kitchen, where she and Shirtless continue their love-hate ballet that reaches a high point when Shirtless uses his foot to literally help Pink’s crotch reach a high point in the room. This sounds terribly tawdry, and it slightly is, but it’s mostly about how erotic and fluid and emotional this extremely physical pas de deux really is. I keep trying to find the funny in it all, but I’m mostly mesmerized by the poetic muscularity. I may have to turn in my snark card until this one is over.

  Or maybe not. Shirtless just let his guard down and Pink managed to grab him around the neck and hurl him onto a table, leaving a splash of blue paint on his chest as she storms out of the room. This is the exact same maneuver that I have wanted to pull with so many co-workers in conference rooms over the years. Then the next scene has them making out of the floor, which is not in my bucket list of what I want to do with co-workers, so maybe I need to take the focus off of me for a bit.

  So we can focus on the desert again, where Shirtless has magically appeared, and we see him hoisting Pink over his shoulders and then dropping her to the ground. (At least I think it’s Shirtless, since we’re seeing him from behind. It’s a man and he doesn’t have a shirt, those are my only reference points.) I’m more clear on the Pink identification, since she and her barely-covered crotch fall toward the camera.

  Back to the house, where they are continuing their dance in what might be a living room, with more of the “I yearn to make love to you but at the same time I want to kill you” motif. It’s obvious that every surface in the house is fair game when it comes to possible places to dance with joy and hatred. (And smear chalky paint all over each other so that it looks like a small Mardi Gras parade that turned ugly.)

  And it’s worth repeating that the strenuous dance moves the two of them are walloping out at an incredible rate are amazing. I’m thinking there are some seriously-trained dancers out there that would have an issue pulling off some of this footwork. (Not that I’m a certified ballet instructor or anything. I just think I am when I’ve had too much to drink, and that’s a whole other video from this one. One that nobody should ever watch.)

  Desert again, where Shirtless is now balancing an upside-down Pink on his shoulders, with her managing to do the splits in mid-air. I’m really not sure what the symbolism or message might be here, but it’s another moment when you realize that Pink has so much more fun in her life than the rest of us. And at least he doesn’t throw her to the ground this time, which has certainly got to be a bonus plan if you’re Pink or her physical therapist.

  House once more, not sure of the room, where we have the most physically awesome move by Pink. She manages to flip Shirtless over her head. Say what you say? Yep, girl done yanked a big ole man over her head. If she doesn’t deserve to be President of the United States for that, I don’t know what it’s going to take.

  Okay, maybe there was just a tad bit too much fan worship in that last paragraph. Especially since the two of them then proceed to head butt each other repeatedly. I’ve always wanted strong passion in my life. I just don’t want that passion to include a body cast and hospital bills.

  Then we start jumping rapidly back and forth between the house and the desert, with Pink and Shirtless leaping and bounding about in the dwelling, giving the foundation a workout, and just Pink in the desert, where she and her coats of many colors are singing defiantly. (I don’t know where Shirtless went in the desert bit. Perhaps he was hired by the CIA to covertly dance his way into North Korea and shut down their nuclear weapons program. You never know.)

  Hold up, now the couple has decided to start throwing chairs at one another in the house, which was probably not on the dance program that the patrons received when they arrived at the theater, and it’s certainly not something my lover should do to me if he wishes to remain in the house or our relationship. Interestingly enough, we cut to the desert where those same chairs are flying through the air. The seating implements crash to the ground and crumple, which is no big loss since they were kind of tacky to begin with and no one is going to mourn their passage.

  But it seems that we now have a faceoff in the desert, with Pink glaring at Shirtless (I guess the CIA gig didn’t work out) and Shirtless glaring at Pink across a wide expanse of sand. Then they start running toward each other, in a dramatic, drawn-out segment where you think they are finally going to get together, apologize for trying to kill each other through the magic of dance, and live happily ever after.

  But instead, as they reach the meet point, they both leap through the air with a snarl and hurtle toward each other with arms thrown high, chests heaving, and a potential impact that will leave both of them with ruptured organs and disability checks. Then the video cuts off.

  Hmm.

Click Here to Watch this Video on YouTube.

Vince Vance and the Valiants – “All I Want For Christmas Is You”

  We start out by zooming in on one of those holiday snow-globe things, with the bits of white whirling around a house that is really cute, which means it’s probably located in a subdivision that we can’t afford. Then we transition to a real house, with the camera plunging through one of the windows where the individual panes have all been artfully primed with fake snow by a set designer that clearly has never been in an actual snowstorm where the temperatures are negative and the howling wind can freeze and snap your nose hairs off in less than a second.

  But it’s all good once we get inside, with a lovely Christmas tree decorated in a vaguely Martha-Stewart way, and we get our first glimpse of the woman singing the song. (I should probably advise you that you shouldn’t get used to her current outfit, because she changes it at least 47 times throughout the video, a clear sign that she has focus issues.) But right now she’s all dressed in white, which is probably a lie, and she’s happily emoting as she fondles the fireplace mantle and performs some minimalist choreography as she sashays her way over to the window that doesn’t look like one you would find in a real place where they get snow.

  Cut to somewhere else, with somebody jacking around with some calendars on a desk. Then we get another angle on the goings on, and we can see Vince Vance is sitting at that desk and squirming about in an overly-caffeinated way. It’s very easy to distinguish Vince from the other set props. He’s the one with the alarming hairdo that kinder people might call “beehive” but I’m gonna have to stick with the facts and say “suppository stapled to head”.

  Then we zip to another place, one where Vince is apparently some type of perfume salesman. At least I think he is. (It’s hard to pay attention with all the distractions on the set, like the odd jacket Vince is wearing that seems to have been attacked by metal house numbers.) There are two women on the other side of the display case who are piling up boxes of merchandise on top of the counter with feverish intensity, oohing and ahhing over each little box as if each of them has been personally touched by Jesus.

  Vince turns to the camera and acts as if he’s been overwhelmed by this display of rampant consumerism, but I’m thinking Vince should be more concerned about his hairdo and his savagely-accessorized jacket, either of which could cause a citation to be issued by the city Code Compliance division.

  Then we cut back to Happy Singing Lady (Let’s call her Phoebe. Some say it’s Lisa Layne, who does the actual vocals on the song, and some say it’s another singer/actress. I’m not Facebook friends with any of these people, so I’m officially claiming ignorance and going with a pseudonym in case judicial issues arise.) Phoebe is in the midst of singing to a tree ornament, which is a good call if you don’t want your audience to talk back and critique your performance. She does this for a bit, then plops the ornament on the tree, so we can see that it contains some type of hologram of Vince.

  Wait, is Phoebe in love with the Suppository Man? (Which reminds me of Phoebe Snow and “The Poetry Man”, a mid-70’s song about angst and rhyming couplets, but we’ll just have to assume that there’s no connection because that would take the oddness to a level that none of us are prepared to contemplate.) Phoebe launches herself away from the Christmas tree, allowing us to gander upon her new outfit which looks like something Shirley Temple would have worn on The Good Ship Lollypop. Then Phoebe collapses on a couch that someone has handily placed nearby.

  Cut to a shot of Vince also collapsing, in his House of Perfumes, apparently because the bill he is writing up for the Jesus-touched eau de toilette ladies has numbers beyond his computational skills. As he sprawls on the ground, four people lean in to study both his drama-queen antics and the possibility that his hair could be used to reinforce the foundation of the store. (If you pause at 1:18, you can see that these four are: the lead singer of Wang Chung, Jane Wiedlin from The Go-Go’s, a Santa with a crappy beard made out of Cool Whip, and Laura from “General Hospital”, during the “Luke and Laura” period when her choice of stylist was more important than the plot. Just kidding. Sort of.)

  Back to Phoebe, who has changed clothes again and is now perched on a staircase that leads to… probably Venice Beach, because they don’t have real snow there, either. Brief shot of Vince doing something in that odd office of his, then we have a scene where Phoebe (yet another outfit) is receiving gifts from a deliveryman with an identity crisis. She quickly shoos him away so she can go sing to the tree again, an important thing to do when your current sweater matches the color of said tree.

  Then we wander into a series of scenes that I don’t really get, which I suppose shouldn’t really surprise me, but I try to keep the faith and support artists in their choices even if it scares me. This has something to do with Vince and his hair picking out women’s apparel that was only attractive for about 30 seconds in 1992 between the presidencies of The First Bush and Clinton. These outfits (in name only) are then delivered by the psychotic deliveryman to yet-another-sweater Phoebe, who sings to one of the packages until Vince appears in the wrapping paper, using sign language to express his devotion to the fair Phoebe.

  This is the part where I should probably start drinking.

  Now we have a bit where a saxophonist is displaying his prowess whilst standing next to one of those Salvation Army bucket-collection people. I’ll refrain from saying anything about the Salvation Army (people don’t like to hear that they are anti-gay, which understandably bugs me) or anything about the saxophonist (because I mistakenly did NOT recognize Clarence Clemmons in a Lady Gaga video a while back, which led to a comment chain that would make you think that I am Hitler’s offspring). We’ll just let these folks do what they need to do and wait for Phoebe to put on another fetching blouse.

  And, eventually, there Phoebe is, advertising a spangly top matched with white trousers, sitting the wrong way at a piano and fighting to keep her suddenly-voluminous hair from taking over the scene. This kicks off a montage of Vince doing… I don’t know. Something about picking out fur coats (you shouldn’t, shout-out to PETA), spazzing out in his office full of presents for Phoebe (you shouldn’t, because it just doesn’t read well on the screen), and not letting landscape workers take care of that hair with a weed-eater (you should, end of story).

  Now we’re back to Phoebe, but we can’t see her couture at the moment because she’s staring out one of the window panes with the fake snow sprayed in a pattern that does not happen in nature. Then we have a short bit with presents being shoved under a tree (do these people really think that Phoebe needs more clothes?), followed by more shots of Vince…. well, not sure what he’s doing, but it appears to involve him channeling Martin Short and giving a show to young children who don’t really know who Vince or Martin might be, but they are well-behaved enough to smile politely and wait for someone to arrive with a tray of milk and cookies.

  Next up is another shot of the hopefully-medicated deliveryman starting to offer Phoebe yet another festive present, but then lurching out of the way so Vince can waltz in and offer himself up as the latest gift. (If you study the architecture above the door, you can clearly see that they had to raise the door opening, and the entire first floor of the house, an additional three feet so all of Vince’s hair could arrive at the same time. I’m sure the actual owners of the house were a bit pissy about that until someone cut them a check.)

  Phoebe and Vince embrace, with both of them being careful to avoid lacerations to the face from Vince’s dramatic and lethal hair, and then they both focus on the snow-white puppy dog that Vince has thoughtfully brought along for his muse and her fluid wardrobe. They both quickly retire to the couch, because everyone knows that Vince can’t be expected to stand very long before the weight of his hair causes a hernia. And that’s where we wrap things up, with Vince and Phoebe bonding over a docile pooch who is a clear professional and knows better than to lick himself unless it’s in the script.

  But it’s a given that Fido is secretly eyeing Vince’s coif. He knows there’s got to be some kind of doggie treat shoved up in that mess. He just has to wait another 17 seconds for Phoebe to wander away for another costume change, and then the game is on, and Vince better start running…

Click Here to Watch this Video on YouTube.

Hunter Hayes – “Wanted”

  We start out with a quick, off-center image of Hunter, making us think that the cinematographer might be a wee bit drunk, then we cut to him sitting at a piano where the lyrics of the song are scribbled all over said piano. I can understand that some folks are a bit nervous when they perform and might forget things like words and the proper payment of income taxes, but seriously, what’s up with this Hooked On Phonics flashback tribute?

  And with that last sentence I immediately lose everyone that is under the age of 40. Oh well.

  We then get some more quick shots of I’m not sure what, with one of the black-and-white scenes being splashed with this dripping red color as Hunter stares at the camera. It’s probably meant to be artsy and such, but for some reason I think of the TV series Dexter. (This was probably not the intention of the art director, my bad.) Then the drunk cinematographer finally finds the focus button and we get a good profile of Hunter. His age is not clear, but I’m reminded of another TV series, Doogie Howser.

  Who is this child and why is he singing songs? Have I missed another important cultural moment while I was bingeing on bean dip and watching reruns of Buffy? Probably, it happens quite often. So I pause the video and google the doogie. Turns out that Hunter has been performing since the age of 5 and has released something like 74 albums. He’s now 21 and has done more with his life in roughly 15 seconds than most of us will ever do. Great. Another reminder that I didn’t listen to the right people when making important life decisions.

  My soul damaged, I push the “play” button again.

  Hunter continues playing the piano (another swipe at my useless list of personal skills) for a while, alternating with scenes where he’s just singing in a lovely voice (swipe number 2). Then we start getting shots of Hunter driving a motorcycle while a supermodel clings to him and allows her hair to be caressed by the wind in a manner that makes it clear she uses a much better conditioner than the rest of us do.

  Eventually we make our way back to the recording studio where they have all that helpful graffiti, where we learn that some of the important words in the song have been highlighted in red. I try to memorize these words in case Alex Trebek has a question for me, but snippets like “love” and “beautiful” and “sushi” don’t make any sense to me and I prepare myself for another failed test.

  Oh wait, now we have some images (still mostly in black-and-white) of some place where they have a chandelier and someone is doing something with what might be a calligraphy pen or a scalpel, not sure. We do seem to have a scroll of paper that is rolling off a desk where Hunter or the supermodel or a Franciscan monk appears to be sitting and scribbling, but the words that we can see have been drenched in more of that blood-red color, so I’m still not feeling completely safe in this environment.

  More of the graffiti piano, with a long-shot letting us know that there are also graffiti panels hanging around the room where Hunter is tickling the keys and reminding us that he has a marketable skill and we clearly do not. Then we focus on a blurry image of what might be Ally Sheedy back in the day when she was still perky and not doing lesbian art films. Oh wait, it’s not Ally, it’s the supermodel, and now we’re back to the motorcycle. Hunter and the supermodel (she really needs a name, let’s call her…Callie) are dashing about the streets of whatever town and looking really trendy on their two-wheeler.

  To make sure that we understand that Hunter and Callie are in love forever, Callie is clutching not only Hunter’s non-fat waist but also a rose that has been niftily colored-in with red by some low-paid worker in China or some other country where the peon workers are supposed to just do their job and not ask for things like better wages or free wi-fi. We have additional shots of Callie’s wind-blown locks in case you missed it the first time around that she has better hair than most of the planet.

  Next up is Hunter driving his chopper into a garage where the door is painted in stripes of black and red. Callie apparently runs off to do something important like hydrate her skin, because she disappears for a while as Hunter rolls out more scrolls of paper where he (or some assistant) has scribbled more of the lyrics. Then we head back to the graffiti recording studio where you never have to remember your lines because the furnishings act as cue cards.

  This is followed by an inexplicable series of shots where Callie, sitting in a café, appears to be sharing a latte and good bone structure with someone who is NOT Hunter. I don’t know what that mess is all about, but they sure seem to be having a good time and this montage threatens to derail whatever the producers intended. So we head back to the graffiti recording studio where Hunter is wailing and pounding the piano to remind us that Hunter is the star of this video and not some meaningless stud that Callie made nice with while picking out croissants in a neighborhood bistro.

  Hunter sings for a very long time, since the camera is currently on his face and not the competition, but we’re distracted by images of blood-red words falling out of the sky while he basically makes a woman out of the piano. (Got wood?) I understand that the redness is symbolic of love, but you should do a little more planning if you don’t want that redness to make things look like a video that would receive kudos from Jack the Ripper.

  Hunter doesn’t care about my input, and he probably shouldn’t, since MY greatest achievement in life has been simply avoiding arrest at just the right times. But still, dude, you’re coming off a little manic with the red thing and the words of the song flying around like Dorothy and Toto just landed. To be fair, Hunter really seems to be invested in his artistry, and he appears to be making all the proper facial expressions right on cue, so we might just have to blame the director or maybe one of those corporate people who don’t know squat about anything but have somehow been given a position of power. (Kind of like Donald Trump with that lame-ass “Apprentice” thing.)

  Then we have a long sequence where the blood-words continue to rain out of the sky while Hunter pounds the keys and emotes and reminds us of what it was like when we all still had a respectable amount of hair. Obviously, no one is listening to me or my suggestions. This is probably a wise choice in most countries.

  We finally get to a bit where the word “want” becomes the focus in all the red graffiti, along with a red carpet that appears to lead to Hunter and his piano. He winds down with the singing and the key-pounding, and then apparently wanders off to a place where gifted people sit on a couch and wait for their talent to be recognized and supermodels to make a decision about which boyfriend makes the best cup of coffee…

Click Here to Watch this Video on YouTube.

The Script – “For The First Time”

  We start out with shots of a lovely young lass filling out a postcard. Apparently she’s living in New York City, but has a hankering to follow that postcard back across the water to Dublin. Something about missing her some brown bread. I suppose this is a really important thing that one can yearn for, but I don’t really know and it didn’t seem an appropriate time to ask questions. The woman (we’ll call her Katie, that sounds Irish enough) finishes up her dissatisfied missive  and then stares forlornly around the room at things that are obviously not the brown bread that she wants.

  This is the cue for lead singer Danny (more of the Irish fest!) to kick off the sad beginning lyrics where we don’t know how “we got into this mad situation”. (Poor recreational drug usage decisions? A really high wireless bill? That really horrid woman at the corner deli who always gives you the crappy corned beef?) While Danny warbles in the black-and-white part of the video where the band lives, Katie turns to gaze upon her boyfriend, who is probably also sad because he doesn’t appear to own a shirt. He’s rushing around and getting ready in a hurried manner that indicates some fool hit the snooze bar too many times. (Probably Katie, mad that it wasn’t a loaf of brown bread making the noise.)

  The boyfriend (we’ll call him Sean) finally manages to snag a shirt and he prepares to leave the apartment. But before he can head out to wherever it is that Seans go in NYC, he leans in to give Katie a little smooch. Instead of allowing this little peck of love, however, Katie makes a face and pulls back. (So she’s one of those kinds of girls, who get into a funk and wants everyone else around them to suffer as well. These are the same girls who are completely stunned when their husband/boyfriend/Soviet same-sex lover gets fed up with it all and starts trolling porn sites.)

  Anyway, Sean eventually gets away from Katie and her co-dependent blues, hopping on his motorcycle and zipping away to his workplace where he makes things or sells things or plays Angry Birds all day. As he travels, the building scenery in this part of town is kind of blurry, so we don’t know if the pollution has gotten seriously out of control or if Sean has lost a contact lens. Meanwhile, Danny and the band continue to play the song over in that place that looks like the first part of the movie Pleasantville. Their story is just not as interesting as the tale of the estranged lovers, so we can ignore them for a while and focus on the next episode of All My Irish Children.

  Now we’re at the part where they’re sucking down “cheap bottles of wine”, (I guess Sean’s job only lasts 7 seconds and then he’s home again) and it initially appears that Katie might be in a better mood, because she actually laughs and doesn’t seem to be looking for any of the questionable and missing bread. They share a tender moment where they gaze at one another lovingly while a soft light enhances the fact that neither of them have any body fat whatsoever. It’s very sweet, but we know that Katie is going to want a sandwich sooner or later.

  And there it is, with Katie back in her sulking room, fighting back tears as she ponders the painful drawbacks of moving from a city where relatively little happens to a city where absolutely everything happens, 24-7. She has a flashback to another drinking session where she was happy, and then she cries some more. (Is she missing the obvious point that she is much more fun to be around when alcohol is involved? Perhaps we should text her.)

  We roll into a montage of Sean rushing about town and doing presumably important things, shots of Katie possibly lying on the grass in a park and staring up at silent trees that refuse to assist her with the quest for special bread, and images of the band playing where we now have a bit of color seeping into the cinematography. (And they’ve turned up the lights a bit so we can realize there are other band members besides Danny, and not just quick glimpses of disembodied fingers strumming a guitar or banging on a drum.)

  Now Katie has managed to find a camera, and she’s wandering among the buildings and trying to get decent shots so she can show the folks back home what a skyscraper looks like. This leads to a confusing moment where Katie seems to be stuck on a chain-link fence but isn’t trying very hard to escape. (Girl has some serious issues.) This is followed by more frenzied images of Sean still rushing about for his job (some type of messenger service or drug courier, not clear), actually making a living instead of pining for baked goods while the laundry goes undone.

  Oh wait, we seem to have zipped back to happier times again, where we have Katie wearing a fetching hat and smiling while she and Sean pose in front of the Statue of Liberty across the bay, a picture angle that no one in the world has ever tried before, right? Sean also appears to be happy, wearing a festive stocking cap of his own, so he probably hasn’t yet learned that he’s living with a character from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  We take a short break from the drama so that Danny can do an interpretive dance on his little stage, an energetic bit of choreography that seems to involve the invention of the helicopter, sharp objects on the floor that you should avoid, the Running of the Bulls, and an unsupervised bottle of cooking sherry. The end of his performance signals another rolling montage, with more of the happy/sad imagery, the buildings that are still blurry, somebody driving a car down a busy street like a total dumbass, brief moments of bed aerobics, and Danny kicking over a piano bench that has displeased him in some way.

  Things slow down a bit as we watch Sean the boyfriend pausing at some shoreline to reflect on things like what to do with his life, where he might be able to find some decent sushi, and what the hell are we going to do about the missing bread. While the band plays out the last part of the song, Sean comes to a decision, and we see scenes of him selling his beloved motorcycle to a man who apparently can’t stand all the way up but likes to wave goodbye with one finger. (Is that man just really tired or what?)

  After an another dancing exhibition from singer Danny, we watch as Sean strolls up to Katie sitting on the stoop of their building, with her still looking sad despite wearing a clever little dress. They head into the building as the song fades, and Sean hands Katie an envelope. She stares at it suspiciously (probably because it’s not a loaf of bread) and then finally asks what it is. “It’s a plane ticket. I quit my job and I’m taking you home.”

  It’s very touching and somebody should probably make a Hallmark movie about it. But I can’t help but wonder if Sean realizes that, if it’s this hard keeping Katie happy in New York, it’s going to be even more so in Dublin when Katie is surrounded by her family and they ALL gang up against him when she gets blue over not being able to see the Statue of Liberty out her parlor window. (Irish families don’t play when one of their own is not happy.) Sean might have just made a poor life decision, especially if they get Tori Spelling to dye her hair and play the role of Katie…

Click Here to Watch this Video on YouTube.

One Direction – “What Makes You Beautiful”

  We start out with a nice shot of a beach at sunset, or possibly sunrise, it’s never really clear what’s going on when saltwater is involved, and everything is very peaceful. But two seconds later we get a “Directed By” credit popping up on the screen, and instantly everyone in the viewing audience is horrified that this might be one of those artsy vanity videos full of symbolism, heartbreak and people wearing grunge clothing whilst looking sad.

  Happily, our fears of a Swedish black-and-white film about loss and desperation are quickly quelled. As the opening notes of the song kick in (the notes that always make me think Danny and Sandy are about to sing on the bleachers at Rydell high), we get a shot of the One Direction guys lined up on a sort of cliff thing at this beach. They seem non-depressed and they’re all wearing cute outfits, so it’s all good. (The one blond guy is standing apart from the others, so he might have done something he shouldn’t have, but there are no other signs of disharmony and we don’t see Yoko Ono trying to break up the band.)

  We get a few different shots of the beach from various angles, because if you’re going to hire a cinematographer you might as well put him to work, then we get a close-up of the guy who sings first in the song. (Sorry, I don’t know the names of any of the band members, which probably makes me the Anti-Christ in the eyes of all 12-year-old girls, but I’m old and don’t care.) Singer A warbles for a bit, while a gentle sea breeze reminds us why it’s sometimes very important to get haircuts.

  Then we roll into a travel montage explaining that the guys all piled into an outdated camper van earlier in the day so that they could drive to this here beach. (I’m glad they shared that with us, because I don’t know if I could have fully enjoyed the video if they hadn’t explained that particular detail.) As the guys wander around on the sand, Singer B gets his close-up, then all five of them suddenly run up the side of a hill for no apparent reason. (I guess impromptu mountain-climbing is very trendy with the youngsters these days.)

  Right about here we get our first glimpse of The Girl flipping her hair just as the guys are singing about how overwhelming it is when she does that, so kudos to the editor.(Side note: If you pause the video during the flip, it appears that Girl is actually a bit terrified of her unruly locks as they whip around her head, so maybe “overwhelming” is not necessarily a good thing, but we’ll see how it plays out.)

  Cut to The Girl and her Girlfriends tooling along a highway in a VW Beetle with the top down, the old-school kind of Beetle before they revamped the vehicle and made them look like a toy you would get out of a gumball machine. Girl is not paying proper attention, and her cute little hat gets caught by the wind and goes flying off to Jesus, a second sign that Girl might not be sure of where she’s at or what she’s doing. But she’s cute, so we’ll forgive her at this point.

  Now the guys have taken over one of those long stairways that lead down to the beach, so they can give a mini-concert on one of the landings. Then they’re suddenly back at the water’s edge, so they’ve obviously been drinking Red Bull and they can’t stay still. Back to the stairs, back to the water, tight shot of them standing in a circle like they’re about to kick off a Wiccan ceremony, in the water, on the beach, back on the stairs. This probably explains why The Girl has to flip her hair around so much in the first place, since she’s trying to keep them in sight as they dash about like ants on steroids.

  (Side note, part two:  A little after the one-minute mark, one of the guys grabs his crotch. So two-thousand-and-late, right? I thought we’d moved beyond that. Carry on.)

  Another montage, this one involving the guys getting their stuff out of the camper van and screwing around with a soccer ball. This is followed by the lone blond guy getting his close-up, but he’s not actually singing in the shot, so he might still be in time-out from whatever he did earlier in the video. Then they find a giant piece of driftwood so they can climb on top of it and knock each other into the sand. (My version of festive beach-time activities is far less physical and much more alcoholic. Each to his own, though.)

  Singer C gets his solo appearance (he’s the crotch-grabber, by the way, in case you need to update your diary with the little lock that breaks quite easily so I don’t know why there’s a lock in the first place).  I guess word has already gotten out about his affinity for fondling, because the camera is kept firmly above his waist.

  Then The Girl and The Girlfriends roll up in the vintage bug, which is really impressive because they’re driving on the sand and using a stick shift and all of them are busy waving at the guys instead of watching where the car is going. The Girls pile out, there are hugs all around, and then the whole gang goes thundering over the dunes, propelled by their youthful exuberance and fluctuating hormones. They even scramble over the big-ass dead tree instead of calmly walking around it, so they definitely have some carbs to burn off.

  The Girls vanish for a bit so the Guys can walk and sing on the beach some more, which kicks off another montage of hair-flipping, mini-concerts on the stairs, the Guys back in that Wiccan circle, the Guys with their arms around each other in budding little bromances, and lots of splashing and running. (At one point, we see the Guys gallivanting back DOWN that huge hill, despite having just been spotted on the beach, so I’m beginning to suspect that there might be TWO One Direction bands, the original and a posse of clones that can be used to confuse the paparazzi  and/or make double the revenue until somebody figures it out.)

  Shot of The Girl and her hair sprawled on a beach towel, then a loving solo shot of one of The Girlfriends, so there might have been some recasting decisions while the Guys were jacking around on that pointless hill. Does Girlfriend B have a chance at overtaking Main Girlfriend based on online polling during the playing of the video? Stay tuned! (Note to the agent of Main Girl: tell your client that accessories are very important in this business and she should have held on that hat a little tighter while riding in the car. You piss off the wardrobe people and your career can plummet.)

  Anyway, we next have a shot of the guys all shirtless as they splash in the water, because you have to hit all the right demographics. (Well, except for the Blond Guy. What is up with him?) Then we’re back on the beach with the camera twirling around in a circle so the guys keep appearing and disappearing, making it seem like there are hundreds of One Directioners, an image that thrills the tweens (more of them to marry!) and causes the parents to reach for anxiety medication.

  Next up, as the sun is lowering, is some type of clap-along during the “na-na” chorus. This goes on for a while, so they throw in a few random shots of people being wrapped in blankets and then hurled down the beach (not sure what’s going on there, hope the proper insurance papers were signed). We eventually get to the really quiet part of the song where one of the Guys nuzzles up to The Girl (I guess she was able to fight off the second-tier girlfriend and remain the star) and tries to woo her with words. To be fair, it’s a bit difficult maintaining your composure when someone is bellowing right in your face, but Girl does an admirable job and only seems to be on the verge of laughing for one brief second.

  We wind things down with that inexplicable tradition of setting off sparklers as night falls on the beach. (I always thought this was kind of dangerous, especially if somebody has gotten into the alcohol, and you KNOW someone did, probably the crotch-grabber. Who wants a burning piece of metal shoved at their head by people who are wobbly and have blurred vision? Seriously.) But nobody asked me, so away the bouncing teens go, running and waving danger flame like they’re trying to help Air Force one land nearby.

  We wrap it up with a montage of all the revelries from throughout the day, just in case you didn’t write it all down in your security-breached diary. Singing and dancing and a mystifying lack of costume changes and campfire stories and death sparklers. The last shot is of The Guys disappearing around a bend in the beach. Without The Girls. No idea what that’s all about, but I hope they have fun wherever they are going…

Click Here to Watch this Video on YouTube.

The Wanted – “Glad You Came”

  We start things out with the video literally following the opening lyrics of the song (the sun goes down, the stars come out) so right away I don’t care for the director, going for the obvious and all. Then we see that said director is none other than “Director X”, which usually means “this thing was mashed together by a marketing team and a drunken stylist with the main goal of filming somewhere tropical”. Who knows what kind of hot mess is going to come flying at us, so fasten your seatbelts.

  We first see the guys all lined up in a row, sitting on a cliff overlooking a patch of water. They appear to be gazing at something in the distance, which could be the setting sun but could just as easily be that drunken stylist doing something obscene with coconuts. Then we have the guys staged in front of a stone wall, in a stance that says “cover shoot”, so one of them can start singing while the others wait for panties to be thrown at them.

  Then we’re back by the cliffs, and the cinematographer gives us glowing close-ups of each acne-free face so we can cheer for our favorite, but I don’t know any of their names so the only way I can describe it is “five guys sitting around on boulders, with one of them considerably whiter than the others”. Then we get a long-shot rear view of the guys lined up again, staring at the now-annoying sun as it finally plops out of sight, thus making it harder for any witnesses to testify later about what they might have seen the boys doing in the darkness.

  And then bam, it’s the next day, the peaceful part of the song is over and we are plunged into some beach-party locale as the music ramps up and some of the guys’ shirts come off. The editor doesn’t waste any time letting us know that we are in Ibiza, where endless videos like this have been made in between rounds of massive alcohol intake and spontaneous near-nudity. (As if to highlight that second part, we get a montage of supermodels proving that you can indeed wear a paper towel as a dress and still look quite fetching.)

  Within about three seconds of arriving in Ibiza, the guys start hooking up with some of the supermodels, because things like that just naturally happen in a place where everyone is nearly-wearing the same minimalist designer fashions and you really can’t tell people apart. Might as well pair up with the first person you meet since they all look the same in the mirror over the bed.

  Then the boys head over to a nightclub (or dayclub, whatever, these places never really close in Ibiza) to sing part of the song, although it appears that most of the patrons are more interested in being served a cocktail rather than being serenaded by a singing group that can’t even manage to wear the same outfits. This is followed by the guys going back into the cliffs, where they discover a pack of chesty women lounging about in the crevices, looking like lionesses as they wait for somebody to wander their way so they can make a kill.

  Of course, all of these overheated women are staring at the guys like they’ve never seen anything else as desirable on the entire planet. Within a few more seconds of their arrival, the boys have managed to all hook up with one or three of the desperate non-housewives. Then we head back into town, or at least somewhere that the cliffs are not so noticeable, so we can watch the guys hunt down more prey, because having less than 15 available females on your dance ticket is so old-school.

  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is basically the plot of the entire video: the five guys are on a perpetual quest for women, though they apparently don’t have to try very hard to accomplish this mission. On dance floors, on speedboats, on sun-drenched beaches, on the top of a hotdog stand, the women are throwing themselves at the guys with the rapidity of a jackhammer, as if none of the hormone-dripping women can imagine living if living is without at least one member of The Wanted.

  This goes on for a very long time, because the women are everywhere in Ibiza. They return your volleyball when it bounces their way, they come out of the depths of a swimming pool, they fall out of trees, they pop out of the trunk of your car, they are awarded as door prizes at the supermarket, and they are neatly stacked in your underwear drawer. Even the white guy, slathered in SPF 150, has to deal with rafts of women floating up to him and yearning for his slipperiness.

  The mating rituals reach a high point when one of the guys actually makes musical and physical love to a woman in the bathroom, both of them knocking things off the vanity as they satisfy their burning needs. (It also appears that there is another couple going at it in the shower behind them, but this can’t be fully confirmed because the video editor is making jump cuts like a woodpecker on crack.)

  We stop having sex long enough for some of the guys to climb one of the cliffs and then leap into the ocean, as if they haven’t already proved their manliness, or at least their horniness, by bedding half the population. Then the gang heads back to that nightclub so they can sing about their exploits, reminding us that this is indeed a music video and not the Kama Sutra. The boys also exhibit some dancing skills by performing intricate choreography that involves putting their arms around each other’s shoulders and then bouncing.

  There’s an additional sequence where it appears that the guys are having a night parade thrown in their honor, but this might just be the line for the margarita stand. Again, the editor really doesn’t like to stay on one scene longer than three milliseconds. And the director doesn’t let anybody who isn’t pretty come anywhere near the camera.

  We end the video with hung-over people waking up on floors and tables and toilets, and some of the guys do seem a bit concerned that they might have overindulged a bit. But then their faces brighten as they realize that it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, and there’s an island of women out there. Maybe they can order a few with room service?

Click Here to Watch this Video on YouTube.

One Republic – “Feel Again”

  We start off with a nice nature shot of, well, not sure what it is, some bit of land with trees that hasn’t been turned into high-priced condos that nobody really needs or wants. Here comes lead singer Ryan bopping along a little path like he can’t see the camera right there. What he can see is a glowing orb plunked in the middle of the trail, which he promptly picks up even though it doesn’t have his name on it and one really shouldn’t mess with things that have no visible source of energy.

  Ryan studies the orb for a bit, and apparently his jacking around with it causes a little side path to light up and tempt him further into the trees. He hesitates for roughly two seconds, and then he happily heads into the trees, like nothing bad ever happens to people who follow strange lights into the forest at night, all alone and not carrying any survival gear. I’m thinking Ryan should spend less time without some form of supervision.

  Anyway, sparkly fairy path eventually leads Ryan to a clearing where there are lots more little lights, some of them making interesting patterns, as well as some folks dressed like futuristic hippies and dancing in the fairy light. (Didn’t see that one coming.) Ryan, instead of heading for the hills, wanders further into the clearing to find more pretty lights, ropes and panels of them, as well as the rest of his band. (You’d think they would have said something if they knew about this place, but sometimes the people in bands keep secrets from one another until their solo album is ready.)

  While the secretive members of the band keep playing, Ryan starts fondling some of the light strands and trying to figure out what’s going on. Before he can quite do that, a woman dressed in more of the odd clothing, and who is clearly a descendent of Esmerelda from Bewitched  based on that hair and makeup, throws an important switch and suddenly we have tons more lights blinking and dancing through the trees. (It’s like a Skittles factory exploded, only in a happy way, and the survivors decided to decorate with the fallout.)

  Ryan pauses to sing with the band for a little bit, because even if they are plotting a coup of some kind, they still have a recording contract to fulfill and they might as well get that part done. Then Ryan goes back to studying the colorful décor and citizens in this place, including some dancing stewardesses from the 1960’s, a woman who is rudely listening to something on headphones when she’s got a live band right in front of her, and a couple who appear to be playing badminton with a ball of light.

  This inspires Ryan to pick up an old-school megaphone and start hollering the words of the song into it. What he expects to accomplish by doing that is unclear, but he seems to be enjoying it so we’ll let it go for now. (He also raises his left fist in the air so we can see he’s wearing some really cool bracelets that you can probably order at the end of the video.)

  Hold up, Ryan’s breath is now coming out as a string of lights which then proceed to run up the trees around him. This is a very interesting superpower to have, although I would personally choose something that can destroy evil warlords instead of help passing spaceships land. No matter, Ryan likes that his very essence can light the world, and he seems quite pleased with his new ability. Now all he needs is a phone booth where he can change into some tights.

  While he looks for that, we get little vignettes of the other citizens, with some of them giving each other flowers that light up and some of them blowing air kisses that look like rainbows. Since we’re nearing the last section of the song, all the folks gather into a large opening and start dancing, because that’s what you’re supposed to do in music videos when you get to this part of the song, even if you live in an odd village with mystical lighting.

  Because Ryan is really wailing the lyrics by now, the words are shooting out of his mouth like a much happier version of Pong. (Side note to the youngsters out there: Pong is a video game that old cave-dwellers like me played hundreds of years ago on an ancient device made by a company called Atari. You can still find rusty examples of this contraption in antique stores and buried in the pyramids of Egypt.)

  As the song and music fade, we get a tight shot of Ryan and his chest, where we can see that is heart is lighting up with each beat. Then the camera shoots up into the sky and we swivel back down to watch a last few bursts of color over the trees before the little happy place disappears.

  The next morning, Ryan awakes from his dream and discovers that he has eaten an entire bag of Lite-Brite pegs….

Click Here to Watch this Video on YouTube.

Rihanna – “S.O.S.”

  We start out with Rihanna shimmying about in front of some tree-bush thing. She’s sporting lots of that body makeup where her skin sparkles like she got a finger caught in an electrical outlet, and she’s performing a dance that seems to be based on the fact that her breasts are fighting desperately to escape the pretty but functionally-questionable dress that she is wearing. There’s a nice breeze blowing that gently caresses all of her various body parts as they compete against one another to get our attention.

  Eventually we switch to Rihanna and an unnamed male companion cavorting in a spotlight that is being splashed on a grey wall. (They didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the set design for this bit.) Rihanna is showcasing a new outfit (something about tight blue-jean cutoffs and eye shadow) and a new dance that involves rubbing against the back and buttocks of her little friend before dropping to the ground on all fours and searching for her water bowl. (The camera catches the guy staring at Rihanna like he really didn’t expect this type of behavior when he innocently picked her up to go get some sushi.)

  We jump again, this time to some place where there’s lots of pink and purple lighting, and a random stylist has made the decision to pile all of Rihanna’s copious hair on top of her head in a sort of poofy, curly bun that is bigger than some planets. (I would imagine that this hair-piling process was a major operation, and that the production team had to hire some extra contractors just for this scene.) She’s accompanied by another male companion, or possibly the same one, who seems really invested in waving his arms around so that they reflect the pretty lights in different directions.

  We zip back to Cutoffs Rihanna in that spotlight, where she has modified her choreography to include energetic movements that make her hair whirl about like she’s helicoptering troops to a secret deployment site. Sidekick Dude has been instructed to clutch at Rihanna’s body in a manner that allows his head to be positioned dangerously close to her hoo-hoo. There appears to be a very interesting story here, perhaps we’ll get to the details in a bit.

  But first we check back in with Green-Dress Rihanna as she continues her advertisement for body cosmetics and whips her really fancy earrings about with complete abandon. (Operation Breast Escape update, for those keeping score: the twins are still bravely fighting for liberation, but the dress is apparently made out of some miracle fiber that manages to keep the detainees in lockup.)

  And now we’re off to another location and another outfit, where Rihanna and four of her horny male posse are doing a line dance that involves arm-waving and baseball caps. In the background, we can see what might be giant ice cubes with their own internal power source that allows them to be lit-up and sparkly like Liberace forgot to put his cufflinks away. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of those things, because you don’t spend obvious cash on set pieces and only allow them to be in one brief scene.

  Over to Pink-Lighting Rihanna, where she and her hair have wandered into a House of Mirrors, creating an army of Rihannas wearing high heels and a backless jumpsuit. Seeing herself reflected that many times has gotten Rihanna even more lusty than usual, and she proceeds to rub her booty on as many surfaces as possible and do more of that crawling around on her hands and knees business. (Meanwhile, her little companion is enjoying his own set of mirrors, writhing around and loving his own bad self while still managing to keep his sunglasses in place.)

  I guess the two of them are really enjoying this part of the shoot, so we spend a lot of time watching them frolic and undulate while those samples from the old-school Soft Cell song are blaring from the speakers. But even the hardcore fans can take only so much of this symbolic masturbation, so we cut to another scene and outfit, this one involving Rihanna dancing with some other ladies who have discovered the joys of smearing glitter on your skin and then cavorting in places where the wind blows your hair just right.

  All of these lovely lasses have libidos that completely control their bodies, because that’s some sort of requirement in a Rihanna video, so of course they immediately engage in a line dance that allows them to leap about like somebody sprinkled paprika in their panties, as if they were wearing any. While they are doing that, we revisit Green-Dress Rihanna to confirm that the chesty inmates are still trying to jump the walls of the penitentiary.

  Now it’s time for the inevitable product placement, so we have Rihanna wearing Capri pants and fiddling with a Nokia phone whilst she relaxes on a leather lounger. It seems that this is a very special phone that you simply must have, because exploring all the high-tech features of the device can apparently cause you to have instantaneous multiple orgasms, based on the way Rihanna is arching her back and curling her toes in complete ecstasy.

  As if that wasn’t enough excitement, we head back to the room with the spotlight and the boring grey wall, so that Rihanna and all of her various dance partners can perform solos while the ever-present wind whips across the soundstage. The main motifs with this bit of tag-team shimmying seem to include touching your head repeatedly and trying to hump the wind that never stops blowing. Then we jump back to Pink Rihanna in the House of Mirrors, where she is now invested in doing lots of sultry maneuvers that showcase the fact that she is very limber and has legs strong enough to snap your head right off.

  Then we head over to that room with the giant electric ice cubes (I knew we were going to be seeing more of those things) where the whole gang has gathered for more choreography and hormonal release. We kick things off with a drill-team routine where the camera runs down the line of anonymous dancers and allows everyone to perform a signature move that will hopefully transform their careers from “hip-thrusting guy #7” to international megastar. This doesn’t immediately happen, from what I can tell, but you never know.

  Of course, this is really all about Rihanna in the end, so we quickly kick off a montage of Rihanna twirling and kicking in that one spotlight, including some fancy dual-screen imagery in case just one Rihanna is not enough for you to make it through the day. This sets up the grand finale, where Rihanna is hoisted on top of one of the electric ice cubes so she and two of her closest dance partners can perform an energetic ménage a trois based on the insistent beat of the song, with Rihanna’s odd pantyhose (or possible henna tattoos) serving as the centerpiece of the action.

  After a brief return to Pink Rihanna and her beau loving themselves in front of the pleasure mirrors, we close things out back where we started, with Green-Dress Rihanna sparkling in front of the tropical foliage whilst the last few after-tremors of her Nokia orgasm work their way out of her system. For the records, it appears that the prison uprising has been quelled and the naughty prisoners are still locked in their dual cells…

Click Here to Watch this Video on YouTube.

Oasis – “Wonderwall”

  We start out with a clown and… I’m already not a fan of this video. There’s just something fundamentally wrong with clowns, can’t quite put my finger on it. But I’ll try to be nice. So this clown is walking to the middle of a mostly vacant warehouse, where he discovers an old-school record player just sitting on the floor. No one asks him to, but the clown decides to start the record and then he disappears and leaves a mess for somebody else to clean up.

  Why does that remind me of the George Bush administration? Hmm.

  Next up is a guitar player sitting where the record player used to be, and he’s strumming the opening of the song. This is much more pleasant than the damn clown. Until we get a brief shot of some evil-looking saws swinging on a metal rod. That can’t mean anything good. But then we have a nice showgirl posing beside some harmless acoustic guitars, so we head back to the happy place once again. I’m not sure why the video editor is throwing all these images at us, but maybe he’s preparing us for the eventual close-up of Liam Gallagher and his startling eyebrows.

  And there it is, with Liam staring into the mirror of a giant compact and crooning the first lyrics of the song. Then we cut to a montage of the various band members alternately sitting on a long bench and possibly preparing to perform in this empty warehouse. It’s really not clear what they are doing, other than moving around a lot and screwing around with instruments and random ladders. To make it even more confusing, everything is in black and white. This could be a nod to nostalgia or an indication of a budget issue.

  Then we’re back to a close-up of Liam, and he’s sporting some John Lennon sunglasses that are reflecting what might be dual Ferris wheels. (I understand that Liam has a fancy for recreational drugs, at least at one point in his life, so it might be a good guideline to just let some of these images roll by without comment. If I wasn’t there for the trip, I’m not going to understand the souvenir photos, sayin’.) We pull back from Liam so we can see that the rest of the band is behind him, still wandering around without any apparent focus or itinerary. (Again, shades of the Bush Administration.)

  This is followed by a montage of shots involving the playing of a bass violin, the damn clown not going away like he should, something that might be a mechanical cowboy, more of the band members sitting on a bench like they really have to wait for a bus like the common people, and some mess where Liam is rotating around what might be a giant dartboard or a leftover still from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Oh, and the clown appears to be having a torrid love affair with a ventriloquist dummy that looks like Stockard Channing if someone threw her in a dryer.

  Did I mention drug usage? Thought so.

  We jump around for a bit more, then we’re back to Liam and his John Lennon glasses sitting in a chair with his crotch thrust forward. He’s using one of his index fingers to point at his crotch, in case you were unclear about what such a thing might be. And another montage kicks off. (Actually, the whole video is a montage of randomness, but I’m trying to give this some story structure since the writers, if there were any, didn’t bother to do so.)

  This new rush of whimsy involves more of those swinging death-saws, the band playing, the showgirl, a spinning record album with some type of twisted Brady Bunch tribute, the clown still not leaving, and people fiddling with that mechanical cowboy. (Closer inspection of said cowboy reveals that he might be a slot machine, and pulling on his business lever makes coins shoot out of him in a rather homoerotic way. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I just didn’t see it coming or I might have put on a more sexy outfit.)

  Odd scene with college professors making music with those slasher-film saws, then we cut back to the band members on that bench, with the camera panning along their various faces. Why are none of these people smiling? Did Liam and Noel get into it again, what with their history of loving then hating then loving each other within a five-minute span? I guess it doesn’t matter. I think all explanations clearly went out the window when that bastard clown stuck his hand up Stockard’s backside.

  Another John Lennon close-up, with the added attraction of Liam possibly being electrocuted.  He manages to survive this rude event, much to the relief of his agent, and he again shoves his crotch at us for our viewing pleasure. (So thoughtful of him.) We jump around a bit more, then we start messing with more of that Brady Bunch shenanigans with the various band members appearing in little squares. (None of them have hair of golden like their mother, just in case you were wondering. It’s black and white, love, there’s not a golden anything.)

  Brief bit where the band decides to play a game of darts, because the death-saws and the orifice-invading clown and the eyebrows are not dangerous enough.

  Somebody brings out a megaphone, probably not the wisest decision, and the band members start using it to torment each other, because you’re really not a family unless someone is doing something completely annoying. Happily, they quickly get rid of that thing and go back to another montage, this one involving more Brady Bunch, bass violin, showgirl (who is really starting to get on my nerves with her lack of purpose), the cowboy (who is still oddly hot despite his lack of a pulse), crotch, professors, bench-sitting, and some actual playing of instruments.

  Then Liam finally hops out of his John Lennon chair and goes off to do something else, so we start to wind the video down, especially since we’ve gotten to that part of the song where nobody is actually singing. There’s another montage, but it’s more of the same, with random images that are somewhat interesting but really serve the purpose of stretching out the video to accommodate the really long instrumental bit which sounds great on the radio but causes a video director to clench and take stomach-acid pills.

  The final shot is of the blasted clown returning to turn off the record player. Which is NOT like the George Bush administration, because they never came back to fix anything that they broke.

  Cheers.

Click Here to Watch this Video on YouTube.

Of Monsters and Men – “Little Talks”

  Okay, folks, this one gets a little trippy, so pack a lunch and hang on…

  We start out with an odd little flying machine (think: combination of a blimp and Noah’s ark) zipping through the darkened skies of some alternate universe where things don’t seem to be very happy. There are menacing clouds everywhere, it’s all done in black and white, and you fully expect Ingmar Bergman to show up and smite everybody. Instead, a colorful meteor (possibly, who knows) shoots past the ship on its way to a fiery crash-landing or a sale at Macy’s.

  We zoom in closer to the ark part of the ship, so we can see the band members come running out of the Chinese-themed cabin and line up on the prow of the vessel so they can check out the flaming thing that just shot past them in the fast lane. (Note: The band members have been digitally messed with so that they have super skinny legs. Despite all the monsters and mayhem that show up in a bit, those skinny legs are probably the most unsettling thing in the video for me.)

  Anyway, one of the band members has a convenient spyglass thingy that he probably got as a bonus prize with his last XBOX purchase, and he uses this device to watch the meteor crash to… well, it’s not Earth, but it’s probably a planet we haven’t discovered yet because everyone is still bickering about that Pluto-downgrade mess. Next thing you know, the band is lined up in front of the meteor, with no explanation as to how they got there so quickly or whether or not they bothered to put the proper amount of coinage in the parking meter for the ark.

  Suddenly, ominous orange-red cracks begin appearing in the skyfall rock, a sure sign that we need to go find something else to do for a while. But instead of run like hell, the band members just stare at the thing in wonder, probably so we can carefully study their interesting glacier-themed makeup. (Hey, if somebody took the time to put all that goop on their faces, it’s only polite that we fully review the quality before we pass judgment and/or hire the artist for our next thesis presentation.)

  Then the rock suddenly explodes and the band members go flying, which is probably not a good thing, but I don’t happen to have the travel brochure for this particular planet. (Maybe this is why people come here, to get their ass thrown through the air by a shockwave. It’s certainly better than going to Disney and watching over-sized rodents dance and sing.) Rising up out of the rubble is a fabulously-attired creature with more clever makeup. She may want to eat us for brunch, but she sure is purty.

  I guess we missed out on some sort of contract negotiation, because the next thing we know the creature has joined the band on their ark and they are back in the skies again. (The creature is hovering just above the ship, so not only is she a snappy dresser, she doesn’t have to worry about gravity or regular means of transportation. We’ll call her Fly Girl until we get to know her better.) The gang continues on their journey through a land where giant animal statues adorn the various mountaintops, definite warnings that this planet is not known for safety or hospitality.

  Sure enough, an enormous two-headed vulture thing suddenly appears from wherever (possibly back from a Starbucks run, who knows) and rudely uses it’s claws to deflate the quaint little blimp, sending it hurtling downward. Well, Fly Girl thinks this is completely uncalled for, so she shoots a radiation bolt out of her mouth (right in time with the beat of the song, such talent!) which vaporizes the angry bird. It’s probably a good idea to keep Fly Girl on our side in case we need her to do that again.

  Cut to the ark-blimp snagged on a barren tree growing out of the side of a mountain. (Whew!) One of the band members hauls out a hooked thingy on a line, which he throws clear across the valley and into the stone mouth of a giant dragon sculpture. (I would have aimed somewhere less death-signifying, but I wasn’t consulted.) The band then hauls ass across the line, with Fly Girl hovering prettily just behind them, and then they march down into the throat of the stone beast. (Do these people just not think about consequences? Are they Republicans?)

  The dragon’s cavernous intestines apparently lead to another part of this world, where they have lots of snow and blizzard conditions and another enormous being, this time in the form of a hairy Yeti that clearly doesn’t have his welcome mat outside the front door. To make sure that we understand his displeasure and evil intentions, the beast aggressively growls at them (also right on the beat, so even if the folks around here dangerous and uncivil, at least they understand things like percussion and timing.)

  No worries for the band, though, because they’ve got Fly Girl in their posse, and it only takes about two seconds for her to annihilate Bad Boy with another bolt of unpleasantry and collect her Achievement award. Then the band decides to march through another valley, this one lined with giant gargoyles, because that looks very inviting and we might as well march somewhere because the video isn’t over yet.

  Then we find the gang in a forest where they have floating smoke monsters, just like on Lost, only without the sunshine or Jack and Sawyer taking off their shirts in order to impress Kate. To be fair, those smoke monsters are pocket change compared to the clientele that we’ve already met, and everyone seems to agree that this particular path isn’t dangerous enough, so we head over to some type of polar icecap  with active volcanos and giant icicles that can pierce your skull. Much more satisfying from a poor-decision-making angle.

  Whoopsie, I guess no one planned on the volcanos causing the ground to split open (because who knew that mixing extreme heat and extreme cold can cause issues) but that’s exactly what happens, with the band members plunging underwater. And, keeping with the theme of super-sizing our meal, the water is filled with fish bigger than Alabama. (Oh, and some interesting ruined temples, so I guess every planet gets to have an Atlantis, must be some type of intergalactic decree.)

  Naturally, the guys don’t try to swim to safety with any sense of urgency, so one of the sea creatures gets bored and snags a band member as a souvenir to hang over his fireplace. Fly Girl, the only one who seems to understand that you have to stay relatively alive in order to continue promoting your latest album, quickly zooms in with another shot of glittering death.

  Once the Creature from the Slacker Lagoon has been dispatched, they all pile onto an iceberg, because that seems like a reasonable mode of travel when all other modes of transportation have hit the fail blog. Interestingly enough, this appears to be a rather zippy iceberg, one that can spontaneously launch itself out of the water and into the clouds. (It seems that we were not very successful the last time we were airborne, but maybe this flight will have those tasty packets of peanuts and a decent movie.)

  But before we can order a cocktail from the alien flight attendant, we can’t help but notice that the sky suddenly fills with flaming birds who are intent on a destination up ahead. The one band member whips out his trusty spyglass, and we learn that the fiery fowl are headed toward a special cloud that seems to be exploding with all of the makeup colors from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. This should be fun, let’s see what happens.

  As we pull up to the iceberg, making sure that we park in the white zone so we don’t get yelled at by Security, a horned being rises out of the cloud, a thing with multiple eyes on its vaguely buffalo-inspired head. We get another round of reaction shots from the lined-up band members (one of them appears to be gazing in the wrong place, so he might have missed a memo or at least shouldn’t be allowed to drive the tour bus anymore) as the creature continues to grow and fill the air with his peacock-on-acid creepy flamboyance.

  Then we focus on Fly Girl, who up until now has had a single expression, one that indicated an intense dissatisfaction with life and dumbasses who have to be rescued continuously. But now her face is breaking into one of supreme joy with a possible tinge of arousal. So either she’s Hot for Buffalo or she’s at least found her way back home again, just like Dorothy finally did after she made that one bitch melt and slept in an opium field.

  I guess it’s the latter, because Fly Girl wastes no time flitting toward the buffalo and installing herself in the middle of his forehead. She must have been some sort of missing touchstone, because the buffalo being expands even more, spreading its dazzling wings, its various eyes twinkling. The camera pulls back for a parting shot of the band members lost in studious rapture as they gaze upon the magnificence of something so menacingly beautiful.

  Then the therapist announces that our session is over and she’ll see us again next week…

Click Here to Watch this Video on YouTube.

The Wallflowers – “One Headlight”

  Note: There are times when you have a really great song that is paired with a video that is so bland and uninspiring that I can’t find anything to make the funny happen. This is one of those times, so I’m just going to make stuff up as I go along. And here we go…

  We get a brief shot of the band warming up on a stage somewhere, then we shift to what is possibly a giant star-spangled flag that is being dragged over the opening of a big-ass well. This makes me think of The Ring, that heart-warming movie where bad things happened in or around a well and people died. It also reminds me that people in that movie who happened to watch a certain video met untimely deaths in startling ways that were not covered by their insurance policies.

  So, of course, I begin wondering if watching this video is going to ignite a similar curse wherein I get killed by simply pushing an unknown satanic button on my DVD remote control. I really don’t want that to happen, as I haven’t made the proper arrangements for sudden death on my couch, and I haven’t finished the latest Stephen King novel. Then I realize that I have paused this video at the 8 second mark, and I probably should watch a bit more before I get too invested in my psychotic break.

  So I push play again, and hope that the offspring of Bob Dylan can help me get to a better place.

  Speaking of, there’s Jakob, now standing in front of that star-spangled flag. He’s wearing a hat that I don’t particularly care for, and he’s sporting a goatee that looks a bit wimpy. This does not bode well. But then we switch to more shots of the other band members doing things with their instruments, and they don’t seem to be concerned about cursed videos or falling into a well, so I’ll just keep watching.

  We eventually get to a section where Jakob appears in a tight close-up so that we can better inspect the controversial goatee (still not sure about that decision) and admire the more-favorable things that a stylist has done with his hair. I try not to notice the odd lights behind him that could easily represent evil spirits that are pissed off about something that happened 60 years ago. Probably near a well.

  More shots of the other band members strumming and drumming, with all of them wearing Johnny-Cash-black outfits and pretending no to notice the odd flashes of light behind them that might indicate someone is being electrocuted. We also seem to have some fog blowing across the stage. Perhaps this happens at some of your more progressive concerts, but I usually associate fog with the sudden arrival of headless horsemen or strange beasties strangling innocent maidens on the Scottish moors.

  Suddenly, we are transported to what might be the seedier regions of Moscow or Vienna, where we have a woman strutting about in a mysterious way that only lets us see her shadow on the walls of this questionable environment. But before we can ask why this bit is important, we jump back to Jakob and the band and their black outfits performing on the stage where people might be dying behind them.

  Quick revisit to the Moscow Woman, or at least her shadow, where it might just be the camera angle but Olga appears to be quite pregnant. Does Jakob need to adjust the number of dependents on his income tax returns?

  I guess we won’t find out any time soon, because we head back to the band performing, and no one seems to be waving about any paternity test results. Instead, they all seem to be cast members in a French film where everyone is dissatisfied with life and the brie has gone moldy. And we still have lots of unexplained power surges.

  Oh wait, now it looks like we have Jakob wandering around Moscow as well. He sings for a while, because that’s his basic job and we expect him to do that, but there’s also some mess about a mysterious car driving sneaking along the streets. (And more of those gold stars. Did somebody do really, really well on their spelling test?)

  Hold up, was that Stevie Ray Vaughn at about 2:34 into the video? Probably not.

  More shots of the band performing, and I’m starting to get a little bit irritated that none of them seem to be bothered with all that unexplained lightning and fog behind them. This is where people mess up in horror movies. If something is jacked-up with the weather patterns in your immediate area, you need to run like hell or find a weapon.

  The band continues to ignore the atmospheric disturbances for a very long time. And someone keeps waving that star-spangled flag. In the music video industry, this is known as “just throw in repetitions of the same shots until the video is as long as the song”. In the music video review industry, this is known as “who the hell was responsible for editing this video?”.

  Next up is an extended sequence of Jakob singing in front of the star flag, interspersed with more lightning and less plot. (His hair still looks good, props for that.) Then we have another close-up of the goatee, some more shadows in Moscow, and a non-explanation about who might be pregnant and why they find it necessary to wander the streets of an unnamed town when it’s very clear that they should get their ass back home until the baby is due.

  Sadly, none of our probing questions are answered, as the rest of the video makes it clear that the editor and/or director have run out of ideas. We have more of the band ignoring Mother Nature, more of the band wearing matching black outfits, more of the unresolved paternity suit, more of that damn star-flag that seems to serve no other purpose than match the cover art on the CD, and a shot of someone’s foot tapping to the beat.

  Then we have a final lightning burst behind the band and the video ends.

  I stare at my PC and the blinking option to replay the video. Dare I risk it? What would Naomi Watts do in The Ring? What would the Japanese woman in the original film do? Most importantly, what part of any of this is covered in my insurance policy?

Click Here to Watch this Video on YouTube…