Cool: Breaking Point
Balancing Point: The music's relaxing, the camera trickery is clever - these guys knocked down piles of stones then reversed the film. Slow start, but pretty funny when the short guy starts making like some sort of stone-stacking magic ninja.
posted by CatsFive @ Friday, August 12, 2005
5 Comments:
That was awesome, but I'm kind of a sucker for backwards stuff; I liked how, well, basically perfect he got the moves and such, too. At times, I wasn't sure if they were just doing editing/trickery/mattes/etc. to have him, say, leave the scene in forward motion while the "creation" was fully backwards, but in the first one, you see a bit of snow sort of.. fall.. on his shoe, acting in a way you'd only get with backwards footage, so I think he actually figured out how to walk more-or-less-naturally backwards, so it'd look right.
(Speaking of which, have you seen the video for "Sugar Water" by Cibo Matto, directed by Michel Gondry? That one is amazing, and a similar sorta thing. I think he said it only took him a few takes, too. Ok, I just looked - I found a small version online (along with an essay about it!) here, but it's also on the Work of Michel Gondry DVD which is SO essential. (The other volumes, honestly, are less so. All three of the current batch are worth getting (Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham), but Gondry's the only one who really seemed to get the project. Cunningham in particular seemed that he couldn't really be arsed, and Spike Jonze seemed more that he liked the idea well enough but was too busy or something. I'm not sure if I'll pick up the next four volumes; I really wasn't impressed by the lineup on the discs. (And I'm still kinda pissed at Anton Corbijn for that waste of film Some Yo-Yo Stuff, where it's all "HEY IT'S A BEEFHEART DOCUMENTARY! WITH BEEFHEART!!" and all it is is just Beefheart standing around, not really saying much of anything as stuff is projected onto him, like David Lynch going "Hey, Don, how's it going?" SUCH a wasted opportunity. You get a chance to talk to a brilliant recluse and you waste it by not actually letting him say much of anything of substance? Jerk. But, man, I think this pretty much defines "digression" here, so I'll stop.)
That's just awesome! :D I just got more impressed with it as it went along. Heh heh!! Excellent, excellent. (He also has excellent taste in music, that second piece being a song from my man John Frusciante).
And Matt- yes, I've seen the Gondry/Cibo Matto video. ALL of his are cool. The Cunningham disc is still my favorite from the set, though! :)
Funnily enough, the Cunningham one is my least favorite (even aside from the anemic contents; hardly any bonuses and waay fewer videos than the others -- though that might be just because he hasn't DONE as many, in which case, you know, can't fault him for that); he's technically brilliant, but I tend to find that he seems to go a little bit more for Shock than for actual... story or whatever. (Though there are some of his I love; "All is Full of Love" is magnificently beautiful and the one with the Japanese girl and the dog in the asylum (forget the act/song, though, but I remember digging that too) was great too) are both worth the price of admission, and, well, hey, I do like almost all the videos on that one, but every single video on the Gondry set is flooringly good. And so are all the bonuses, the short films, and the documentary and everything. But Gondry might possibly be my favorite director, at least of those working today, so...)
Seen "Rubber Johnny" yet? I've been sort of on the fence -- everyone talks about how disturbing it is, which makes me a little leery, but on the other hand, everyone talks about how disturbing "Come to Daddy" is, and, um, I never really found it so much so... so, hey...8)
No, I've seen the "Rubber Johnny" trailer but not the actual video yet. It looks fascinating... disturbing, but with the undercurrent of wiggy humor that (to me) is what keeps Cunningham's stuff from being unbearably dark.
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