This is fairly random. To be honest I'm not really sure on the structure of it. Plus my connection to my co-lo server is lagged to fuck and back and Ive been grappling penguins (electronic ones, of my own creation) and possible bugs in Perl and whatever all day so expect this to be even more incoherent than the usual gash I spew out at times like these. Disclaimer over. Your keywords for today are : Michel Gondry Jonathan Glazer Spike Jonze David Fincher Adverts Movies Music Videos History Fight! Shynola You can probably see where I'm heading with this one. Exits are located to your front, rear and side of the mailing list. Keep your hands inside the carriage and don't feed the animals. The music I'm currently listening to on endless loop is the Natural Born Chillers' remix of the Jungle Brothers' Brain faded, by WinAmp, into '10 years asleep' by Kingmaker. No, in case your wondering it doesn't work but feel free to play those two yourself if you want the authentic feeling. So, where were we? I was thinking about old films and pacing and a whole host of other things over the last few days. Partially this was inspired by the delivery of my favourite film of all time on DVD. To wit, The Big Sleep with Bogie and Bacall. I don't know why I love it [0] - there's nothing particularly remarkable about it apart from the dialogue, Bogie's comic timing for aforesaid dialogue (written by Raymond Chandler) and Bogie and Bacall's chemistry. So good, in fact, was the chemistry, that they redited the film tohave more of them on screen to the expense of the explanation for the (already convoluted) plot. One of the interesting things in that film is a shot where Bogie pulls up in a car, gets out, walks up to the door and knocks on it. In a modern film that would be cut to [EXTERIOR (wide) : a car pulls up] [CLOSE UP : Through windshield, Marlowe looking Screen Left] [EXTERIOR (close) : Marlowe knocking on door] Are we becoming more impatient? Or just more sophisticated. We didn't need the rest of that stuff. People have blamed this fast cut culture on MTV but it's interesting to see directors who cross over. Superficially, adverts are very similar to music videos - in fact, superficially is completlely the wrong word. Music videos *are* adverts. I wonder if they're like trying to write the shortest possible script to do something. It's a very different discipline to film making and you could claim it's actually more interest. You have the shortest time possible to sell your product whether that be a song or a pair of jeans. Everything has to be tight. Seconds, milliseconds shaved off. The Editor and the Stylist are king. The Photographer and the Director their Queen. Sorry, that was overly wanky. I do apologise. I've been reading too much Salon. Like I said, it's interesting when all this spills over. The msot famous example of this would have been Ridley Scott and his Apple advert (of course he, or was it his brother, did the seminal Hovis advert). It used to be that it was an one way thing - you earnt your spurs in music videos or adverts but then on to movies. Kind of like Blonde Starlets in soft core porn movies hoping to break into the big time. Nowadays it's not the same. People criss cross back and forth like wife swappers in 70s suburbia. And doing good adverts or videos is not seen as second class directing. BMW commissioned films from Ang Lee, Guy Ritchie et al (http://www.bmwfilms.com) with Clive 'Chancer / Privateer 2 - the Darkening / Casino' Owens in them. They were surprisingly good and the chance to see the comparative styles of the directors when constrained tto the brand and the overall aesthetic of the series was fascinating. David Fincher went from adverts and videos onto Se7en and Fight Club. Superficially they were different films apart from the underlying current of modern life being rubbish. Really only the lighting, Brad Pitt and the Opening Sequences were the same. A product of dealing with different brands? Interestingly enough the Dust Brothers opening credits music for FC has just been used for a car advert. A Volvo I think. It has crabs in it. Jonathan Glazer on the other hand has a very distinctive style. His actors are all usually the same height and build and shot very strongly to highlight their cheek bones. They are dressed in nodescript but well fitting, fashionable, sub indie, vaguely 1950s looking clothes. His video for Radiohead's Street Spirit, Fade Out was the epitmoy of this and also had slow motion special effects. His latest advert, for Levis, is the culmination of this trend and could almost be a continuation of that video. Except it has a green filter and is far more violent than Street Spirit (which did have a strange underlying tone of menace). It copied heavily off Ang Lee who's almost pornographic shots of southern china were a perfect foil for the car adverts mentioned earlier. Indeed cars and pornography have a strong link from Show Girls at car shows, ladettes with their baps out in Loaded-With-Motors Max Power and Revs and the traditional mechanics' pinups. This relationship has been further explored by Pirelli with their exclusive high-class-porn (hence erotica?) calendar and JG Ballard in Crash which was unsuccessfully filmed by David Crononberg who also explored out fascination with TV in videodrome and with new great pop culture favourite, games, in eXistenZ. In this light, Glazer's first feature film, Sexy Beast, is very interesting. Opening with a strongly lit shot of Ray Winstone the characters are a big departure from his usual ones. The colour is almost monochromatic apart from the lurid red tans of the ex-pats and the occasional glimmering of the pool. Again though, there is underlying menace. Ben 'Gandhi' Kingsley and Ian 'Lovejoy' McShane are the perfect vehicles for this. The violence is very rarely overt except in Kingsley's case where it erupts from a tranquil surface periodically. Levis are interesting in themselves being that their adverts have launched many a one hit wonder - most of the time the adverts being better videos than the videos them selves - Stiltskin, Babylon Zoo, Flat Eric. Where are they now? Eh? The characteristics of them are often that the the music has a strong beat and distinctive movements, much like soundtracks for films which amke it easy to tell a story round it. Which brings me too ... Michel Gondry has two videos in the charts at the moment. The rhythmn synced Chemical Brothers video is a technically more advanced sequel to his video for Daft Punk's all around the world and his lego-tastic video for The White Stripe's "Fell in Love with a Girl" are both linked to the music in a way which doesn't happen often these days (The monkeys nodding in time to the music in "Check your Head" by Basement Jaxx being a recent exception). It would be interesting to see what he would do with a feature length film. I imagine it would be highly choreographed, probably to music which might suggest a cartoon, possibly in the Japanese anime style, although, to be honest, animation isn't really necessary since the brain will compensate, much like visualisations in WinAmp et al. /me checks to see who else he's got left to write about. Hmm, Spike Jonze and Shynola. Shynola are big on Non Photorealistic Rendering and and Cel Shading, which I've ranted about before, and, as I predicted, became the next morphing (for this I could go into Michael Jackson's extended music video/advert/PR exercise Moonwalker) or Bullet Time [tm]. They've done lots of stuff for DJ Shadow, particularly for his Quannum project which involved computer games type stuff and anime type stuff (which also, obviously has a strong influence over games as well). Recently they too have done a video for Radiohead (for Pyramid song) and adverts for Natwest. This is CONVERGENT EVOLUTION. And that was a self referential joke. Spike Jonze defies classification since none of his stuff has any distinctive style really : see his videos for Fatboy Slim - Rockerfeller Skank, Right Here Right Now, Praise You and Weapon of Choice, The Besties Boys mini movie Sabotage, which in itself is a pastiche of the userers in of the fast cutting film world we see today - the 70s cop show with it's minature montage at the start of the each episode, and then later, his full length films like Being John Malkovitch which, in a self referential kind of way, is actually quite derivative of Fincher, Scott and Cronenburg. He's also spoofed Happy Days with Wheezers Buddy Holly by splicing and matching and has also done a Daft Punk video (in Da Funk, the one with the dog). The pop-culture-meter is on overload. ... Actualyl, know, that's my bladder. All this has been written in one sitting, I haven't done any proof reading, I have to run to a pub now and I've consumed 1 pint of coffee and 1 pint of water. No wonder I'm busting for a piss. For further references look at Designers' Republic and their involvement with the WipEoput series and Warp records, Tomato and their involvement with Trainspotting and Underworld and then travel back in time and come to my talk at last month's Dorkbot about games and music. -- : it's pretty hard to look miserable when you're spinning on your head