“Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and Other Games)”

Of Montreal

You have to be in the right mood for Of Montreal. The aggressively happy group will cheer you up whether you like it or not, which, as anyone with perky friends knows, is not always pleasant. Their tools are such songs as “Wraith Pinned to the Mist (and Other Games)” (ironically unrelated to wraiths, mist, or games), and the video for the same. Like anything so sugary, it can be both delicious and cavity-inducing.

At first, the video appears to be the latter. In self-consciously amateurish animation (with the aesthetic of a hastily-assembled Flash project), brightly-colored creatures dance, birds flutter about, and flowers, rainbows, snowflakes, and polka-dots abound. There are even little animated penguins in funny hats, for God’s sake. It made the long-presumed-dead girly part of my brain come alive with cries of “Awwww” and “Eeeeeee!” It is Cute.

Cute is fine, but the saving grace of the video is its thread of gleeful sadism. The adorable critters shove, punch, shoot, and even guillotine each other. One pulls its own head off, spraying cute little animated blood droplets. The video skims past each one without comment, moving through scenes without pausing.

This sensory overload of twisted preciousness loses steam toward the end, however, as the video ends with several unidentifiable creatures springing out of an acorn spaceship (which makes as much sense as anything else in the video) and dancing for the final 30 seconds. The relative immobility of the scene allows the viewer to catch her breath and think “that was completely nonsensical.”

Sometimes, though, a little nonsense is a happy thing.

—Lisa J. Bloomberg



“Seasons of Love”

Rent

Chris Columbus has been tapped to direct the upcoming “Rent.” I could follow this up with a joke, but that is a joke in itself.

The rationale behind this selection is elusive. Could it be because Columbus’ best-known previous cinematic outings, the first two “Home Alone” films, were also set in the mean streets of New York?

Or maybe the films producers see “Rent” as a thematic continuance of the “Home Alone” flicks—neglected children growing up to become impoverished convalescents—a thesis all but proven by Macaulay Culkin’s tabloid-baiting adolescence.

Anyhow, “Rent’s” promotional push begins in earnest with the release of this “music video” (read: trailer) for “Seasons of Love,” the hit song spawned by the musical. I’m a fan of “Seasons”—it’s actually quite pleasant, as songs about a lover’s death from AIDS go.

The video retains none of the song’s charm. It begins with stock footage of a sunset reminiscent of the visual noise run behind lyrics on karaoke machines, then cuts to a tableau of the movie’s cast belting “Seasons” to an empty auditorium.

Perhaps this scene is the director’s acknowledgement of the film’s theatrical origin and his attempt to incorporate images of the stage into film’s visual idiom vis-à-vis postmodern notions of meta-narrativity.

Or maybe the video is just poorly constructed and full of hamfisted tomfoolery like people standing around and singing to no one in particular. I’m going to assume the latter.

The remainder of the video is comprised of clips from the upcoming film, which are so plodding and unimaginatively executed that one longs for a return of the karaoke footage. Maybe Columbus doesn’t intend “Rent” as entertainment so much as a $100 million soporific. If so, then he succeeds admirably. Nyquil beware!

—Bernard L. Parham



“The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine”

Spoon

Thematically landing between Thurber’s “The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty” and queer cinema classic “The Birdcage,” the recently released (and unauthorized) video San Francisco director Ryan Junell created for Spoon’s “The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine,” from “Gimme Fiction,” their latest album, is definitely interesting. After all, self-proclaimed “bad-ass drag-king” Johnny Kat makes a cameo appearance.

Much credit has to go to Junell for creating a short film out of a song by a band whose music is hardly visual. The video concerns a bald, portly, middle-aged man, living a soulless corporate life in a particularly depressing Bed, Bath, Linens, Things and Beyond. Following are shots of mattresses and men with ill-fitting dress shirts; general misery ensues, backed by lead singer Britt Daniel’s restrained 4/4 emotions. Later, said fat protagonist comes home, relaxes, eats, puts on women’s clothing… what? Yes, it seems that, as Daniel croons it, “no one knows the two sides of Monsieur Valentine.”

The song’s string-laden bridge suddenly takes on a new meaning, becoming a brief interlude of metamorphosis from your average Dilbert into feminine, um, beauty. He (she) attends a place called the “Trannyshack,” sings and dances on stage, and returns home, exhausted yet happy. There is a very visible change in mood, as he feels more comfortable as a woman, and appears much more natural and at ease.

But this plotline only relates to the song’s title, without a deeper connection to the other lyrics in the song, more about a fanciful actor in some imaginary nineteenth-century play than the secret double life of a modern-day office worker. The editing is also pretty terrible; in the jump from the first shot to the second, a blanket magically disappears.

But despite such flaws in execution, “Valentine” remains a decently creative short film inspired by a decently creative song.

—J. Samuel Abbott