2014 SXSW Film Fest - Music Videos Announced!

The music video lineup for SXSW has been announced. Some good stuff? You bet.

Highlights (for me) include:

My Best of 2013 picks...

The beautiful...

and the batshit crazy...

Read on for the full list...

2014 Juno Awards Music Video Nominees

Nominees for the annual JUNO Awards — essentially the Canadian version of the Grammys — have been announced. Of course, there is a video category.

Nominees for JUNO VIDEO OF THE YEAR are:

I'll say two things:

  • It's nice to see the director get primary credit
  • Damned these are creative and under the radar videos for a national awards show

Colombia Pol Decries New Shakira Video for Lesbianism, Tabacco Use

Shakira may be the pride of Barranquilla, but that doesn't mean she gets a pass from Colombia's unofficial moral police.

Politician Marco Fidel Ramirez is calling on Colombia's National Television Authority to ban the 37-year-old's "Can't Remember To Forget You" clip from being broadcast on any of the nation's channels, saying:

"Our Shakira with her erotic video is promoting tobacco usage and has become the worst example for our youth. Shakira's new video is a shameless case for lesbianism and immorality. It is a danger to children"

Also, because he knows what children like, he made up a hashtag: #PeligroVideoShakira...

Director Dawn Shadforth Talks Kylie Minogue "Into The Blue"

'Into the Blue' sees the return of the magnificent collaboration between Kylie and director Dawn Shadforth. Stylish, sophisticated and intimate, the promo shows the pop star alongside French actor Clement Sibony.

Dawn Shadforth, director:

I love working with Kylie.   We go back a long way.  Spinning Around was my first video for her, then Can't Get You Out Of My Head, In Your Eyes, Chocolate and Two Hearts.  She is an amazing collaborator and it's always a treat and exciting to work with her.   Kylie is an incredible performer, she creates magic in front of the camera, she understands direction immediately and is very intuitive, highly skilled and fearless.  She seems to have be some kind of inbuilt radar telling her where the camera and the lights are without affecting her performance. Also she is up for shooting on a London streets, in January, at midnight, in not much more than a pair of tights and still be cracking jokes and having a laugh.  If she is excited about creating something, that is what matters to her, and it's infectious.   She makes my job easy. 

All our previous videos together had been performance led, and I had wanted, for ages, to do something with Kylie that was less about dancing and performance, more about acting and emotion.   I wrote the treatment for Into The Blue this way and Kylie really responded.  

The idea for the video was to connect the emotion of the song with a fragmented narrative that played on the lyrics in an ambiguous way.   And so we created this little story of glimpses into the world of a man and woman, a lost weekend, scenes from a film where the context is not quite clear.  

I wanted to show a bit of soul, a relationship that felt authentic and intimate and a side to Kylie people were not so familiar with.  I had been inspired stylistically by some early John Cassavetes films and wanted to make something with an improvisational style, a fluid camera, and with quite a pure and simple theme about love.  We were both very excited to cast the fantastic French actor Clement Sibony and they got on like a house on fire, which made things really easy when it came to improvising

RIP, Philip Seymour Hoffman

Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead this morning in NYC, apparently of a  heroin overdose. He was 46.

Hoffman's varied filmography boasts rolls in Capote, Doubt, The Big Lebowski, Money Ball, The Savages and several movies directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, including Boogie Nights, The Master and Magnolia.

Jackass Director Jeff Tremaine's Bud Light Commercial Will Likely Be Better Than The Super Bowl

Are you ready for some football commercials?

In a sign that the on-demand revolution has started to even dismantle the "everyone watch it all at once" event that is the Super Bowl, the commercials have already started to make their way online.

One picking up serious buzz is an epic Bud Light spot with Ian Rappaport, a normal guy on hidden camera offered a  Bud Light by a beautiful woman, but only if he's up for whatever comes next.

Obviously he is, and thus begins an adventure that includes Reggie Watts, a llama, Minka Kelly, a OneDirection concert and a ping-pong battle with The Terminator himself.

Best Music Videos of January 2014

A shorter list than usual, but I have a feeling that 2014 is just revving up...

Here are the Best Videos of January 2014, in reverse order of release: