Wax museums are lame. Unless you get to use a heatgun to melt that shit to the ground. Liars know how not to be lame, so while most of this video focuses on the behind-the-scenes process of getting their faces 3D-scanned and then made into wax replicas, there's a gory, yet colorful payoff at the end.
Even the simplest situation can be made awfully complicated. Director Saman Kesh enlists narrator Bret Easton Ellis to solve yet another mystery for Placebo. This time we have projectile vomit, a slaphappy creep, a rash and a possibly spiked blue drink.
And, we also have some NSFW elements, so you might want to study this like a Zapruder Film in the comfort of your own home.
Entirely shot in Catalonia (Spain) with international dancers/actors Sau-Ching Wong and Daniel Corrales.
The story tries to complement the lyrics showing what happens in her mind while she stays in the ruined house. The dance scene is an abstraction of that, and the balloons from the band's performance light according with the intensity of the song like if they're the neurons in her brain.
It's a tale of two journeys, both of which are hopefully imaginary, in this jarring and compelling video for EDM artist Jon Hopkins.
Tom Haines, director: “Jon’s music has a transportive quality, which can be blissful and expansive, but can also be internal, and more aggressive, and Collider is at this end of the spectrum. We wanted to create an internal journey, which was unflinching, singular and claustrophobic and at the same time liberating. The video is like a voodoo ceremony, where the lead character dances herself into frenzy, and through the dance gains access to a parallel dimension; it’s her unfurling thoughts, her dislocated mind, and hints at something more apocalyptic - an end game for her and us."
Placebo "Too Many Friends" is one of those great videos that can be easily summed-up in a couple bullet-points to a newbie — it's narrated by author Bret Easton Ellis and ends with a quiz — but also stands up to repeated viewings and close studies. The video is a mystery, but also a critique about how we've been lulled into submission by our digital devices and the well-chose pharmaceutical.
We recently chatted with director Saman Kesh via email about how the video came together, the irony of it all, and what it means — including how the video is slyly, if a bit coincidentally connected to The Dark Knight Rises.
Narrator Bret Easton Ellis — yes, the dude who wrote Less Than Zero — and director Saman Kesh (aka Saman Keshavarz) explore the anatomy of a seemingly simple scene that reveals itself to be far more complex upon closer inspection. But the moral here isn't the unreliability of perception; it's the danger of relying on technology and drugs that actually amplify, instead of serving our desires and fears.