Fumbling film professor Alan Poole McLard delivers the least insightful, yet most entertaining documentary about the new Alice In Chains album, The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here.
Something is highly irregular aboard a spacestation, but the apt Kubrick reference here is The Shining and not 2001, since the thing that's malfunctioning is a lonely mind.
This must've been a no-brainer pitch to The Rolling Stones: "We'll make you larger than life. Towering over NYC skyscrapers. And, there will be lots of models." A simple idea — that was surely a complex production, especially in 1994 — perfectly executed by director David Fincher and an A-List team.
Jared Leto certainly dreams big when it comes to his band 30 Seconds To Mars and the music videos he makes under the guise of Bartholomew Cubbins. "Hurricane" is meant to be the magnum opus, an ambitious 13 minute excursion into sex and violence that sometimes plays like an action flick and other times like an art film. Purposefully provocative, Leto/Cubbins lets the images pile up: Religous leaders burning books, flag-draped coffins, s&m eroticism, bondage, fight scenes, rampaging gimps and so much more. It's all a bit of an enigma, complete with keys and locks, clearly made for the die-hard 30STM fans to rewatch and find the meaning to it all.
Luck and timing can be the difference between "happily ever after" and a lifetime of solitude. That's the tenuous, thin skin this music video character study rests upon, showing two lonely souls adrift in snowy, small town lives. Director Daniel Stessen and DP Sam Gezari shot in a style that Stessen calls "staged documentary" — no Ben Harper, no performance, real locations, no staging, no script, real people (aka: no actors) and no crew — on-location mostly in and around Syracuse, NY. Split-screens amp up the presumably fated get-together of the two leads — a rugged guy with multiple jobs and a sense of family vs. a a sexy stripper who knows she could do better — but Stessen keeps you hanging until the very last moment of the video, eking out every bit of drama.
Merge @ Crossroads director Wayne Isham (second from left) and EMI/Capitol/Virgin commissioner Danny Lockwood (foruth from left) with Saving Abel in front of the famed Capitol Records Building for the "Stupid Girl (Only In Hollywood)" video...
