About
Motel Music Part II, a short film directed by Johnny Hardstaff for French artist Jimmy Whoo, closes out Whoo's Motel Music chapters (2014-2017) with a twisted tale about men and motors.
A lynchpin of the Parisian music scene, Jimmy Whoo is a renowned DJ, producer, and curator, and the founder of label Grand Ville Records. Whoo’s 2017 mixtape, Motel Music Part II, is the culmination of his time spent with other artists on the scene, and works in a mix of jazz, soul, and hip-hop influences, whilst maintaining the modern electronic feel for which he’s best known.
Director Quote
“With a four speed on the floor, she’ll be waiting at the door. You know that ain’t no shit, we’ll be getting loads of tit. In Greased Lightnin’.” So, sang Danny Zuko in 1978’s ‘Grease'. Forty years later the automobile still holds a highly masculine place in popular culture, to this day men commonly believing their ‘sweet rides’ to be ‘chick magnets’ or ‘pussy wagons’. The unapologetically feminist short revenge film ‘Motel Music Part. II’ looks to debunk the myth that a car can get a man laid, taking aim squarely at the macho contemporary cinema of Winding Refn’s ‘Drive’ amongst countless others, and in so doing offering a refreshing recalibration of the stereotypically masculine relationship between cars, violence and sexual conquest. Far from feeling like the end of something, in exploring gender politics, in examining the social trauma of almost a century of commercial advertising (something this film’s director and its producers know more than a thing or two about) and in seeking to exhume the emotional truth from industrial output, ‘Motel Music Part. II’ is a beginning, a first step into the misogyny of cinematic glamour. Put most simply, ‘Motel Music Part. II’ is a contemporary fable of human agenda and industrial product, a tale of predators and prey.”- Johnny Hardstaff
