My last video of the series starts out as the most boring and abruptly turns into the most disturbing.
Willem Dafoe plays a businessman who, it seems, had an affair with a co-worker and reacts by staring quietly out of his office window. They have a brief scene together, then we follow her back to her office… and I’ll let you watch the rest.
This is the second video of the week to feature both a strip club and gay sex. One more and we’ve got ourselves a trend.
I’m more and more impressed by the cinematography and direction of these clips. Today’s video has some beautiful camerawork, with Scorsese-esque Steadicam shots exploring its seedy location.
St. Vincent showed up in my video round-up last year with ‘Cruel,’ a video in which she was kidnapped by a family, forced to serve them and then buried alive in the front yard.
This year she returns as a giant museum exhibit who breaks free from her bonds before literally falling to pieces.
I think the woman has some issues. Fortunately she’s working them out through compelling short films for our enjoyment.
Every video I’m featuring this week deals with either gender issues or sexual orientation.
Today’s clip, by English band Spiritualized, is more like a short film than a music video. Directed (quite well) by A.G. Rojas, it follows a day in the life of a transgender prostitute, including his interactions with two small children he’s raising. (I believe ‘transgender’ is the appropriate term for the man in this video, who seems to identify as a woman though he doesn’t have female parts).
The song that came up most often in my Web research on the best videos of 2012 was this one — M.I.A.’s ‘Bad Girls.’
The combination of excellent cinematography and the sociopolitical statement of depicting Muslim women driving proved irresistible for many critics.
