BEST SHOTS: THE VMAS

Nathaniel had to make a last-minute scheduling change, which means that this week's edition of Hit Me with Your Best Shot is all different and exciting and weird: he's assigned all five of the newly-announced VMA nominees for Best Cinematography. This is particularly different and weird for me: as one of those crabby olds who hasn't systematically listened to pop music in around a decade, I didn't even recognise the name of three of the artists/bands whose videos were nominated. And I liked a grand total of none of the songs.

But it's a fun challenge nonetheless, for the style and vocabulary of music videos is one that I find much worthy of praise, study, and criticism, and it just never comes up, does it? So here we are, then, with my favorite shots from five different videos that I would never, in the ordinary course of things, would have watched, and in more than half of the cases, I'm pleased that I did.

* * * * *

Flying Lotus (featuring Kendrick Lamar), "Never Catch Me" - cinematography by Larking Sieple (watch the video)

A bittersweet little fable in which two black children rise from their coffins to dance at their own funeral and return outside, with the stone-faced non-response from the mourners and the details of the finale suggesting that we're not watching a return to life, but the release of two souls into whatever comes after. Does it track a bit too closely to banal "they've gone to a better place!" sentimentality. Oh aye, it absolutely does. But the exuberance of the choreography contrasting with the hushed lighting inside the church and then compliment by the hazy, afternoon exteriors, is enough to give the video more emotional impact than any description of its content could do.

My pick for best shot, anyway, is the kick-off to all that, and it would be quite impossible to express what makes it great without seeing it in motion.

Obviously, this was coming - we just saw the little boy open his eye. But still, I gasped, literally gasped, when this shot came in. The starkness of the dark figures against the white rectangles of the coffin, the choreographic "oomph" of them both jolting up so quickly and in perfect tandem, and the stately mournfulness of the camera moving down the aisle with its soft lighting and extremely present shadows are going in three different directions, but the combination of sadness and surprise is exactly what the video does throughout to great effect, and never better than right in this moment.

* * * * *

Ed Sheeran, "Thinking Out Loud" - cinematography by Daniel Pearl (watch the video)

Sight unseen, this was the one I was excited about: I'm way the hell obsessed with Pearl's cinematography for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Both of them.

First point off: the song is insipid pap. Second point off: the music video is dull, with thoroughly generic, if impressively flourish-ey dancing. It is, in effect, a video whose whole entire point is "look at the lighting! Look at how the lighting interacts with moving human bodies and moving cameras!" And for that, I can just as easily watch "Single Ladies", which at least has balls-to-the-wall choreography. Still, if you've got Pearl doing your lighting, you can get away with that.

Picking a favorite shot, anyway, is basically an exercise in deciding what you think the prettiest kind of lighting is, and go with it. Me, I like it when light defines negative space and subdivides the image. So here's my pick: the noir moment of "Thinking Out Loud".

* * * * *

Taylor Swift (featuring Kendric Lamar), "Bad Blood" - cinematography by Christopher Probst (watch the video)

Hey, so I don't like Taylor Swift. Never have. "You Belong with Me" is okay in the sense that I could imagine the person who wrote and performed it having an interesting career if she hung up the country-pop shit and embraced the history of the Nashville sound, and since that's exactly the opposite of what happened, I'm just going to continue to avoid thinking about her as much as possible, which is easier than you'd think, given her dominance of all the music.

As for the video - what the hell is this doing within miles of a cinematography award? It's so computer processed that it barely resembles photography any more. But at least there's some shiny graphic interest, some images that feel like panels from a comic book. Speaking of which:

There is but one reason I picked this image out of all the ones available to me, which is that everything about it reminds me of a splash page from Sin City. The garish red has the tendency to suck the color out of the image, which is itself artfully arranged violence designed to call attention to the shape of the female body. Most importantly, the way the car runs at a diagonal adds a sense of momentum and force to the image.

And to be fair "I could be reading a Frank Miller comic book instead of watching this right now" is no compliment, but it reminded me of good Frank Miller at least. Given how much of the rest of the video reminded me of bad Michael Bay, with just enough sense of humor in some of the images (teddy bear with a knife in the face made me laugh, I confess) to keep the whole thing tolerable, that's enough to put it over.

* * * * *

FKA twigs, "Two Weeks" - cinematography by Justin Brown (watch the video)

Um. Okay. Both visually and sonically, I think I'm sorry that I wasn't high when I watched this one.

It certainly looks striking, but not in an entirely good way: the soft focus CGI golden lighting feels alarmingly cheap, and the army of small twigslings are goofy without there being any indication that this is supposed to be funny in even the slightest degree. They're also composited into the frame with shockingly poor skill, for a video nominated for both its cinematography and its visual effects - the lighting is just all wrong.

Still, the gentle track back revealing a temple in praise of the goddess twigs is hypnotic, in its own fashion, and the sense of grandeur is absolutely tremendous - as a single moment in a Tarsem Singh movie, and with better CGI, I think I could have been absolutely crazy about this. So it is only fair that for my favorite frame of the single continuous shot, I pick the widest extent of that shot, revealing the gilded splendor of the production design in all its fullness.

Seriously, though, I wish I'd been stoned. I'd like to get something out of this, anything.

* * * * *

Alt-J, "Left Hand Free" - cinematography by Mike Simpson (watch the video)

Since we're never going to see a beer ad directed by David Gordon Green, this is the next best thing.

The hook is unbelievably straightforward: "in the summer, sexy young people like to have fun with their sexy young friends! Pick-up trucks and getting wet are often involved!" And the images are precisely as unimaginative as you'd expect, though I'd actually be inclined to award this one Greatest Degree of Difficulty: the night shots are obvious, but I'm far more impressed by Simpson's ability to shoot all that sunlight on water and not ever catch any harsh reflections.

As a video, it lacks the nuance and resonance of "Never Catch Me", but as a collection of images, I actually prefer this (those two are, by miles and miles, my favorites of the five). Some of the shots are fun and relaxed; a surprising number feel worn out, like you will after you've gotten too much sun. And one of those is my pick:

At the risk of making claims for this that it fucking well doesn't deserve, but there's a loneliness here that I find admirable. Taken in isolation - and even in the video proper - it's easy for me to come up with a narrative of abandoned places on the side roads of America, two shops that are just hanging out in the middle of dust with nobody visiting them except this kid who's clearly there for reasons of his own, that involve isolation and solitude. Staring the camera down, like he didn't quite intend to be photographed, he's the only person in the video who isn't overtly having All Kinds of Fun, and that combined with the washed-out palette and the lack of pavement makes it feel like we've stumbled into a forgotten corner of the country that wants to stay that way.

Shorter version of that paragraph: this looks like an illustration from a National Geographic article on the American Southwest during the recession. And that's, again, making claims that the video doesn't ask me to make, but sometimes an image just clicks for you in a certain way and you can't shake it.