On Friday the 13th, I, along with several other music and short film keeners, ploughed my way through the crowds at the Little Italy street festival on College to head on over to The Royal Cinema for an evening of short music films, music videos to be precise. Luckily, many of these videos can be found online, so if you missed the experience of seeing them on the big screen, you can still see them, albeit with much less audio punch and probably much blurrier picture.

Scene Not Herd was mostly a showcase for music videos by Indie Canadian band talents. There were two videos of music by The New Pornographers, Myriad Harbour and Challengers, off their latest album. Challengers was also one of my personal favourites from the programme. Aside from being a big NPs fan, the weird paint-oozing simplistic aesthetic of the film is actually quite appealing. The main focus is a boy and girl who start of in black and white, but as they begin to hold hands, colour rushes to them starting at their hands, a la Pleasantville, and then coloured paint starts seeping in from every nook and cranny. It’s actually a pretty creative way to show that sexual charge that can come with that first time you hold someone’s hand. And if the visuals bore you, the music is swell.

While the other reasonably high profile Canadian Indie band talents, like Arcade Fire (Black Mirror) and Emily Haines (Our Hell) and Young Galaxy (Come and See) tried too hard and faltered with overly stylized but ultimately boring videos, less known bands charmed with their little ditties. Vampire Weekend’s A-Punk has a light-hearted bopping feel, reminiscent of The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night, though admittedly less boppy than Goldfrapp’s ridiculous Happiness, which involves 4 minutes of a man in a white suit hopping along, with much less entertainment value than A-Punk. Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings also get special mention for their 1950s retro-revival number 100 Days, 100 Nights, which looks and sounds like it came from a different decade, to wonderful effect.

Two of the most entertaining shorts were also possibly two of the least musical, but still worth checking out. Mr Bumblebeez’s Dr Love was ridiculous in a wonderful way, and involved a troupe of middle-aged men with musical instruments – or even rubber duckies – tattooed to their chests which ultimately got used as musical instruments throughout the video. Singin’, dancin’ and an overall cohesive aesthetic made this film one of the most fun even if the music was less than good. The same can be said about Aesop Rock’s Pigs, a 5-minute rap video, in which we watch a beautiful satiric mural about American consumerism (The Beatles “Piggies”, anyone?) get put together, with wonderful artistry.

The grande finale was the 3D film (which required nifty 3D ‘sun’glasses) of Björk’s Wanderlust, which I found less than compelling. The 3D experience made it interesting and some of the visual effects, most notably the stringy water, were enough of a visual delight that I was impressed, even if the overall storyline was ultimately stale.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Events, Film, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.