The 5 Best Videos Of The Week

straight2video

The 5 Best Videos Of The Week

straight2video

I didn’t post one of these lists last week, because Thanksgiving, which meant that we had a ton of worthy videos to choose from this week, and that plenty of them didn’t make it. And this would also be a good place to point out, as our own Michael Nelson noted to me, that the best piece of music-related video this week was not an actual music video. It was this clip from the Coen Brothers movie Inside Llewyn Davis, in which Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake, and Adam Driver knock out a novelty tune in the studio. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I feel like Driver deserves Best Supporting Actor consideration just for the way he says “outer space.” Anyway, the five videos we did choose (including one that’s only debatably a proper music video) are below.

5. Behemoth – “Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel” (NSFW) (Dir. Grupa 13)

When Kanye West said, during a recent tour-stop rant in Brooklyn, that people are still ripping off the Chilean avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, he probably wasn’t thinking of a group of Polish black metal satanists, making a video that wasn’t even out yet. And here we have a video that’s even creepier for its outright unapologetic mythic weirdness, a five-minute Unholy Mountain.

4. Kings Of Leon – “Beautiful War” (Dir. Casey McGrath)

Give it up for this unapologetically hammy piece of downhome cheeseball melodrama, absolutely confident in its silly metaphorical grandiosity. Forgive him, model-looking lady! He loves you so much! You don’t ride a bull like that unless you’re in love and also very sorry!

3. The Hidden Cameras – “Gay Goth Scene” (Dir. Kai Stänicke)

If they made PSAs this powerful when I was in high school, maybe kids wouldn’t have been such dicks. Just kidding. High school kids will always be such dicks. But now we get to see them being such dicks through the lens of snowy, artfully composed cinematography, so that’s something.

2. Superchunk – “Void” (Dir. Scott Jacobson)

The old-guy-in-the-club problem is a real and powerful thing, and it’s an issue that the members of Superchunk presumably know better than most. So here they, and some other funny people, take it on with jokes but also with a certain grace. The ending, if you’re in the mood to be moved by something so silly, packs an actual emotional punch that I didn’t see coming.

1. James Franco & Seth Rogen – “Bound 3″ (Kanye West parody) (Dir. ?)

The heart wants what it wants.

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