Interview

Known for their strange, darkly comic and occasionally disturbing images of aliens and alt-rock, British art collective Shynola (i.e. "you don't know shit from shoe polish) offers a more light-hearted, whimsical vision in their latest music video, for Coldplay's "Strawberry Swing." In the clip, Chris Martin dons Superman-style tights and cape in an animated adventure that takes him underwater, into the sky, fighting squirrel monsters and saving a princess, all rendered against a 2-D chalk-drawn background. The short's clincher comes in its wry conclusion, which deconstructs the illusion of everything that came before.
 
Shynola—Chris Harding, Richard Kenworthy, Jason Groves and Gideon Baws, who tragically died last year—may not be as famous as music video directors Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham, but their innovative animated adventures are among the highlights of the world wide web. The crew first turned heads with UNKLE's video for "Guns Blazing," a freaky sci-fi hodgepodge filled with pesky aliens. In 2001, the group created two awe-inspiring spots, the haunting computer-generated undersea world of Radiohead's "Pyramid Song" and UNKLE's "Eye for an Eye," an eerie story about a group of innocent primitive creatures overrun by an infestation of evil insectoid monsters that take over their bodies. It's weird, frightful stuff.

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You've got to hand it to Drew Barrymore: Between Poison Ivy, Charlie's Angels, and her newest project and first gig as a director Whip It!, she brings on the girl-power like few other womyn in the business. In the newly released trailer for the film, which opens on October 9, Ellen Page (from Juno superfame) returns to the big-screen as another alterna-teen, Bliss, trying to find her way in the conservative Texas town of Bodeen. An unwilling beauty pageant competitor, Bliss rebels against her parents by dying her hair blue and finding her true passion in roller derby.

Whip It! has all the ingredients for a sleeper hit: Mix in Ellen Page, a dollop of coming-of-age quirkiness, the thrill of competitive sport, and add in a cast of babes kicking ass on roller skates, and it's hard to see where this one will go wrong. The trailer gives special emphasis to comic supporting player Kristen Wiig (from SNL), but Barrymore herself also gets screen time as tough team-member Smashley Simpson, along with other bad girls Juliette Lewis, Zoe Bell, Alia Shawkat and rapper-turned actress Eve. Based on young writer Shauna Cross's young-adult novel Derby Girl, the film will be released by Fox Seachlight, which has a history of making box-office gold out of this sort of thing (i.e. Garden State, Little Miss Sunshine).

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The Dead Weather's Jack White and Alison Mosshart face off as well-matched machine-gun marauders in the new video for "Treat Me Like Your Mother," the second single from the supergroup's Horehound album. Launched over the weekend on Cinemax and quickly leaked to the Internet, the nearly five-minute clip is directed by Jonathan Glazer, the British video and commercial maverick also known for his idiosyncratic films Sexy Beast and Birth.

The video opens with a whirling old-fashioned bomb, its fizzling fuse ready to explode, then cuts to Jack White, leather-jacket-clad, walking across a washed-out, suburban landscape and carrying a machinegun. In the opposite corner, vocalist Alison Mosshart charges across the same terrain, locked, loaded and ready to fire her own automatic weapon. As the sun bears down on the combatting singers, a strange sort of Western showdown ensues, with blazing bullets tearing holes through their bodies in Bonnie & Clyde-like excess, but with little actual effect. A metaphor for a combusting romance, noted.

Spin's Charles Aaron wrote, "When you listen to clattery Horehound tracks like 'So Far From Your Weapon' or 'Treat Me Like Your Mother,' which White and Mosshart sing (or wail) together, you imagine a sort of Tennessee Williams, kitchen- knife-wielding scenario." Looks like Glazer expanded the analogy to heavier weaponry.

While arguably not as daringly executed as Glazer's famous clips for UNKLE's "Rabbit in Your Headlights" or Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity," but conceptually similar in its simplicity and subtle twisting of reality, the video nevertheless captures the song's angry take on one very messed-up relationship.

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Fans of Donnie Darko, perk up your restless bunny ears: Richard Kelly, the cult director who tweaked the minds of moviegoers with his brain-bending, time-traveling 2001 debut feature, is back with a big-budget supernatural thriller called The Box that looks every bit as stylishly unnerving. Starring Cameron Diaz and James Marsden as a middle-class husband-and-wife facing tough economic times, the film dramatizes an age-old thought-experiment in gruesome detail. When a mysterious box lands on the couple's doorstep with only a red button inside, they must make the ultimate choice: Press the button, and they'll receive $1 million—but in doing so, will kill someone in the world they don't know.

The new trailer promises some intriguing nightmarish visuals—big-white spaces, laughing bellhops, a zombie-like Santa Claus, water-falling inside a bedroom-as well as some tantalizing plot twists. With the excellent Frank Langella as the creepy puppet master pressing the couple's buttons, it's hard to see Kelly mess this one up. (Kelly's previous post-apocalyptic pop fantasia Southland Tales was widely reviled.) There doesn't appear to be an ominous figure named Frank in a rabbit suit but Darko wasn't an immediate success, anyway. Perhaps that bodes well for The Box at the box office, when it opens on Friday, October 30, the day before Halloween.

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