Director's Series, Vol. 3 - The Work of Director Michel Gondry

Rating:
Summary: Masterful
Review: If you're interested in music videos as an art form, or film as art in general, you should buy this DVD. Previous comments sum it up: Gondry has directed many of the most innovative and memorable videos ever made, and this DVD offers a very personal glimpse into his body of work, as well as his life. The exclusions, like the Radiohead video, are disappointing, but overall this DVD features a hefty amount of videos (many more than the other volumes in Palm's Director's Series), almost all of which are engaging. This man is a genius and the work he makes is simply magical. I bought this DVD last week, and it's already one of my favorites in my collection...has surprising replay value.

And as for the comment about the shocking material on this disc, please. There are one or two segments that some people will object to, but they're supposed to be funny. So if you're hypersensitive to things like farting and distasteful costumes, then be prepared to pretend you're better than that for a few minutes. But you'll still enjoy this disc.

Rating:
Summary: video visionary
Review: is it wrong for me to have never remembered the name michel gondry before this dvd came out?
i mean, sure, i'd seen alot of these videos before and loved all of them, but the name never stuck. not like spike jonze. when i saw the promotional trailers for the directors label dvds, i saw all the videos on michel gondry's collection and was completely floored. suddenly, spike jonze became a secondary thought. i NEEDED the michel gondry disc.

now, odds are you already know whether you're going to like the music videos or not (if you have any artistic sense at all, you most likely will like them very much
what may surprise you is that his short films and whatnot are equally interesting and entertaining.
many hours of eye candy, brain benders and ear sweeteners (eww...and yet...oooooh) are to be found on this two-sided dvd. often the most underrated of the three directors in this set, i hereby proclaim michel gondr to be a true video visionary.

if you don't love this dvd, you must have no style.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent except for....
Review: It would have been great if it included Gondry's video for
Stardust's Music Sounds Better Without You..but I guess they couldn't get the rights. I could also have done without the
scatological One Day with the annoying unfunny David Cross (although the role is appropriate for him)..it's more like something the vastly overrated Jonze would do..

Rating:
Summary: Oh yeah and also..
Review: it would've been nice to have Terence Trent D'Arby's She Kissed Me video in place of a Bjork video..she has her own compilations..though it is nice to have all of her clips with
Gondry to compare and contrast

Rating:
Summary: Best music videos, all from the same director
Review: Like many other customers I didn't know before that so many of my favourite video clips cam from the same director. Wheh I saw Bjork's "Human Behavior", Sinead O'Connor's "Fire on Babylon" and Radiohead's "Knives Out" the first time is was simply a shock of how good musical video can be!

Now Gondry's works are available on this DVD. An excellent purchase; highly recommended.

One big regret - no "Fire on Babylon" here. That clip sets the bar very high for the music visualization and deserved to be on any "Best of".

Rating:
Summary: a really good Best Of collection...
Review: Michel Gondry is a visionary music video director who presents images that feel like they have sprung right out of fanciful dreams or fevered nightmares. Like feature filmmaker Terry Gilliam, Gondry seamlessly blends reality with dreams so that it is impossible to know where one ends and one begins.

Included with the DVD is a 52-page booklet that features behind-the-scenes photos, interviews with Gondry and several of his written treatments for the music videos he ended up directing.

Several of his short films are included on the DVD. Among them, "Drumb and Drumber," which anticipates the same kind of technique he would perfect on a more ambitious scale with the "The Hardest Button to Button" video by The White Stripes.

"Pecan Pie with Jim Carrey" is a funny short film that involves the actor riding around in a bed in his pajamas. It's a surreal vignette that makes no sense-which is largely its appeal.

The DVD also collects some of Gondry's commercial work, most notably one for Levi's jeans which beautifully captures many of the video director's pre-occupations.

In lieu of audio commentaries for the videos (as on the Spike Jonze DVD) there is a 75-minute documentary about Gondry and his career that is divided into two parts over both sides of the DVD. The second segment is the most interesting because it features interviews with many of the musicians that have had videos directed by Gondry. One of the highlights is when Jack White dryly noting that Gondry's concept for "Fell In Love With A Girl" was better then his bandmate, Meg's idea of having them be made out of Oreo cookies.

This DVD perfectly conveys Gondry's unique vision with an excellent cross-section of his work. This disc is highly recommended for fans of the music video medium.

Rating:
Summary: True quality video from a great director
Review: Michel Gondry is an abstract thinker with cutting edged creativity. From his childish "Human Behavior" video with Bjork, to his mature and dark "Dead Leaves and Dirty Ground" with the White Stripes. Gondry's creations are but a slice of his colorful and creative life. This DVD comes with a book and a postcard. The book includes the inside stories, sketches and photos of Gondry with the likes of Cibo Matto, the Rolling Stones and Bjork. Included in the book are pictures of his son(who is a smaller version of Gondry), brother and various cars his father owned. Missing from the book are the stories behind Massive Attack's "Protection" and Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water". But, with all that aside, Gondry's video is excellent and full of memorable vids, thoughts and ideas.

In the future I hope to see this series of Director's DVD's expand with the likes of Mark Romaneck and Flora Sisgmondi.

Rating:
Summary: Oui oui!
Review: Michel Gondry's massive imagination is full of weirdness and wonder. The director of "Human Nature" and the wonderful "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" has a certain kind of cleverness well-suited to music videos. Now the best of them are shown in "Director's Series Volume 3: The Work of Director Michel Gondry."

Among his vivid music videos are the White Stripes' "Dead Leaves & the Dirty Ground," "Fell In Love With A Girl" and "Hardest Button to Button," and a slew of other respected bands like Massive Attack ("Protection"), the Chemical Brothers (the funhouse mirror "Let Forever Be"), Daft Punk (colorful "Around the World") the Rolling Stones ("Like A Rolling Stone") and a bunch of videos for the French pop-rock band Oui Oui, for which he played drums. And that's not all of them!

The two part documentary "I've Been 12 Forever" includes interviews with Gondry, behind-the-scenes information, and bits and pieces of how he forms his unique visions. There are commercials, all tinged with the strange but immensely effective. And on the short film front, Jim Carrey stars in the cute, immensely amusing "Pecan Pie," but the freakily scatological "One Day" falls utterly flat. Wrapping up the whole thing is a booklet full of even more interviews, drawings and inspiration.

Aside from his films, Gondry is perhaps best known for his Bjork music videos, presented in their glory here. The attitudes of the bands and musicians are reflected in the music videos, so the personality shines through, as if Gondry has carefully shaped the images around the music. Nothing is normal here -- whether it's the White Stripes made of Legos, or Jim Carrey riding his bed like a car.

The double-sided disc allows fans to check out the evolution of Gondry's style. He was a lot less sophisticated in his Oui Oui days, but the relatively immature videos he did for those songs were enough to get Bjork asking for him to direct "Human Behavior." The rest is musical history. After that, Gondry's style becomes somewhat stranger but no less riveting.

There's plenty of information for those who love Gondry's warmly quirky style, including interviews with the musicians. What it lacks are some of his other prominent music videos, like Radiohead's "Knives Out." However, it contains a lot more early material than the other Director Series DVDs. And what it has is quite personal, since Gondry also made the music for the earliest music videos.

With the exception of the occasional dud, "The Work of Michel Gondry" is an effervescent trip into a mind where the music video becomes a flexible art form. Vivid and vibrant.

Rating:
Summary: I've Been 12 Forever
Review: Quick -- name the director who made a bunch of cool music videos before directing 2 feature films written by Charlie Kaufman. If you said Spike Jonze, you'd only be half-correct. While Michel Gondry might not yet be a household name, you'll no doubt recognize his work. In fact, most of the music videos on this DVD have been my favorites for years and I had no idea they were directed by him!

Unlike Spike Jonze whose videos rely almost entirely on a clever premise, Gondry is much heavier on visuals and special effects. I was actually more impressed with his "simpler" videos though, like Cibo Matto's brilliant, palindromic "Sugar Water" and the Chemical Brothers' "Star Guitar" in which the scenery seen from a moving train is perfectly in sync with the music.

Instead of commentaries, the DVD comes with a very intimate and insightful documentary called "I've Been 12 Forever." Be sure to watch Part 2 first, then Part 1 (don't ask).

Rating:
Summary: Music Video as Artform?
Review: The directors in this series (Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry) show that as much brilliance can go into a four minute slice of music video as it can into an entire full-length motion picture. They also show that music video is at its best when it strays from conventional narrative techniques or the straight-up dull "live performance" approach. Like Jonze, Gondry works best when he follows through on a visual concept: see all the White Stripes videos, Kylie Minogue's "Come into My World," the absolutely insane "Let Forever Be" (the Chemical Brothers), and the metatextual Bjork video "Hyperballad." While working with or exploiting 80s digital special effects ("Let Forever Be"), stop-motion photography (White Stripes "Fell in Love with a Girl), CG effects (Chemical Brothers' "Star Guitar"), backwards film (Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water") or projection (the Stripes' "Dead Leaves"), Gondry dangerously (at least to the musical performers) makes some of these songs seem quite inferior to his amazing visual product. The early Oui Oui videos are very informative for the way they show how distinctive Gondry was even during his "apprenticeship" phase. The Bonus material is mixed in quality. Many of the commercials and shorts are quite uninteresting. The documentary (I've Been 12 Forever) is very informative, and "One Day" (with comedian David Cross), which I cannot really talk about here due to its graphic nature, is so appalling that it is either utterly repulsive or a work of sheer genius. I haven't figured out which yet! Worth purchasing for anybody interested in the best that music video has to offer.