Video directors making movies

Rating: 10/10 (20 September 2005)

Michel Gondry is best known (at least to me) for his music videos for on-the-edge artists like Bjork (Army of me, Hyperballad), Daft Punk (Around the world), the White Stripes (The hardest button to button), and the Chemical Brothers (the weirdest and most beautiful video of all time: Let forever be). He is said to be a very weird but incredibly creative person in real life, and his works reflect that. Together with the extraordinary performance by the leading actors (Winslet and Carrey), his visual genius is the highlight of this movie. (By the way, in my humble opinion the co-stars weren't as good, especially Wood, whose expressiveness ranges from starry eyed to eyes wide open). Gondry's visuals give this movie a very particular touch, but they constitute a limitation, too, in that one would like to see Gondry's directing talent emerge in a very ordinary setting, without the frills that characterize his videos. Will he be able to stand the normality of an everyday life drama/comedy? He has to prove that video directors can be great movie directors without making a 2-hour version of the videos they're used to directing. Anyway, Gondry has succeeded where other high-profile video directors have failed (see Joseph Kahn's "Torque", which is as badly edited and confused as his U2 "Elevation" or Britney "Toxic" videos, or Mark Romanek's "One hour photo", which is so clean and neat it's almost boring like Lenny Kravitz "if you can't say no" or Jay-Z "99 problems").