Music Video Director Gil Green.
Music video director Gil Green has three of the best videos in rotation right now: Akon’s ‘Don’t Matter’, Three-Six Mafia’s ‘Doe Boy Fresh’, and DJ Khaled’s ‘We Takin’ Over’. I believe ‘We Takin’ Over’ is the first Green video to feature the Hype-esque ‘Gil Green Presents’ in floating CGI-letters, which I read as Green’s formal announcement as a big-time event oriented video director. Green’s direction however, is a bit more subtle than Hype Williams or most video directors, having an energy and honesty that is very appealing and never becoming too much.
All three of the videos highlight Green’s strength, subtlety; he knows when not to cut or go crazy with the camera, the kind of thing that should be ‘Film School 101’ but has unfortunately becomes synonymous with “good” music video directing and is taught in film schools. Green has all of the qualities a music video director nowadays is supposed to eschew: restraint, a focus on realism, and a refusal to blow his subjects up larger than life. Green also communicates even-handed and rarely didactic social and political messages that sneak up on the unsuspecting viewer.
‘Don’t Matter’
The video fits the music because ‘Don’t Matter’ sounds like a sincere version of a travel commercial theme and the video looks like a sincere version of a travel commercial. We get the expected island imagery but presented a little more realistically, it has a certain 70s movie feeling to the cinematography, which hints at my favorite aspect of Green’s video direction: he does not depend on fast-cutting or computer enhancement. The party scene at the end is the only point where we get any sense of fast-cutting but it’s barely rapid-fire and the fast-cutting there works because it is a legitimately cathartic party scene. Other than that, the video has a meandering quality that fits the concept of the video. Akon picks up his girl to go out but the girl’s father doesn’t like it (communicated in one effective shot of the father looking angry) and the rest of the video is the fun part; the couple hanging-out for the day. Keeping the video to this simple concept also avoids the tendency in rap videos to simply mix two unrelated sequences in order to vary the video up (although he does do this in ‘We Takin’ Over’). Instead of cutting between two loosely connected sequences, generally, a narrative and a performance sequence, Green allows them to co-exist and mix with one another. Also, the video gains energy from suspense, the slightly threatening aspect of the Father, looming in the background, always exists. We’re not explicitly reminded of it but that’s good because the song is called ‘Don’t Matter’ and the song and video are about not worrying about those things even though they hover in the background.
-Movie Equivalent: ‘Morvern Callar’
-What’s with…Akon saying the word “fight” the same weird way that Eddie Murphy says “fart” in ‘Delirious’?
‘We Takin’ Over’
I’m actually not as hyped-up about this video as others but for a music video for a typical banger which therefore, should have a conventional video it more than gets the job done. Similar in style to ‘Don’t Matter’, Green uses handheld cameras mixed with more conventional video shots, once again, bringing the video’s energy through sequences and conventional cutting, not hyped-up rapid-fire editing or CGI embellishments. Again, there’s a loose concept like ‘Don’t Matter’, a concept that keeps the video itself moving forward so it doesn’t need to be done with extraneous “cool” shots and fancy-pants film-school editing. Green fulfils the crucial A.D.D aspect music videos need but on his own, significantly more modest terms. The video also modestly takes on the mixtape controversy of the past few months. ‘We Takin’ Over’ being the new single from a well-known DJ’s sophomore “legal” release is made into an action plot where Khaled is being chased by imposing men in SWAT gear, presumably some stand-in for the conventional, legal music industry. I also like how the aggressors in the video are omnipresent but never really take the video over. They literally hover in the background of the frame but do not stop Khaled and friends from having fun. Like ‘Don’t Matter’, ‘We Takin’ Over’ has a way of acknowledging threatening outside forces by putting it figuratively or literally in the background of the videos, never absent but never fully oppressive either.
-Movie Equivalent: ‘Vanishing Point’
-What’s with…the church at the end?
‘Doe Boy Fresh’
Tom Breihan pretty much summed this video up here calling it “a neat little statement on the escapist fantasy-fulfillment aspect of rap’s appeal.” I personally find the video to be a bit more satirical, not harshly critical or anything but I don’t think it’s only addressing rap’s escapist appeal as much as it is pointing out the way that many, of all races and age-groups, are willing to embrace rap music but always from a distance. In this video, Green uses computer effects but they are necessary to the concept of the video. The effects are used to an end beyond sprucing up the images, instead working towards the point of making the rap appropriators look at least a little absurd. The computer effects aid in helping the concept but Green is still not afraid to make the video look sort of weird or awkward. Some of the actors rapping do it well, others not so good, but I don’t think that is poor acting as much as it is an attempt at realism. For example, the Little Girl just looks sort of awesome while the Old Guy looks creepy as fuck. That’s interesting! Other doses of realism come through in the setting (a community center) and in the little joke at the end, with the guy taking money from his son, telling him: “50 dollars kid, c’mon. Yeah, I be hustlin’ to get back some of that child support money.” The joke, which is darkly funny rather than typical music video “wacky” is a strange touch and the line is delivered by the actor naturalistically rather than over-the-top.
-Movie Equivalent: ‘Watermelon Man’
-What’s with…Travis Barker being in the video?
‘Hell Yeah’
This is more of a bonus but this video is so amazing. One of the best rap videos ever. I remember seeing it in its eight minute entirety on ‘BET Uncut’ and being blown away. The intro with the family is really hilarious, their arguments and the inflections of their voices are dead-on, making the maliciousness of what happens to them even funnier. Certainly, they are being mocked but the parody is so dead-on that it’s done with some familiarity with that which it is mocking. Then the video itself, wow- a series of elegantly sloppy single takes gives the song an added energy that conventional video editing and directing would not be able to produce. This video, fitting the artists involved, recalls the actual grit and energy of the classic rap videos of the 90s. Once again, Green gives us real, palpable sense of realism, the details of the house dead prez are in, the total out-of-control-ness of the video camera aspects (it’s shaky like real family video footage), and the really sick and scary part where the family get hijacked are way more realistic than they need to be.
-Movie Equivalent: ‘The Black Gestapo’
-What’s with…nothing. This is the best video ever. Nothing is wrong with it.
Green is also the director of the much-hated but actually really, really, good ‘Choices: The Movie’. I’ve heard nothing but horrible things about ‘Choices 2’ and its availability only with the soundtrack and the lack of involvement by Green has led me to never pursue it. I will eventually. But I’d say that if ‘Choices 2’ has made you weary of ‘Choices’, rent it anyway.
‘Choices’ is obviously low-budget, so if you don’t for digital-video cinematography and questionable acting you won’t dig it, but if you can get beyond that it’s a more realistic and interesting crime movie than anything Scorsese has made since ‘Taxi Driver’. Unlike other rap movies, ‘Choices’ never tries to be too cutting-edge or cool or really anything, it just tells a story, doing its best to use the films’ apparent flaws, like untrained actors and a low budget to make it a bit closer to real-life. There is also the interesting choice of having the hero not be Juicy J or DJ Paul making it less of a vanity project. Instead, we get Pancho, played by Rodney Wickfall, who succumbs to the pressures of his moronic friends (Three-Six) and their acquaintance played by La Chat. Wickfall gives a very sympathetic, pardon the cliché “everyman” performance when he could have easily over-acted the entire movie as the actor playing the Foghorn-Leghorn-esque Alonzo chose to do. Beginning with the credit sequence which makes use of the Impressions’ ‘Choice of Colors’ and down to the rather touching end, the movie does a better job of having a heart and being gritty than most Hollywood movies. To me, it is the closest approximation of Donald Goines’ novel in its ability to understand and condemn criminality and retaining empathy for those involved in the life.
Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader?