Music Video Directors' Box: Jonze Cunningham Gondry Romanek Glazer Corbijn Sednaoui

Sabotage. Closer. Come To Daddy. Liar. Rabbit in your Headlights.

I was a little surprised when my wife got this as a birthday gift from her artist sister, but the two boxed sets, comprising the music videos and other of Jonze, Cunningham, and Gondry on the first and Corbijn, Romanek, Glazer, and Sednaoui on the other are a bottomless pit of time consumption and fascinating insights into these works. The Amazon links contain good review breakdowns by people that seem to know what they’re talking about, but really attempting to gush over every standout in the collection would be pointless.

The Romanek DVD is a case in point, with outstanding (separate!) director and artist commentary tracks…from Fiona Apple to Trent Reznor. I would just enjoy having high quality versions to play on my Oppo of some of the most iconic music videos of my misspent youth, but the sheer volume of extras on these works is just…well. I don’t know. I think it’s probably the first batch of solid film nerdery that I will get a lot out of versus simply “meaning” to go more into depth on it.

This went completely under my radar when released, but I’m incredibly glad it ended up in my hands.

I’ve only picked up the Gondry one of this series, but have always wanted to pick up the Jonze.

Gondry continues to be one of my favorite music video directors.

Around the World - Daft Punk
Star Guitar - Chemical Brothers

Both sit firmly in my top 5.

I like the boxed set format, with the overdose of both familiar and unfamiliar titles. Especially the latter, when you have a flash of recognition at the beginning of a video (“That’s what that video was!”). But I guess if your a big enough fan to single out specific directors above others, then the single dvd format would work for you. I like how I can find a couple on each disc that really stand out.

I have the Corbijn one as I am huge fan of his still photography. His videos are uniformly good to great in my opinion, but the truly good stuff can make a great song even better. It’s hard for me to not think of the videos when I hear songs like “Enjoy the Silence” or “One”.

“Foo Fighters - Everlong” is my favorite video ever. Can’t beat Dave Grohl hulking out with the giant pimp hand of doom to kill werewolves.

Edit: Netflix doesn’t have any of these available :(

Honestly, without seeing them I would have a tough time buying them. But if I’d seen them first, then there’s no way I could avoid purchasing the box sets. There’s a lot of bang for your buck, and it would just destroy our Netflix queue more than my wife’s David Lynch fixation already has.