Sound And Vision: Josh Boone
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: Bright Eyes' Bells and Whistles, directed by Josh Boone.
Josh Boone's works have never clicked for me. The Fault in Our Stars feels like a weird ode to romantic dramas with an illness theme like Dying Young, Turkish Delight, The Notebook and the perennial godfather of the genre, Love Story, that adds a youthful glow to the notion of dying young. It feels like a bad taste film that is offensive to people with cancer ánd victims of World War II. The scene in which the American teens make the suffering of Anne Frank somehow all about them speaks to how utterly misguided the film is. The New Mutants is not much better, a mix between teen horror movies like The Faculty and A Nightmare on Elm Street, mashed up with highschool superhero movies like the X-men series or Sky High. It's an utter mess and mismash of a movie. And The Stand, his update of the original Television Drama, with some added grit, started off well enough, but ultimately turned into an equally messy slog.
The two-fold financial and artistic misses of The New Mutants and The Stand landed Josh Boone in director's jail. He has been writing screenplays ever since, but a directorial effort has long been in the waiting. That is, until now, because Josh Boone made his first music video this year, for Bright Eyes' Bells and Whistles. And who would have thunk? I think it is a messy miss, that like everything Josh Boone has done before is too beholden to its inspirations.
It doesn't help that the song to Bells and Whistles itself feels uninspired. It pains me to say this as a huge Conor Oberst-fan, but Bells and Whistles feels slightly like him phoning it in, even going as far as using similar lyrical motives and melodies as Shell Games from The People's Key.
The video, for which Josh Boone was responsible, also feels like a rehash. Like The New Mutants before it, Bells and Whistles pales in light of its inspirations, which here mainly seems to be a mash-up of two earlier Bright Eyes videos. Like First Day of My Life, the music video has a variety of normal people listening to the new song. In the case of First Day of My Life those were people representing all sorts of love and relationships. In the case of Bells and Whistles it's a group of Bright Eyes fans. Both face the camera head on, but whereas First Day of My Life touches on something deeper, pure and universal, the photo booth concept of Bells and Whistles ultimately signifies nothing that matters.
The second inspiration seems to be the music video for Four Winds, where a live Bright Eyes performance goes kinda haywire. In Four Winds, it is a group of people being wholly antagonistic in trying to drive Conor Oberst off the stage, while he performs for his life. In Bells and Whistles, the narrative of the music video is broken for a segment in which the fans turn rowdy yet again and break out in a bar fight. Problem is, it never fits well into the central premise of the video.
And therein lies the rub. Bells and Whistles tries too much, narratively, like every Josh Boone project before it. And like every Josh Boone project before it it fails. The Fault in Our Stars tries having its cake and eating it too, by being an inspirational romance about being young, and a drama about dying. Ultimately, the two bite each other and cancel each other out, in a way that feels intentless and muddled. The New Mutants tries to make a superhero movie and a supernatural horror work at the same time, and it just fails utterly. Gods and monsters don't always mix. And Bells and Whistles? It's what they call in comedy circles putting a hat on a hat on a hat. It's trying to do so much, that ultimately it becomes a whole lot of nothing. Is it a music video about fans being treated to a concert? Is it a music video about a magic photo booth? Is it a music video about a bar fight breaking out and Conor Oberst inexplicably being a bar man? Yes.
And the muddledness doesn't stop there: who are fans, who are actors and who are band members? Presumably the people in the photo booth are all fans, but why are they arm wrestling in the bar fight segment? And why is one of the band members running off with the money? It's all just inexplicable. And why are some of the fans being shot in a way that is just too glossy to be spontaneous? While others are shot in a hand-held style that tries to go for a verité thing that is all but abandoned when the narrative kicks in out of nowhere? I'm not a fan. Josh Boone never convinced me before, and this music video is no exception. His works are all bells and whistles, sadly.
