Review Time

I love music videos. Which is a shame because the music channels don't show them anymore. At least, they don't show them like they used to. Now those channels are full of reality shows and people sitting around talking about music. If you want to be on MTV you have to be a rap artist because that's all they ever show anymore. FUSE is pretty good but they never show the whole video. They start it late and cut it off early. I hate that. So when I get to see a whole video that isn't rap and actually tells a story instead of having a bunch of hoochies dancing around I get excited.

Nickelback is not one of my favorite bands, I don't even own any of their albums. I like the song "Savin Me." I saw the video for it the other day and I have to say bravo. There is a definite story to this one. It's an easily followed story, too, not one of these obscure stories that only the artist and the director understands pieces o' crap.

In case you can't or don't want to watch the video - It opens with a man in a trench coat looking for something among a crowd on any street in a big city. Another man appears talking on his cell phone when trench coat man saves his life (talking on the cell phone, not paying attention to a big, fat bus that's about to run him over). Trench coat guy disappears. Cell phone man starts freaking out, stopping people and trying to touch something above their heads. Finally we see that he sees timers on top of their heads. Obviously he is freaked out by this and doesn't understand what it means until he sees a woman being put in an ambulance and watches her timer run out. Ah-ha! He then sees a woman walking toward her car and realized her timer is counting down really, really fast. He pulls woman away from car just as a big statue is dropped on it. Then cell-phone man walks away and the car lady starts to freak out looking at the top of people's heads.

I like the theory, you know, passing the torch and all that. I really like the way it is explained. With a concept like this it would be really easy to get it wrong and confuse the audience. However, the director took careful steps to explain what was happening. Man gets saved, gets confused, find an answer, solves the problem, then goes about his day. The video also goes really well with the song. Whoever did this had his thinking cap on and I liked it. It's one of those videos that makes you think about it. What if we could see how much time we or others had? Would we choose to save a life, or let nature take it's course? At one point he tries to see his own timer but can't. I could write a whole paper on that concept alone.

Till next time.