Andrei Tarkovsky is Alive and Directing Metal Videos

A couple of weeks ago, some film dork friends and I went to see this new movie called Under the Skin. It’s basically being sold as a mind-bending trip in the vein of 2001, only with Scarlett Johansson naked, but that’s not really accurate; it’s much more like an Andrei Tarkovsky movie, only with Scarlett Johansson naked. And by “like an Andrei Tarkovsky movie,” I mean there are a lot of lllllloooonnnnggggg, lingering shots of abso-fuckin’-lutely nothing. Like, if you’ve ever seen Tarkovsky’s version of Solaris, you might remember a five-minute-long scene of a car driving along a highway, and then, uh… the car, like, gets wherever it was going. And that’s it. End of scene. There might be a reason for what’s basically a transitional scene to last that long, but I’ve never really figured out what it was. Likewise, there are a LOT of scenes in Under the Skin of ScarJo just sitting in her car, expressionless, just watching people. Neither myself nor any of the people I was with have short attention spans, but it was a real slog to sit through.

I mention it because I just watched Barren Womb’s new video for the song “Live Fast, Die.” Like last week’s video for Demon Hunter’s “I Will Fail You,” nothing much happens here; it starts and ends in an entertaining-enough manner, but the middle is mostly just a guy with “The End is Nigh” sandwich board walking around, doing nothing in particular. The Barren Womb clip is superior to the Demon Hunter one because it’s much shorter, the photography is far more kinetic, and its bookends display a sense of humor, but that’s really all it has going for it. I suspect the director was trying to either create a droll contrast with the song’s title or a direct visual translation of one of its lyrics (“Waiting for something to happen”), but I don’t think the results are entertaining enough to really justify his decision.

As always, you are, of course, free to disagree to with me. Watch: