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(More customer reviews)Featuring twenty-one songs, and clocking in just short of an hour and forty-five minutes, this compilation of Duran Duran's "greatest" videos is a much more generous and comprehensive overview of the group's wildly inconsistent 17-year career than anything currently available on CD. Well, let's face it, with Duran Duran the videos were always an essential part of the package that completed the (new) romantic promise of their already (fairly) good music.
"Planet Earth" (from 1981) looks amusingly quaint now: the Edwardian frill shirts and Kabuki makeup - along with the stiff-spastic-marionette dancing and Futurist sets - mark this early clip as a quintessential Blitz Kid time-capsule.
The uncensored "Girls on Film" still arouses us as an ever-dubious attempt to merge sub-Roxy Music decadence with a barrage of mid-Eighties Playboy-channel cliches (and I DO continue to relish the sweet sight of that LUSCIOUS boudoir tart straddling a feather-covered phallic pole in her sheer black scanties!). Still, "Girls" never transcends the surface titillation offered by its self-consciously chic litany of soft-core S&M-lite posturings, nor does it really have the guts to explore or confront its own darker implications.
The next video, "The Chauffeur," is the collection's darkly gleaming gem. Shot in intimate, otherworldly black-and-white, this insinuatingly erotic mini-epic about a femme-lesbian rendezvous at a desolate London underground parkade in the dead of night is, I believe, this group's musicodramatic masterpiece. Fluid, rhythmic crosscutting blends together the stark, luminous chiaroscuro imagery to devastating effect. And the ghostly sight of those three sculptured beauties swaying and undulating in their fetishistic undress...ahhh, you won't find anything as deeply or blissfully kinky as THAT on late-night cable these days!
The next three clips, "Hungry Like the Wolf," "Save A Prayer," and "Rio," are all well-known and still entertaining to watch. "Wolf" is the best of the three - as yet another tale of lustful pursuit and orgasmic conquest/submission, it combines cinematic allusions ("Gunga Din," "Bridge Over the River Kwai," and "Apocalypse Now") as camp signposts on a journey into the jungle heart of feral eroticism. "Save A Prayer" has some nice romantic images of Buddhist monuments and native youths stilt-fishing in the Indian Ocean, as well as a few panoramic aerial shots of a sacred plateau and a final procession of saffron-robed monks illuminated by torchlight. "Rio" is exuberantly naive and amateurish - this is the one with them posing on a yacht in the Caribbean, a neat trick which (unfortunately) convinced many that the group really did inhabit a continuous episode of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."
"Is There Something I Should Know?" is a rather vague and arbitrary bit of classic New Wave kitsch-cryptic surrealism featuring men in Magritte bowler hats and forbiddingly spare Cubist décor, while "Union of the Snake" is merely a flaccid and indigestible boondoggle of Oriental menace and crude forced sexuality.
While a dandy little song by itself, the video for "New Moon on Monday" badly flubs its potentially intriguing premise - revolutionaries organizing an underground resistance movement in some unidentified Eastern European police state. In what has to be one of the most painful moments in all of music video history, our lads end up feebly pantomiming their exultant chorus like earnest teenage wannabes at a talent(less) competition...while several megatons of pyrotechnics detonate everywhere around them!
"The Reflex" is a colorful and well-made attempt at a fake "live" video - but the teenybopper quotient renders it just a little cringe-worthy. The legendary "Wild Boys" now looks like an hysterically overblown slab of "Thriller"-era excess - complete with absurd post-apocalyptic jungle-gym-cum-torture-rack sets; dizzyingly baroque camera angles and vertiginous cutting; snarling, shaven-headed zombies in alabaster body paint, tribal-dancing and somersaulting with atavistic abandon; our hero suspended from a tattered old windmill and...oh, I could go on, but why bother? On the other hand, "A View to a Kill" - the famed James Bond theme - compensates with a simple self-deprecating wit that makes it stand out as one of Duran X 2's most cleverly inventive and enjoyable videos. "Bon...Simon Le Bon," indeed!
After that we get "the new Duran Duran" - a bit less flashy, a bit more "mature." "Notorious" has some nice footage of lean, wiry female models jiving and strutting but the video is ruined by way too many herky-jery camera movements and worsened by frenzied, dissonant cutting. "Skin Trade" has a more controlled rhythm and makes an appealing use of vivid bright colors and matted backdrops. "I Don't Want Your Love" is still surprisingly fresh and fun...perhaps more so than it was the first time around. "All She Wants Is" is a vaguely DEVOesque domestic statement with a lot of blinding, distorted, hypnotic strobe-neon effects and a pretty, pouting girl that I can either love or leave.
The mid-tempo yawner "Serious" (the only semi-bearable moment from their gawdawful "Liberty" album) is the most negligible of the bunch here, as is the rather pointless retrospective sampling, "Burning the Ground."
"Ordinary World" is a triumphant return to form - gorgeous, melancholy romanticism beautifully realized with classical guitar and the lyrical image of a bride wandering amidst golden-toned boughs of weeping willow trees. "Come Undone" is another great song, although I'm not quite so sure about the video. Hmmm...an aquarium full of exotic sea creatures, a ginger-haired young siren chained underwater, a middle-aged dowdy inserting disparate household objects into a blender, a tortured transvestite confronting himself in the vanity mirror...are these folks all meant to represent displaced personalities who have "come undone"?
The recent (and mildly scandalous) "Electric Barbarella" is a catchy electronic dance ditty that brings Double D full circle (cf. Roxy Music's "In Every Dream-home a Heartache"). This last video - about a battery-operated, remote-controlled, life-sized Barbie-doll that suddenly animates to dizzy, ditzy life - is light-hearted and witty, it's also perversely, artificially sexy like a Pedro Almodovar film. Zap me, Barbie!
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The definitive Duran Duran video collection on a 2-DVD set! DVD 1: Planet Earth, Girls on Film (long uncensored version), The Chauffer, HungryLike The Wolf, Save A Prayer, Rio, Is There Something I Should Know?, Union of theSnake, New Moon On Monday (EP Version), The Reflex, Wild Boys (7" Edit Version),A View To A Kill DVD 2: Notorious, Skin Trade, I Don’t Want Your Love, All She Wants Is, Serious,Burning The Ground, Ordinary World, Come Undone (Uncensored version), ElectricBarbarella
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