Product Description

Studio: Uni Dist Corp (music) Release Date: 10/28/2003

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46270 in DVD
• Brand: Universal Studios
• Released on: 2003-10-28
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Color, Compilation, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 200 minutes

Amazon.com
Like the other volumes in the acclaimed Director's Series (featuring the work of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry), The Work of Director Chris Cunningham offers a feast of visual ingenuity, with one major difference: Unlike the relatively playful brightness of Jonze and Gondry, Cunningham wants to involve you in his nightmares. From the urban monstrosities of Aphex Twin's "Come to Daddy" to the limb-shattering weirdness of Leftfield's "Afrika Shox," Cunningham's music videos emphasize the freakish and the bizarre, but they are also arrestingly beautiful and otherworldly, as in the aquatic effects used for Portishead's "Only You," combining underwater movements with ominous urban landscapes. Some of Cunningham's shock effects are horrifically effective (his 'flex" video installation, excerpted here with music by Aphex Twin, is as disturbing as anything conjured by David Cronenberg), while others are cathartic or, in the case of Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker," outrageously amusing. And while the eerie elegance of Madonna's "Frozen" arose from a chaotic production, the signature work in this collection is clearly Björk's "All Is Full of Love," a masterfully simple yet breathtaking vision of intimacy involving advanced robotics and seamless CGI composites. In these and other videos, Cunningham advances a unique aesthetic, infusing each video and commercial he makes with a dark, occasionally gothic sensibility. That these frequently nightmarish visions are also infectiously hypnotic is a tribute to Cunningham's striking originality. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

Good, but could have been Great.
This is definitely worth picking up, but it's lacking quite a few things that would have made this a worthy package like the Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry dvd. I cannot believe only 5 minutes from Flex was used! I've seen the whole video and its brilliant, where's the rest of it?. Here's a list of whats missing.

1.Auteurs: "Light Aircraft on Fire"(This is seen on DVD menu page with the dog holding a guitar)
2.Auteurs: "Back with the Killer Again"
3.Auteurs: "Dubstar"
4.12 Rounds "Personally"
5.Jesus Jones: "The Next Big Thing"
6.Lodestar: "Another Day"
7.Gene: "Fighting Fit"
8.Jocasta: "Something To Say"
9.Nissan: The complete commercial
10.Dubstar: "No More Talk"
11.Holy Barbarians: "Space Junkie"
12.Life's Addiction: "Jesus Coming In for the Kill"
13.XFM : "Clip Clop" commercial for UK radio station
14.ITV : "Sport Is Free"commercial
15.Flex: the full 17 minute short film.(this is unforgivable, its the real reason I bought this dvd in the first place).

...

Well worth a look despite the omissions
Cunningham's work, to say the very least, is breathtaking. It's the kind of surrealism that balances danger against the sublime. You're not quite sure if the cacophony is going to spill out of your TV like the skin & bones Richard James creature in "Come To Daddy". And then on the other hand it would be nice to have Bjork's robots spill into your life with their perfect loveliness. All these videos and shorts are amazing visions that are deeply affecting. They stay with you long after your initial viewing. I'll just chime in with everyone else and say that I was disappointed with the abbreviated "Flex" and the omission of "Back With A Killer", one of my very favourite Cunningham videos. The fact that "Killer" and the other Auteurs videos were shown in the trailer for this DVD (as were more graphic excerpts from "Flex") was a big factor in my purchasing it. I was displeased that they weren't there and actually consider this to be false advertising. Hopefully a more compleat version of this will surface one day.

Amazing videos... where's the rest?
I received this DVD with the Director's Label box set that also came with the Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry DVDs. I think if I had bought the Chris Cunningham DVD as a standalone, I would have been disappointed simply because it doesn't come with that much (or as much as it could have)! Sure, it has the videos that he is most famous for (Aphex Twin ones, Bjork) but those are also the ones that you, as a music video buff, have probably already seen a few times. Not to say that it isn't great to watch crisp, clean, high quality DVD versions of them, but I don't know if it will be worth your money.

And the most annoying thing is that they show little millisecond clips of these unincluded videos on the DVD menu! It's like, come on Director's Label people, why flash bits of videos that aren't even included, except as some sort of rude tease? You end up watching everything and thinking, where were the cat-headed dudes I saw in the menu? Did I miss something? And why only a excerpt of Flex?

Okay, besides all that, his work is totally genius and talk about jaw-dropping, absolutely flawless special effects! Better than any special effects you'll see in a Hollywood blockbuster, that's for sure. But overall, I recommend the 3 DVD box set because Jonze and Gondry are great too.