Video Round-Up: Super Duper Video Heads Edition

Video Round-Up is a weekly post collecting an assortment of videos from around the web. Whether they be music videos, creative viral marketing, just plain cool, or just plain ridiculous, they will all be found on Video Round-Up.
Quality this week ranges from good to good in a silly way to fun to horrible. The Round-Up will brighten your day with good music and puppies, and will allow me to express my frustration with one of the worst commercials I've ever seen.

Tron Dog seems, from the title, to be a Japanese production. Japanese society does love it some tiny dogs. And video games. 

I enjoy this song by Japanese rock group Deerhoof. The tone of the echoing synth and the distorted guitar feels great, sonically. The major chords and constant resolutions make this track sound humble to me, combined with the sparse English lyrics. And I love the last line ("Alone. Alone. I'll never be alone.") What my fellow exchange students will like about this video is the nostalgia. The scenes here are very typical of Japanese life, from the lit-up cities to the convenient store snacks.

I've seen this commercial a hundred times at Atlanta metro stations waiting for the train. I hate it. You only need to watch the first thirty seconds of this video to see the ad, and understand how awful it is. It could have simply been another sandwich-joint sports-themed commercial, but instead the director decided to show you a slow-mo shot, and then another, and then another, and shove it in your face until there's no hope of understanding what is happening because you can't fathom why the shots keep slowing down.

I might give the ad more credit if the shots that were shown at high frame rates were actually interesting, but they're mostly mundane. Notice, for example, the forgettable and quite weird celebratory pose the customer takes when he stands up after catching his food. What is that? Was there no opportunity for a second take when he could, oh I don't know, lift his hands all the way up? And who is he pointing to? And why is that slowed? And how many times do you need to abuse this editing feature for a plate of cheap food? American Deli lost my business, and I've never even been there.

 

I must give this team an A for effort. I can tell they wanted to do something worthwhile with the Half-Life mythos. The sound effects are spot-on fan service. Besides the occasional reminder--in the form of a crowbar or red-lighted grenade--that the characters are in the video game world, however, I don't see why this is Beyond Black Mesa and not Beyond Any Other Destroyed Research Facility. Still, this is definitely worth viewing because it's short, pretty good, and perhaps helps the reputation video game movies.