Mirrorball – Unseen & Unclean: Banned Videos
@ Uni Cinema
11:30pm, Sat 9 Mar 2002
Score: 8
Short Review: Bloody funny
The only Mirrorball show I could attend, this was probably the one I most wanted to see – a collection of music videos that suffered the wrath of the censors. A UK MTV production, this film included entire clips of the good ‘uns, snippets from the more well-known stuff (Madonna, Prodigy), and some staggeringly funny interviews with video producers and directors.
Surprisingly, there were a lot of 80’s New Wave videos – the film opened with Duran Duran’s banned “Girls on Film” video (complete with mostly naked women mud-wrestling and pillow fighting), and Soft Cell also showed up with “Sex Dwarf”. Other clips included tracks from Queens of the Stone Age, Massive Attack, Robbie Williams (“Rock DJ”) and Metallica.
In amongst all the videos banned for female nudity, there were a few nixed for other reasons – and these were some of the best clips of the night. The Cardigans’ “My Favorite Game” was a cracker, Death In Vegas’ “Aisha” was also very stylish, but the highlight for the night was undoubtedly Flowered Up’s “Weekender” – a rip-roaring monster of a clip.
There were the gross-out moments, too – Cradle Of Filth’s “From the Cradle to Enslave” topped them, with graphic shots of people bowing their own arms with hacksaws. The funniest bits, however, were the interviews with directors – most of them looked like they were totally tripping, and one justified his creation of a (essentially) porn video by saying “pornography is just really, really interesting to us”. Duh :)
A puzzling one was the inclusion of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” – especially since the screened video was the most edited version of that clip I’ve seen. Other than that, however, this was a bloody amusing way to spend a Saturday night.