One of the great things about music videos is that a music video director can turn out a pretty big pile of videos in the time that it would take one feature film to be made. That means we sometimes see directors playing with a lot of different styles in a short amount of time, and it means that famous directors usually have some odd ball videos somewhere in their videographies.
Take Michel Gondry, who is most known as a director of experimental style clips for The White Stripes and Bjork. You've definitely seen a few of the greatest hits, but do you remember the time he directed a music video for Sheryl Crow that had a guest appearance be Ellen in a yellow suit? IMVDb remembers. Let's take a look at "A Change Would Do You Good" (1997) by Sheryl Crow, directed by Michel Gondry.
This video has a complicated plot, so we should stick with the very basics: Sheryl Crow is some sort of deity who sits on high and can apparently switch people's places in society as will - after which they will retain their personalities but will assume the role completely. We are shown a number of scenarios where eventually the people in them begin to switch places as Sheryl sees fit. See where this is going? The song's title "A Change Would Do You Good", get it?
Also of note is the mechanism by which we switch scenes - it's a big disc that rotates with a scene in each compartment of the disc.
One of the first things you'll notice in this video is that there is a lot of dialogue and other noises/sound effects. You'll also notice that around half of the dialogue appears in subtitles, and at time it seems like what is spoken and what is in subtitles is completely random. The reason for this, apparently, is that originally all of the dialogue was spoken, but people complained, and they added the subtitles for some lines.
But seriously, this video is in love with sound and sound effects. Every time Crow drops some magic purple powder, or someone changes identities, or the wheely disc that all the images are on changes frame, there is a sound effect. Almost all of the scenes have diagetic sound as well. And as for the song, the song is about as low as songs get in music videos. This fits into the music video category of "short film with a song in the background".
So are the sound effects and near-constant dialogue worth it? This is a video laden with cameos from Molly Shannon to Andy Dick to Ellen Degeneres, and it is impressive how they manage to pack in all these pretty well-defined characters while splitting screen time with 15 other people. A lot of the transitions, however, are marked by people visibly freezing before changing, which is a little distracting.
Maybe most importantly, as some YouTube commentors have pointed out, it wouldn't be out of the question for Ellen to be one of the people who change, but she never does. And when you think about it - which people in this video has the most robust career as of today? I will leave it to you to ponder this.
Then there is Ms. Crow. Check her out in the alternate version of this video here, and then come back and watch this video. She is styled very, very differently than how she was appearing in most things circa 1997. She seems to be channeling Samantha from Bewitched for the attitude and Rachel from Friends for the look.
Overall, this video stuffs a hell of a lot into a few minutes, including an entire credits sequence. I find it hard to get past the onslaught of sound effects and dialogue, but once you do, this video is a fun mid-late 90s time capsule. It also, not being part of this concept could be the reason Ellen is so successful today. Good job, Ellen!
