Ted's Blog

I remember watching some kind of MTV or VH1 compendium of best videos and seeing one I really liked for Fat Boy Slim's song "Praise You". It's a pretty famous video, but probably a lot of people still have never seen it or even heard of Fat Boy Slim, who was in the 80's British band The Housemartins under his real name, before mixing electronic music as a DJ calling himself Fat Boy Slim (and using an Amiga computer, no less, at least up through doing the music for the movie Moulin Rouge in 2001). I put the song on Grant's MP3 player and he says it is one of his favorites.

Anyway, I was writing a review of the movie Where the Wild Things Are which I had very high hopes for since I always thought it was a cool children's book and it has Spike Jonze directing. He also directed one of my favorite movies, Being John Malkovich and starred in a lesser favorite, Three Kings. Well, Wild Things didn't turn out that great, but I looked up the movie on Wikipedia and wound up reading more about Spike Jonze. He got his start making commercials and music videos, which I knew. One of the videos he made, well into his career (after a number of videos and around the time of Malkovich), was for Praise You. And what I did not realize was that the main guy in Praise You is Spike Jonze himself as a nerdy community-oriented B Boy dancer. The video itself looks like something someone would shoot and put on YouTube, but at the time there wasn't quite so much material out there like this. But it was certainly shot the same way, and when the manager of the theater comes out to turn their boom box off, that is real, since they didn't get permission beforehand.

You can watch the video on YouTube and read more about the song on Wikipedia