I had a life-changing experience this morning. I was watching VH1 Classic's
request hour, and I saw, for the first time, the video for the Weather
Girls' "It's Raining Men." I am delighted to report that it's
cheesalicious!
Where to begin?
The video for this disco-era anthem was apparently shot on a soundstage
about the size of my living room.
In the opening chorus, the precipitate males are dancing around a cityscape
of four-foot-high apartment buildings.
The camera zooms in on a window in one of the towers. What is that? I
guess it's supposed to be a red curtain billowing in the wind, but it looks
like the building is sticking out a tongue. The little scrap of cloth,
stiffened with sizing, is blowing straight out of the room.
The boys are executing some nice hitch kicks in short trenchcoats, lurid red
underpants, and nothing else. The oversaturation is even stronger if your
TV set's color and contrast are adjusted for sports, but the creepy feeling
that you're watching a Broadway-trained troupe of flashers is even stronger.
The "ewww... my eyes" factor is turned up for a sequence where we see the
guys from below as they drop from the chyronned sky.
One of them adopts a weird crablegged posture, I guess so that he could stay
in the frame.
The budget for this production was clearly negligible by today's standards.
This is a one-take shoot: we see players fumble props on more than one
occasion, and an unmotivated jump cut that must have papered over some flaw.
There are some girl dancers in the clip, but they are dressed almost
modestly so as not to upstage the well-endowed featured artists. And they
are limited to a couple of "Niagara Falls... slowly I turned..." dance
moves.
The silliest passage spells out for us the verse in which Mother Nature goes
to heaven to collect men for all the girls.
One of the WG's dons a glittery jacket with an appropriate legend on her
back (as near as we can tell, as the whole sequence is distorted with some
video effect that the kids in the A-V club dreamed up) and tosses stars to
the boy angels so that they can return to earth as sperm-laden hailstones.
Only, there are only three man-cherubs (she's ignoring the girls) and there
are more counts in the song than this action will cover, so she gives out a
second round of stars. Whoops, fella! Don't drop your celestial train
ticket!
Nevertheless, some of the guys are really buffed. And I love the song.
Really. Heck, I want them to play it at my funeral. Geri Halliwell covered
it, so you know it's good.
posted:
10:34:50 AM
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