Fell in Love with a Michel

Boo! Hiss! The bastards finally did it: Arrested Development got canceled. I haven't exactly been keeping up with the new episodes, but I still would count it as one of my favorite shows, based on my love for the first season alone. Let's hope it can survive a Buffy-esque shift to another network, cable or otherwise.

Those of you who know me well know of my obsession with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (Giddy would often come home late at night and see the DVD case open on the floor near the television, every bit as incriminating as an addict's dirty needle. The next morning, I usually got a mock-accusing, "Did you watch it again?" to which I, sheepishly, had to reply, "...yes. It's just the only thing I ever want to watch anymore!") Anyway, I only bring that up to contextualize the mind-bending excitement I felt watching Michel Gondry's Director's Series DVD over the past two evenings. What a flipping genius. I'm absolutely enamored of the way he combines dark childhood whimsy, French self-deprecation, a magician's sleight of hand, a technician's precision, and his own obsessive-compulsive repetition of certain themes/images (skeletons and skeleton costumes; trains; multiple, disparate realities impinging on each other until they result in either messy, chaotic havoc or a kind of infinite regression) to create these eminently charming and sweetly melancholy visual poetry bombs. (All this being said, I suppose I should link to the new Stripes video [via Stereogum], which doesn't disappoint.)