Make It Stop

As anyone who knows me at all can tell you, I'm a huge fan of music videos. I can sit and watch them for hours at a time until my brain actually feels like it's turning into stale pudding. It's my skill.

Considering the nature of music videos, I'm used to the crappy ones. I generally just change the channel or distract myself for the few minutes it's on in the hope that a good one will follow. However, once in a long time, a video so obnoxious and unbearable comes along that it actually inspires rage within my heart. That video at the moment is "What Goes Around..." by Justin Timberlake.

What makes this even more aggravating is that I love the song, I think it might be the best one on this album. I also hate that this is probably one of the more expensive music videos produced in the past couple of years, and still manages to be the crappiest.

I won't go on and on about this much longer, but here are a few reasons that JT makes me want to scoop my eyeballs out with a plastic spoon every time this piece of crap comes on TV (which is just about every 10 minutes):

1) The poorly developed plot -- I'm sorry but the story is SO SIMPLE, and yet I barely have any idea what is going on. She doesn't like him, she has a boyfriend, so...she's going home with him? Oh I guess she was just flirting...REALLY badly. Which brings me to my next point...

2) The awful dialogue -- Holy crap. Who talks like this? Did some 11 year old girl win a competition to write this shit? They should have just pulled lines directly from Passions or some other awful daytime soap and it would have been a vast improvement. Did they really just stop the music (thereby extending the pain of watching this crap) to give us a conversation about threesomes? And when your friend catches you making out with his girlfriend, is the first thing you yell really going to be "I like her too!"?? Possibly the most touching moment:

Scarlett Johannsen: You don't f*ckin know me!
Justin Timberlake: I f*ckin know you!
Scarlett Johannsen: You don't f*ckin know me!
Justin Timberlake: I f*ckin know you! I f*ckin know you!...hey, come back here!

3) The horrible acting -- Even if they had managed to pay a proper writer to deliver half-decent dialogue, Justin's attempt to show that he is capable of acting has clearly failed miserable. And I generally don't mind Ms. Johannsen, but she sucked. And I also love that they spent so much money casting her for the video that for the role of "best friend who betrays Justin" they got That-Guy-I've-Totally-Seen-In-Something-Else, who actually managed to be worse than Justin.

4) The ending -- And finally, I love the implication of this whole thing. That apparently if you cheat on Justin Timberlake you deserve to die in a car crash. Oh no, wait, not JUST a car crash, the most implausible car crash in televised history. I'm sorry, but if you were speeding down a street and you saw this in front of you:

...wouldn't you, oh I don't know, hit the brakes? Try to go around it? Realize that perhaps you'd rather live and confront the boyfriend you just coldly cheated on instead of die?

I also love that despite not showing how this could possibly have happened during the actual crash, we're treated to Scarlett's completely unscathed-on-the-outside-but-totally-dead-on-the-inside body lying nowhere near the car she was just driving. Um...what?

There are probably a million other things I hate about this video but I need to stop typing now because I'm getting worked up and clearly need to go for a walk and think about more important things.