Friday Morning Videos: Special La Luna Edition

We bought an awesome phases-of-the-moon calendar back in March, and it’s nice to track when the full moon’s going to be high in the sky. Even better, though, is that last night, apropos of seemingly nothing, my husband began singing, “It’s a NEW MOON ON MONDAY!”

I knew he wasn’t singing it because the song popped randomly into his head and he was forced to loop it until another song purged the earworm like a toothpick through stuck glitter glue; no, I knew he’d consulted the calendar.

So here we are, opening our week with the second-best video from a band that became famous solely because of its videos, although if you say that’s proof that their songs suck, I’ll stab you with this freshly sharpened eyeliner pencil. I always carry it, in case someone disses Duran Duran.

Of course, not realizing the import of the lunar calendar, I decided to work in our downtown office today, instead of at home, where I’d have the luxury of watching the video and pointing out the especially fantastic parts. But I’ll leave the deep examination to Melinda, and point out, from memory, why this is one of the best videos of Duran Duran, and also ever.

1. There are four versions. FOUR. They range in length from the one you saw on MTV to a 17-minute edition that can only be found through an Easter egg on their greatest hits DVD, after watching the video three times. This YouTube video is “extended,” but it’s only 6:08.
2. The extended edition features Simon LeBon in a dressing room with a hot French spy, and at one point, he says, “It looks like you’ve already got my back against the wall,” at which point, any viewer must squeal giddily, take control of the remote, and rewind. Yes, rewind. Don’t skip back or run it back or any of those crazy newfangled things discs do; you must find a way to rewind.
3. It features a semi-futuristic French revolution, I think. There are French-looking cobblestones and French-looking flags and soldiers on horseback, and also Simon LeBon.
4. There’s also something about this time, la luna, and lighting one’s torch and waving it for a new moon on Monday, which I think is some kind of insignia, or possibly a rallying cry for la revolucion, I’m not really sure, but it rhymes really well, and Simon LeBon sounds really sexy saying it.
5. At one point, late in the video, the soldiers on horseback–or it might just be palace guards on foot, I can’t remember and can’t watch it right now–chases the hot Frenchie spy down an alley, and she stops the charging horses (OK, maybe they ARE horses) by waving a giant flag and being very brave and revolutionary, totally like Tianamen Square, only without the grocery bag or actual fear of impending death. That act of bravery is not the important part, though. The important part–and the part that makes this video the most rewinded in the Handley house– is that Simon LeBon is watching her wave the flag from far away, and is totally charmed by it, and ducks his head and smiles and then sneaks another look at her because she’s so darn cute when she’s being all death-defying like that. Pick up remote. Rewind. Repeat. Feel funny in ways you don’t understand yet. Rewind. Repeat. Pause. Squeal.

Back to the salt mines. Or, as we like to say around here, back to feeding the capitalist pig dogs.

P.S. The first best Duran Duran video is View to a Kill, because it intersperses scenes from the James Bond movie seamlessly, and features the entire band in their natural habitats: Nick Rhodes as a fashion photographer, John Taylor shooting at Grace Jones, Roger Taylor as a gunner in the back of a van, Andy Taylor as an evil blind accordionist, and Simon LeBon as a terrible pun-teller.