Israeli Directors Nearly Make Coldplay Song Bearable

It’s beyond me as to why anybody would voluntarily expose their aural cavities to even a note of Coldplay’s shapeless, faux-melancholy canon. And yet Coldplay—insofar as the band’s inclusion in the last Super Bowl show tells me—is still, unfathomably, a draw. And so, as long as people keep listening to Coldplay, the generic laundry detergent of popular culture, their music will continue to exist.

Given these facts, it’s somewhat of a relief to find that the new music video for their single “Up&Up,” directed by an Israeli duo, makes Coldplay’s crappy music a little less crappy.

“Up&Up” is co-directed by Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia, who were both born in Jerusalem. We last covered the 30-year-old Heymann in 2013, when Tablet contributor Tal Kra-Oz wrote about his fantastic music video for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”

[T]he video’s director is Vania Heymann, the 27-year-old Jerusalemite wunderkind who left the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design after some of his homework achieved incredible YouTube success, landing him jobs directing commercials and music videos, as well as a running spot on the beloved TV show Eretz Nehederet. Though sometimes derivative, his technically brilliant work has won him countless fans.

In some respects, this is a step down for Heymann by virtue of the fact that Dylan’s music is better than Coldplay’s (although most music scales worse when compares with Dylan). But let’s give credit where it’s due: the video, in spite of the music, is a gorgeous mash-up—some sort of visual narrative that’s two parts ode and one part invective to the modern world. It’s Jonathan Swift meets Murikami meet caged Sea World orca and the ghost of George W. Bush. Oh, and at the 1:42 mark, there’s a wall, which, in 2016, feels all too real.

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