**Side Note**
I wanted to originally post this for the holiday season. Seeing how this is Black Friday and all, I figure this might be an appropriate time to ease into the Christmas standard. So as you’re busy shoving your way through various lines and other difficulties, you can be prepared for the themed music which will dig itself down into your very soul. Enjoy!
I’m sure you’re probably more aware of this song than you want to be. Maybe this year you’d like to share this song with someone special. But a hallmark of the holiday season since the 80s deserves some sort of recognition. The amount of joyous fun I’ve had with this song, at Karaoke’s, driving down the highway a bit too late at night, or just hanging out in an ironic mood is just too great to count. Yet I bizarrely had never seen the actual music video for this. That is, until NOW.
The video’s beginning got me a little worried. For the first few seconds, I see a Jeep and a long Van come up a snowy mountain. I wonder whether or not this is the true music video for the song, or if I had in fact stumbled across the most ironic militia’s recruitment video ever. Around the 15 second mark, I’m assured that haircuts that bad and acting that poor cannot be good recruiting tools. Yet if you edited the clip very slightly it could give the viewer the impression that people with bad hair cuts were practicing in the mountains for the overthrow of our beloved US government.
Acting quality is about is good as the phenomenal composing skills Wham! possessed. Immediately you are taken into a world of hinted upon hurt between the immaculately well groomed man and his gravity-defying former girlfriend’s haircut (she looks like Alice from Dilbert). Both of them are thrust into a winter wonderland where their hearts have frozen over.
George Michael belts out “I keep my distance, but you still catch my eye” as the dinner is set. Tinsel is dropped, and we witness an uncomfortable moment between the two former lovers. I guess this sort of reminds me how you couldn’t express in the 80s. Either that or people really were that corny. Perhaps he should have been collecting firewood instead of pathetically decorating a flaccid Christmas tree that made Charlie Brown’s look positively robust.
Snowball fighting begins. Here it looks again like a militia recruitment video like the free-spirited nature of bringing down the government to mark a new order. It would work, if we didn’t have that cheesy close up. Though the close up might work as a “we’re fed up with the system” sort of style.
Dinner feels like the last supper with the 12 apostles, except they all appear to be self-absorbed shitheads who don’t want to contribute anything but disdain for society.
“A crowded room/Friends with tired eyes” is depicted, word for word. We see the emotional “heart” of the piece. The camera brings us back to the happier times the two protagonists shared. Her piece of garbage jewelry apparently cost him a lot more than money, it cost him his heart, which still yearns deeply for her love and affection. But he’s there, watching her with another man, and feeling upset about his unfortunate loss of such a lovely woman.
Sadly, by watching the video, you get the abridged version. You miss out on his tender screams out to no one in particular. That improvised instrumental at the end seals the deal for me. Listen to this with loved ones. Get vulnerable.
