Today’s Tuneage: The Suburbs

With his new movie Her starring Joaquin Phoenix enjoying widespread critical acclaim, director Spike Jonze has been in the news a lot lately …

For today’s tuneage we rewind the tape to 2010 and a 30-minute short film Jonze directed entitled Scenes from the Suburbs.

Shot on location in Austin, Texas, the film follows a band of suburban teenagers as they attempt to navigate a militant new world order in which neighborhoods have become mini-conglomerations that frequently do battle against one another. A collaboration with Canadian indie band The Arcade Fire, Scenes from the Suburbs was released in 2011 and praised by critics.

It also stars two of the band members in cameo appearances (as police officers).

“If the Arcade Fire’s previous album ‘Neon Bible’ posited that our culture’s sins would be visited upon us in cataclysmic catastrophe, then this film, standing in for the followup record, exhibits a pessimism of a more subdued sort—our corruption will be internalized, eating us from the inside out, dissolving our families and turning friends against one another,” reviewer Jason Sondhi wrote for Short of the Week.

The video above is a compilation of scenes from the film set to the band’s song “The Suburbs” (off of the Grammy-winning album of the same name).

Enjoy …