Jane's Addiction's video of "Jane Says" splices shots from several performances together. In addition to the band, there are several gorgeous and very talented female dancers onstage. Starting at around 3:49 there is a shot of some of the dancers, a couple of seconds which just overpowered me. After examining those two seconds of video over and over, I can see that they merely show some of the dancers lying on their backs, one in front of the other from the point of view of the camera, and raising their limbs up and down. But this simple thing is danced and photographed so well that it is truly magic.
Also after watching those two seconds' worth of video over and over, It struck me that the dancing seems somewhat similar to some of the dancing featured early on in the movie Ocean's Eleven, when Brad Pitt's character Rusty is in a nightclub trying to teach movie stars to play poker, and there are dancers, male and female, in a couple of glass cubicles visible over the bar, and also visible in the backroom where the movie stars are playing hopelessly bad poker.
I only first noticed the "Jane Says" video a few months ago. I first saw Ocean's Eleven shortly after it was released in 2001. There's a scene where Rusty is at the bar in that club. The bartender, apparently aware that Rusty is hanging out with movie stars back there in the backroom, asks him how it's going, Rusty replies that it's very boring, the bartender asks him to repeat himself, and Rusty says, louder, "I'm running away with your wife." The silly grin on the bartender's face doesn't change, apparently he still hasn't heard what Rusty is saying.
In that same short scene at the bar, the song "The Projects" by the group Handsome Boy Modeling School is heard, with someone rapping the words "My wife sleeps peacefully." And one of the dancers, who looks as if she might be Jennifer Anniston, but I can't tell for sure because her hair is hanging down over her face, is on screen for maybe less than two seconds, but she's shaking in a glorious way that Jennifer Anniston and very few other people can do, and that shot is followed by a shot of Rusty staring as if one or more of the dancers has his full attention.
Ocean's Eleven was released in 2001. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston were married from 2000 to 2005. That "Jane says" video was released in 1997. So my questions are: are any of those dancers in both the music video and movie? If not, did any of the dancers and/or their choreographers influence each other? Was that really Jennifer Anniston in an uncredited cameo? And if so, was the word "wife" tossed in twice to give attentive viewers such as myself a hint that they might be right, that it was Anniston? Were Pitt and Anniston on their honeymoon at the time the nightclub scene was filmed? Am I the greatest, most subtle film critic of them all?
None of these dancers, neither in the music video nor in the movie, are in the credits. Kelly Adkins, who is in the credits as "Dancer," is the showgirl in a nurse's outfit who gives a security guard a private dance at the Bellagio in order to borrow his pass. It would be entirely unfair to Kelly Adkins to finish this post without mentioning her.
And now, if you've read this entire post, you have a much better idea of what I think about all day every day than you did a few paragraphs ago.
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