Oldham and Galifianakis do Kanye

Published Jul 25 2007, 07:23 PM by Mike Miliard

Just yesterday, for whatever reason, I was thinking about Will Oldham’s performance in John Sayles’s Matewan, in which the “Appalachian post-punk solipsist” (then just a teenager) puts in a striking turn as an Appalachian post-WWI Baptist.

It’s been 20 years, but I think Oldham may have finally outdone himself.

If you’d told me last month that Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Zach Galifianakis would be starring in the video for Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” I would not have believed you. And boy, would I have been wrong.

As it happens, I am happy to have egg on my face. For the world would have been that much poorer without this short piece of cinema.

The plot: two men with sublime facial hair are broing down on some Carolina farm. The standard stuff ensues: baling hay, revving chainsaws, driving tractors, dressing like pimps. Y’know. Country life.

Maybe it’s not so weird. Hell, Galifianakis networks like crazy. He shared a bed with Fiona Apple, and even hired K-Fed as a dancer in that blessed prelapsarian time before anyone knew who K-Fed was.

But the guy who saw a darkness raising the roof for the guy who heard ‘em say?

This, you gotta see.