Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s anxiously awaited video for their The Fame Monster collaboration “Telephone” has arrived as a nine-minute-and-thirty-second mash-up of lesbian prison porn, campy sexploitation flicks and insidery winks at the two divas’ public personas. If Quentin Tarantino and Russ Meyer remade Thelma & Louise as an orgy of product placement with fiercely choreographed interludes, this would be the result. The video was scheduled to premiere on E! at 11:30 p.m. tonight, but hit the Internet early via a leak. Jonas Åkerlund, who previously helmed Gaga’s “Paparazzi” video, directed the clip.
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The mini-movie opens in a women’s prison, where guards strip Gaga bare and mutter, “I told you she didn’t have a dick,” fanning the flames of one of the most persistent rumors about Stefani Germanotta’s gender identity. Almost immediately the self-referential nudges and brand names appear: the boom box in the exercise yard blasts Lady Gaga’s “Paper Gangsta,” a fellow inmate wears Monster Heartbeats earbuds, Gaga has a Virgin Mobile phone tucked in her pants and sports Chanel shades and Diet Coke cans in her hair as makeshift curlers (nice touch!).
The song kicks in just before the three-minute mark as Gaga (in a spiked bikini and what appears to be Karen O’s jacket from the “Zero” video) takes a call in jail and launches into the most appealing afternoon imaginable behind bars — a tightly choreographed routine that has Gaga and four tattooed backup dancers stamping through the cell block.
When Beyoncé’s scheduled interlude arrives, the song breaks for another dramatic sequence. A guard perusing dating Website Plenty of Fish on a Beats by Dre laptop informs Gaga she’s been bailed out. Beyoncé (nicknamed Honey Bee, a nod to Honey Bunny from Pulp Fic...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily