Silversun Pickups' Joaquin Phoenix-Directed Video

I was just watching Gladiator for the eleventh time over the weekend, and bam, an email arrives about Joaquin Phoenix directing the new Silversun Pickups video for “Little Lover’s So Polite,” off their 2006 album, Carnavas, which is still churning out singles — not shocking, considering it’s one of the biggest rock success stories of the past year.

And it also seems like forever ago (November 20, 2006, to be exact, the night before my birthday) when the band played five songs for a captivated assemblage here in our NYC offices (watch the video), the wall of noise from Brian Aubert’s guitar nearly getting us evicted, each crash on Christopher Guanlao’s cymbals forcing steam from the ears of our upstairs neighbors.

So back to the new video. It’s shot in L.A., the band members performing in various states of slow motion atop a flatbed truck. But this is no ordinary truck: Watch it spin donuts while Guanlao rocks out and Aubert solos. I can’t imagine they made it through that experience without a little bit of hurl. Footage of the band is offset by two saucer-eyed kiddies — perhaps little lovers themselves — soaring through the California night.

Emperor Commodus does a workmanlike job behind the lens, and, according to recent comments by Aubert over at MTV.com, the stars aligned rather neatly for this collaboration. It wasn’t a “take my hand, I only offer it once” sort of situation.