Other vids

[thuviaptarth]

This isn't exhaustive; I'm just going to note down whatever vids I remember. I'd like to promise that I'll have more thoughtful notes on some vids later, but we can all see how well that worked out last year. Various playlists are up at vividcon; I am feeling too lazy to link them individually.

Premiering Vids Not Covered in Vid Review
Jill, Kathy, Kay, "Pants" (multi)
This was cute and funny. I would have liked it better shorter, but that's only because it's about pants and not the hollow between the collarbones. What? Like you don't want to lick exactly that spot.

Gwyneth, "There" (Battlestar Galactica)
Somehow, in the past three years, I have developed firm opinions on song choice. I had no idea, I swear! They just kind of ... grew while I wasn't paying attention. This song sounds really wrong for Roslin and BSG to me, so I can't evaluate the vid beyond that.

e^y, "David" (Angel)
I've been over this with Yoon elsewhere, but basically, although I can guess that she's parallelling the eruption of Angelus with the transformation into puppet!Angel, the import of the argument isn't really clear from the vid, especially since there are these big differences between the two. (Muppet!Angel: Cute, cotton-stuffed, has a removable felt nose. Angelus: Wears eyeliner and kills people.) Yoon tends to conceptualize idea-centered rather than character-centered vids, which I find interesting and unusual, but most of the vids would benefit from a more severe beta and a better song choice; treating vocals as texture rather than text (as opposed to in addition to) is only going to work if the lyrics are in a foreign language.

Sisabet, "Be So Glad" (Farscape)
Oh, I don't know what to say about this. It will take me more watchings to be coherent. But I loved the chain gang song (and chain sounds) for Stark and John in prison and in the prisons of their fates, swinging hammers till the sun came down; everything's a chain, even the sweet love of women, until the dark, the coolness of night, the softness of pillows, the baby in John's arms.

Tray, "Summer Dress" (Hellboy)
Competent but unsurprising -- none of the images had the shock of unexpected rightness, and the vid didn't take me anywhere I didn't expect to go. Maybe too literal?

Dualbunny, Tzikeh, and Absolute Destiny, "Grapes of Wrath" (Battlestar Galactica)
This was my favorite of the short comedy vids in Premieres, possibly because I like BSG better than Labyrinth or The Princess Bride. (*waiting fatalistically to see whether the dislike of The Princess Bride or the disinterest in Dead Poets Society will get me drummed out of fandom faster*)

Sweetestdrain, "Monochrome" (Carnivale)
REALLY FUCKING CREEPY, YO.

Auction vids
Sweetestdrain, "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk" (BSG) for heresluck and dualbunny
They should replace that episode with Lee's previously unmentioned hooker girlfriend with this on the official DVDs. It would be better for everyone.

Killa & Maygra, "From the Bottom of My Heart" (Supernatural) for Maygra
By universal fannish consensus, The Wallflowers' Rebel, Sweetheart is all about Supernatural. I should probably hold off on this until I do a big batch of SPN vid recs, but what the hell: this is focused on Sam's journey through S1, which means it's a complex mixture of things lost and things gained. Sam starts off with the devastating loss of his girlfriend and the (allegedly temporary) loss of his normal life, and at the end of the season his world is even scarier than it used to be--but he's also gained back the family he lost before, transformed but still family. Each repetition of "Coming up from the depths/to the rays of the sun" marks a milestone in Sam's journey: at first the "sun" is the cold, grey false hope of the revival tent on a rainy day, and then it slowly shifts to "an army of one," his dad, and his dad welcoming him home, "to the rays of the sun," which is his brother; and by the end of it, scary and depressing as Sam's world is, his world still has sunlight because it has his family in it. (You can all tell I watched this for the first time after mainlining the season.)

Absolute Destiny, "I Enjoy Being a Girl" (multi) for paraviondeux
OMG SO MUCH ASS-KICKING! I'm sorry, I have nothing coherent to say. SHEER GLEE!


Challenge Vids
I liked them all. I have nothing coherent to say about any of them. I am tired. Possibly this report should end here. And yet it won't.


Club Vivid Premieres
My favorites here were dualbunny's "God Is a DJ" for being a kick-ass Starbuck character vid;
pipsqueaky and laurashapiro's "Goody Two Shoes" for infectious if exasperated enthusiasm and charm; jackiekjono's "Beep Beep" for being incredibly funny even when I had no idea what the source was; and heresluck's "Tres Sorelle" for being all about motion motion motion. And also making me wonder if Moya was the fourth sister and then realize that she wasn't, she was the mother.

Miscellaneous vids I hadn't seen before
Gwyneth, "There's No Way Out of Here" (multi)
What's even more incredible than the action and despair packed in is that this somehow, despite the refrain, isn't a hopeless vid; it's powerful and empowering and I love it more than I can possibly say.

Dualbunny, "Spanish Doll" (Buffy & Angel)
This was so perfectly Drusilla. Loved all the dolls, blindfolded, turned away, staring up.

Comments

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

You don't like The Princess Bride? God, I thought I was all alone out here.

-- That's all I've got. You'd think that, since I don't know enough about vids to watch them intelligently, I would not be fascinated by how other people talk about them, and so would miss out on things like references to movies I don't love as the other girls do. But, obviously, not so.

[untrue-accounts.livejournal.com]

I read the book before the movie was made--which has its own problems, as I didn't get that the long prologue was fiction and felt deeply uncomfortable about how nasty Goldman was being about his wife and son in public; and anyway, aside from the prologue, I liked the book, but am fairly sure I didn't get a lot of it, since I was ten or twelve and did not yet understand irony.

The movie was a big disappointment.

[cofax7]

Hmm, the auction vids aren't on the DVD set. I'll have to scare them up.