Sometimes I shouldn't use words

Marvel The Avengers (Assemble)

Sun, 20 May 2012 15:29:38 GMT

There’s been at least one review claiming the Avengers movie is like a musical. As if this could possibly be a bad thing.

( That’s Entertainment )

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Waving to Buffy fans

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:02:16 GMT

If the Mark Watches blog were a song it might be this one:

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The Wire (Season Three)

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:14:22 GMT

( Spoilers need more relevant icons )

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I meme!

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 19:04:30 GMT

1. The one who seduced you, screwed you over, broke your heart in a million pieces, and laughed about it.
Heroes maybe? I never do heartbroken for long (although Glee is an an accident waiting to happen).

2. The old flame you don't see very often any more but whom you still really enjoy getting together with for a few drinks and maybe a pleasant nostalgic romp.
Alan Bleasedale. I have the Boys from the Black stuff on DVD. I think its time is coming back

3. The mysterious dark one whom you used to sit up with talking until 3 AM at weird coffee houses and with whom you were quite smitten until you realized s/he really was fucking crazy.
The Lord of the Rings. Don’t judge me. The kids love it (uncomprehendingly).

4.The one you spent a whole weekend in bed with and who drank up all your liquor and whom you'd still really like to get with again, although you're relieved s/he doesn't actually live in town
Old Hollywood movies. Any time. Call me.

5. The steady
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Be still my hard drive.

6. The alluring stranger whom you've flirted with at parties but have never gotten really serious with
RTD Who. It begins and ends with David Tennant being hot.

7. The one you hang out with and have vague fantasies about maybe having a thing with, but ultimately you're just good buddies
Firefly.

8. The one your friends keep introducing you to and who seems like a hell of a cool person except it's never really gone anywhere
Fringe.

9. The one who's slept with all your friends, and you keep looking at them and thinking, "How the hell did they land all these cool people?"
Farscape. But specifically John Crichton who I fell in hate with on first sight and every time I dipped into the show there were more of him.

10. The one who gave you the best damned summer of your life and against whom you measure all other potential partners:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You never forget your first.

11. The one you recently met at a party and would like to get to know better:
The Wire. We’re going steady now. It could be love.

12. The old flame that you wouldn't totally object to hooking up with again for a one night romp if only they'd clean up a bit:
BSG or failing that its various offspring. I did Caprica.

13. Your hot new flame:
Batwoman (Elegy). So very, very hot.

14. The one who stole your significant other:
Manchester United. Although since the football came first, maybe he was never really mine. Did I ever tell you the story of the honeymoon plan to visit all the premiership grounds in the order of their finishing in the league?

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Wire vid rec

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 22:29:27 GMT

Wire vids are sadly few and far between and Wire vids that don’t spoil for seasons I haven’t seen yet even more so but Pursuit of happiness, a Season One D’Angelo study by cappylicious is a fabulous exception to the rule ( Read more... )

( Afterthought with literary pretensions )

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The Wire S02 the final three

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 17:17:03 GMT

( A Working Class Hero is a Hard Thing To Be )

( Who didn’t shoot Liberty Valence )

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Three Wire thoughts (Season 2 episodes 5 and 6)

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:30:26 GMT

Six episodes into season two of the Wire now. There’s a different feel to this season so far. Much more comic now we know the characters and things that might have played as disturbing or confusing are just laugh out loud funny.

( You have all heard of WorldCom? )

( It don't matter that some fool say he different )

( Boats and tides and whatever )

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"The Wire" season one

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:02:26 GMT

I think it was around February this year the box set of The Wire was on special offer and I bought it as a bribe to myself. Write the motherfucking paper then you can watch the motherfucking show (K’s name for it based on trying to watch the late night BBC2 showings without subtitles). Still haven’t written the paper. I swear that dataset has an inbuilt uncertainty principle, it changes every time I look at it. But I did other good things. Then there was a week of karmic frustration when I couldn’t remember where I’d hidden the box set from myself. Then a week of mainlining season one.

( Nicely done )

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New Glee Vid

Mon, 30 May 2011 13:23:25 GMT

Title: There’s gotta be something better than this!
Artist: The new Broadway cast of Sweet Charity
Fandom/Characters/Pairings: Santana/Brittany
Warnings: Fighting and flashes
Format: DivX
Size: 27.1 MB

Summary:When did you get so smart?.

Download from here (Right/control click and save target as)

Feedback sounds like a capital plan

( Notes )
( Lyrics )

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Glee 2x22 “New York”

Sun, 29 May 2011 15:16:17 GMT

( Miss Turnstiles has no regrets )

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The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon

Sun, 01 May 2011 17:53:44 GMT

( The Doctor does Utah )

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My festivid (signed and remastered)

Sat, 05 Feb 2011 17:41:30 GMT

Title: Last Chance Texaco
Artist: Ricki Lee Jones
Fandom Caprica (episodes 1-13)
Characters Graystones
Warnings: Flashing lights, self harm, suicidal ideation
Format: DivX
Size: 49.1 MB

Summary: She’s not there

Download from here (Right/control click and save target as)

( Notes )
( Lyrics )

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Festivid recs

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:03:56 GMT

Less than a week till festivids reveals. I did plan to watch all the vids. I started at the bottom of the list and worked up but got lost after about ten and started hopping between fandoms I knew or sounded cool and I’ve still only seen about a third of the 174 (count them 174) vids but here are some favourites:

First and foremost is the vid somebody made for ME!!! Float On . It’s Dory from Finding Nemo and it’s utterly adorable and makes my heart want to swim round in circles. “Women of Pixar reprazent!”

Serpent Charmer The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Movie). Rattlesnake jitter as the serpent falls under the rabbit’s spell.

Space Oddity Community (TV). Like finding my religion.

Amnesia Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Movie). Fragments of a life scatter in a snowglobe swirl.

Still Alive Heathers (Movie). A Heathers vid was one of my requests. I consider it met in full.

End of the World Life After People (TV). Where’d everybody go?

Beat Control Lilo & Stitch (Movie). Ohana. To dance for!

Recalled to Life The Secret Garden (Movie). Everything so barren and alone in the beginning and so joyful and connected and alive by the end.

Make It Pop Scott Pilgrim vs the World (Movie). Superfun!

Truth Is In The Dirt V - 2009 (TV). All will love her and die.

What a Good Boy Young Americans (TV). Bliss it was to be young.

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Fifteen favourite characters

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 16:12:30 GMT

This fifteen character meme has been going around and I started mentally doing it just to see if I’d be able to make it fifteen. I tend to think that I’m not very polyamourous about characters. There a few I would follow into soap opera hell and probably an equal number I fell in hate with at first sight and can’t bear to watch the awesome shows they’re in because of (even more reason to hate them). Still, did make it to fifteen in the end with only minor cheating so here’s the list.

List fifteen of your favorite characters from different fandoms, and ask people to spot patterns in your choices, if they're so inclined

Sarah Connor (Terminator movies and T:SCC series)

Buffy Summers (BtVS TV series and comics)

Laura Roslin (BSG)

Number Six (BSG)

Gaius Baltar (BSG)

Catherine Weaver (T:SCC)

James Ellison (T:SCC)

Robin Hood (anon)

Dana Scully (The X-files)

Jean Harrington (The Lady Eve)

Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch)

Mike Chang (Glee)

Elliot Hoo (TXD)

Sam Tyler (Life on Mars)

George Bailey (It’s a Wonderful Life)

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BtVS S8 #40 “Let’s go to work”

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 21:19:33 GMT

There was a list of songs the writers and other people thought were S8 songs. This is mine for issue #40. I made this vid 5 years ago and it finally came true. Go me.

Download link (with fixed aspect ratio) Right click and save.

( She wears the name. It does not wear her. )

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Onwards and upwards

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 18:00:08 GMT

I finally finished remastering my TSCC vid Nobody Loves You. You can download the new shiny by right clicking here or streaming (YouTube allowing):

I still really miss the show and rewatching the vid only makes it more so but there’s some potential good news on that front. Josh Friedman (show runner for TSCC) has written a pilot, which Fox have picked up with a decision to be made on it in May 2011. Originally he was going to produce, he may still be show running but now it has Spielberg and some guys who produced the New Star trek Movie and Fringe as executive producers whatever that means. It’s based on a comic book (sorry, graphic novel) series called Locke and Key about a family (the eponymous Locke’s) moving back to their ancestral spooky mansion in the aftermath of the father’s murder and horrible wackiness ensuing. I haven’t read the books, they say the art is interesting, but they seem to focus on the 6 year old boy, his teenage brother and occasionally their sister Kinsey while the mother hangs around in the background in a haze alcohol-fuelled grief. But that the book. When Friedman did Terminator it was supposed to be all about John but he brought back the Sarah of it and added Cameron and Weaver and Ellison and that Derek guy. And the first character they’ve cast is the mother, Nina - Miranda Otto (Eowyn) and then the daughter, Kinsey ( Sarah Bolger). It could be good. Or never happen. Whatever. Happy New Year!

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Vidding is love

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 16:55:42 GMT

I finished my festivid! It's the first vid I've ever made specifically for a challenge, which was a deeply scary concept at first (what if I can't think of anything, what if it sucks) but it worked out fine. Much like ordinary vidding except for actually getting made instead of floating around as a brain vid before gradually fading into virtual nothingness. Also the parts that were hard or hardly formed in the brain version just flowed easily onto the screen and the parts I thought I had nailed were as hard as. Lyrics are not your friend when vidding. I need this bludgeoned into me with a very blunt instrument and speaking of blunt instruments, a rec:

Ego by cappylicious In which Arthur Pendragon is totally worthy of Beyoncé Knowles.

Other, non-instrumental, vid recs:

Some Time Around Midnight by bop_radar When Lee met Kara and was doomed. For three minutes feel how that feels.

Black Velvet by wistful_fever Kurt brings the living colour.

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All will love her and despair

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 18:02:19 GMT

Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown had an article on The Awl about the awsomeness of Ripley and Buffy and Marti Noxon and River and Summer Glau which was totally heartwarming except the (very small) part where she dismissed Sarah Connor in order to elevate Ellen Ripley to mother of all fictional mother figures.

I do love Ripley, I do. Even though I think the only Alien film I’ve actually seen all of in one sitting is Aliens I love her. In the 80’s I loved “Get away from her” Ripley almost as much as I loved “No living man am I” Eowyn a decade or so before. Alien hybrid Ripley is the one bit of awesome in a very strange broken movie. Ripley in maternal mode is the mother little girls wish for but not, I think, the mother to speak for them when they grow up when and if they have daughters of their own. Sarah speaks.

It’s a constant of Terminator 2 discussions that someone will claim it’s really a John Connor origin story but even in the movie (which is less Sarah than the show) who gets the voiceover? I generally hate them but what other female character gets the voiceover? I’m coming up Clueless. Eye roll. Whatever. Sarah speaks.

There are two scenes I remember from first seeing the movie. The dream sequence where her nightmare was the world burning (see, Sarah has to save the world) and another, much quieter scene when she’s watching Arnie with John and thinking how the machine will never let him down, never be angry with him, always be there. She can’t compete. In the show this theme is revisited in the parallels between Sarah and Weaver. Aliens has the classic good-bad mother dichotomy in Ripley vs the Alien queen. Its bad mother is a giant pulsating mass of teeth and venom, a maternal nightmare dreamed by people for whom mama will never be the name they call themselves (Sigmund I’m talking to you). Weaver isn’t bad. She’s cold, fluid metal, all things to all people; a beautiful quicksilver mermonster; the perfect other mother; the one who takes John away when he’s ready. Sarah lets him go. I think that’s the part that speaks to me. Much deeper than “Get away from her you bitch!”

One of these mornings
You're going to rise up singing
Then you'll spread your wings
And you'll take to the sky

But until that morning
There's a'nothing can harm you
With your daddy and mammy standing by

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BtVS S8.38 "Last Gleaming" Part 4

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 18:26:54 GMT

( First let’s recap. Glee style. )

( Buffy the Story Slayer )

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Forget You Glee (2x07 The Substitute)

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:15:26 GMT

( Spoilers have opinions on this one )

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BtVS S8.38 "Last Gleaming" Part 3

Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:11:53 GMT

There’s a James Tiptee story (there’s always a James Tiptree story) called The Man Who Walked Home. It starts in a post-apocalyptic world with a preternaturally barren crater and slowly, as centuries pass and a new civilisation grows up around it, the mystery of the annual disturbances at its centre becomes clearer. Added together like the pages of one of those flicker books the annual happenings reveal the image of a man stumbling and grasping for something. This man was the first and last chrononaut who, sent too far forward, somehow, impossibly found a way back and in doing so triggered the explosion that ended his world. The strength of the story lies in Tiptree’s evocation of the time traveller’s thoughts in his final fatal moments. Exiled beyond reason, consumed by longing for the home he had lost, reaching for it with every cell of his failing body.

( Generals, snakes and seahorses )

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Mon, 01 Nov 2010 09:37:13 GMT

Caprica has been cancelled and the final five episodes delayed until 2011. It’s sad in one way but I do think it’s the kind of show that could work best as a single season story. Like Fawlty Towers or the original, Ricky Gervais version of the The Office. They were both comedies and Caprica really isn’t but something they do have in common (I think) is that the incentive to watch is not to find out what the characters do next or what happens to them. Which is not to say Basil Fawlty or David Brent or Daniel Graystone aren’t compelling but what’s compelling about them is who they are, not who they might become. If anything their inability to change or grow is precisely what makes them funny/tragic (and yes, Basil Fawlty is tragic). But they think they can, they think they are, none of these characters are passive victims of circumstances, they work at creating their own hells. Which is to say I liked this last episode of what is now the current run. It was one of those where all the threads finally came together.

( False consciousness )

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Dear Festividder

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 14:45:23 GMT

Hello. And thank you for making me a vid! All of these fandoms are ones I’d love to see vidded. The suggestions (below) will hopefully give you some feel for how I know these shows (and movies, lots of movies) but so much of what I love about vids is to see things I have loved through other people’s eyes. So if you have your own, completely different, ideas that will be wonderful. Everything will be wonderful.

Blackadder [TV] I'm easy but something about Queenie and Nursey or the characters played by Hugh Laurie would be really cool (Lord Percy is the main reason I can never take House seriously).

The Cat People - 1942/The Curse of the Cat People - 1944 [Movie] It's been a long time since I saw either of these movies but they haunt me. The original Cat People I remember as being all chiracuso shadows and the follow up all preternaturally bright. Something crossing over between them would be awesome but really anything that captures the mood of either film. 

Finding Nemo [Movie] I wanted to suggest "women of Pixar" as a fandom but I think the rules don't allow it. So Dory. A Dory vid. Or a Dory/EVE/Ellie/Roz crossover vid.

Heathers [Movie] Another movie I remember loving but not much else. Apart from falling in lust with JD (I loved Scottie in Vertigo too, right up until the ending) and then being delighted by him turning out to be such a psycho and Winona Rider pwning him... Maybe a JD Lord King Bad Vid is what I deserve.

Luther - 2010 [TV] Something focusing on the good parts. Idris Elba, Alice and London looking cool. Not all the dead women.

The Wire [TV]  I've only caught odd episodes. It’s on way past my sleepy time (I grow old) but there were episodes I did see that were so good I think seeing what led up to them would feel like déjà vu. So spoil me rotten. Show me your show.

The Young Ones - 1982 [TV] Go easy on the Rik. That is all.

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You’ll believe a man can dance

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 22:16:30 GMT

This weekend I did ALL the laundry AND signed up for festivids (fan_eunice explains what and why) AND realised that the UK rights for the LXD dancing/superhero/web series had come through and I could download it from iTunes. Yay!

LXD thoughts: ( Like dolphins can swim )

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More TV

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 19:34:31 GMT

( Caprica - that old time religion )

( Glee - cheesus and me )

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