Sometimes I shouldn't use words

Catch up today two-for-one Heroes vids. Both of these I’d saved to watch for after the S1 finale, for some reason I seemed to think that ensemble vids were OK to watch in advance, but character studies were total spoiler-bombs.

Pink Bullets by ghost_lingering

This was intriguing and I wouldn’t normally say that about Sylar. Some wonderful work matching movement to music, keeping the flow and the visual interest going. It keeps very close to the lyric almost to the point of losing focus for a little in the middle (I wasn’t sure if Peter, for example was there as a parallel or a contrast) but I loved how it all came back to Gabriel in the bridge.


The Good Soldier by phoenixchilde

There should be more Matt vids but this one would still have his Five Years Gone arc covered. Great use of the lyrics, spirit and letter both, especially the irony of “God is on our side” and the regretfulness of the middle section. Also beat-whoring to die for, every whipcrack head-turn to the drumbeats marking the finish.

I don’t often post fic recs but selenak’s Folly about how Nathan met Meredith is an instantly believable piece of Petrelli family history. They say it with flowers, a bouquet you can’t refuse.

This week a new round of synopses posts at strangefandom begins. The idea is that people get assigned vids from a fandom they barely know and post their impressions of the later based on the former. Imagine trying to work out the storyline of Life on Mars from There’s too much Light in this Bar and you’re about there. Or actually here. I didn’t have time to participate this time but round one was a blast and also you get to see some awesome and unexpected vids. My favourite from the first was the Princess Tutu amv Hold Me Now by alkampfer81 with another amv for a show called Azumanga Daioh ADVentures in Translation by rogueintellectproductions coming a close second. Read download and weep because there don’t seem to be any region two DVDs for Princess Tutu and I have to see this show. To find out why watch the vid, read the summaries and marvel at the concept of any series where the first line that comes to mind describing it is “Princess Tutu who is also a duck…”

October saw the release of two remarkable movie-based vids both capturing the intensity and tragedy of adolescence albeit in very different contexts.

absolutedestiny’s Deep Kick is a hard vid to watch, it pulls no punches about what happens to group of 15 year old gangland boys, their confusion and pain. But it also manages to convey the deep bonds that form between them and why those who survive might in the end look back on the experience and agree with the Butthole Surfers that:

It's better to regret.
Something you did.
Than something you didn't do.

charmax’s Cry me a River is about girls not boys and set in a very different world but although class differences replace cutting and Kaposi’s with falconry and fencing lessons the emotional intensity is still there. It still hurts.

Finally moving on to a later stage in life bradcpu’s Goodnight Moon uncovers the awful truths of parenthood on Heroes. The places you’ll go.

Belated Happy Birthdays to raincitygirl andstarynightshade!

Also late thoughts on the Heroes episode Company Man although I've watched up to Parasite now.
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Last week I watched an old Fritz Lang movie Human Desire loosely based on Zola’s La Bete Humaine. The atmosphere was certainly Zolaesque, miserable, ground down people trapped in their miserable, animalistic lives with the industrial background an ever present metaphor. The industry in question being a railroad the metaphor was almost comically Freudian but the film positively dour, a reminder that America didn’t all miraculously turn Technicolor after the war. There was one white picket fence on show but blink and you’d miss it, looming larger on the landscape were the dead end bar where prematurely aged railway men numbed their inadequacies and the cramped hallways of domestic discontent. The cheap artificiality of the women’s lacquered hair and girdled waists managed to dim even Gloria Grahame’s sultry looks, she played the femme fatale part but came across more as a battered wife, drowning as much as luring.

In other news Heroes and the first of the Christopher Ecclestone episodes. ( Read more... )