Sometimes I shouldn't use words

Title: Riots
Music: A.R. Rahman “Riots” from the movie “Slumdog Millionaire”
Movie: Black Narcissus
Warnings: Nothing explicit
Format: DivX
Size: 28.1 MB

Summary I couldn’t stop the wind from blowing and I couldn’t hide the mountain.

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( Notes )

Disclaimer: I suppose these are more (entirely subjective) reactions than recs as such. But words are hard and a vid has to get under your skin for any to come. There is no bad. There is much good. Links to all vids and vid shows are here.

( Non-attending Premieres (3 vids) )
( Club Vivid (9 vids)  )
( Premieres One (6 vids) )
( Premieres Two (4 vids) )

I am so very behind with vid recs and that's before VCC even begins. So two very different Firefly vids to begin with, one to praise and one to bury (the series not the vids).

Out of (Classical) Gas byjarrow is the pure expression of love though motion

Secret Asian Man by shati is a pointedly witty criticism of what the show didn't show

I've been thinking about that. And thinking that maybe the problem was more deep-seated than a shortsighted failure to employ East Asian actors in speaking roles. Put that way it sounds as if re-casting the Tams or Inara would have solved the problem but I wonder if it might not have revealed an even more endemic one.

Perhaps the best illustration of what I mean would be the Operative because although played by the Black British Chiwetel Ejiofor the character is *written* and styled as a very stereotypical ninja antagonist. As well as the martial arts fighting skills and samurai sword he embodies all the Zen lack of effect, honorable fanaticism and inscrutable over civilized philosophizing, which is never ultimately a match for the rugged American libertarianism of a Mal or a Han or a Flash.

The thing is the Operative isn't just a one movie villain he's supposed to represent the whole Alliance and all its controlling anti-individualist conformist works. Granted it is a little unfair to use the movie, the show was more nuanced politically-speaking and according to interviews intended to become more so. Yet it remains a thing - if the Asians aren't there because they're the government that government has suspiciously Orientalist tendencies.

Rambling now but speaking of absences there's also the question of why set a Western in space anyway? For the shiny but also for the black. Westerns are famously about those big empty landscapes and space (without aliens) has the advantage of actually being empty instead of filled with other peoples as the real promised land turned out to be. A space Western is a way to have your John Ford cake and eat it, to go to the final frontier and not come back weighed down with colonialist's guilt. Perhaps that’s OK - every story can't be all things to all men, as long as the other stories are being told somewhere and if this one is shiny enough on its own terms?

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... )

Last night I watched the second half of The Lady From Shanghai. It’s such an uncomfortably hot film, all the sweat running off the men’s faces, only Rita keeping her immaculate powdered cool in every close up. As ever, the big production number was the Hall of Mirrors shooting but I’d completely forgotten the aquarium sequence. A better vidder than me would remix Icebound Stream with sharks instead of polar bears in the tanks. There would be shattered mirrors and tropical heat in place of snow globes and arctic landscapes and an infinitely more bitter ending .


( This one has spoilers for the s3/29 arc of DW )

I re-watched Children of Men this weekend, something I’d actually been putting off doing for a while. I loved this movie the first time around but now I have a vid idea for it I was afraid of that getting in the way. Instead of just appreciating it, with half my mind I’d be hanging over it like a vulture looking for bits and chunks of usable footage. Fortunately, it didn’t work out quite like that, I got caught up in the story just like the first time only more observantly (I think I was also worried that it wasn’t going to stand up to my initial impressions but if anything it was better, thematically and visually it’s an incredibly tight piece and the way it uses music is just inspired).

It did make me think about fannishness and how it affects the experience of art. In many ways non-fannish things are simpler, the relationship between you and the creator of the art is quite straightforward. It’s very easy to become immersed in the experience because it’s impersonal, a chance encounter between two strangers, no strings attached. With fannish things the relationship between creator and fans is more like family, a family of adolescent children struggling to become adults in their own right. It’s dynamic, very personal and inherently unstable. Some fandoms, SGA seems to one, have come to an amicable agreement with their source texts, the fans have grown up and left to start their own homes. They call in every so often but are more likely to argue amongst themselves. Others, X-files perhaps, have had such a cataclysmic falling out with their parents that they’re are no longer even on speaking terms. And then there’s BtVS fandom, a large unruly clan famous for constant internecine wars that had just begun to settle down when the Jossfather decided to hold a big drunken re-union in comic form. Fist-fights are already threatening to break out on the lawn.

This vid is totally kicking my arse. Right at the last, which happens to be the first and I know exactly what it needs to do and the kind of things it needs to do it but just can't seem to figure out exactly what. Had an inspiration this morning that almost cracked it only to realise that the colour was all wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. So yay me for noticing something colour-related (for possibly the first time ever) but damn Technicolour for ever tempting the movies out of good old black and white. And then inventing aspect ratios. Bastards.

Tangentially, I just finished reading Walter Murch's In the Blink of an Eye. Murch is/was a film editor who worked on, amongst other projects, The Conversation, American Graffiti, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (parts II and III), The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The English Patient. Fortunately I didn’t realize about the last of these until I’d already ordered the book. That movie took three hours of my life!

Admittedly the problem I had with it was probably down to Minghella who does exactly the same thing of lingering infinitely on every other emotional moment in all his films. I think the killer on the EP was when having already been sitting in the theatre since the late Cretaceous, someone decided it was necessary to show the complete sequence of Ralph Fiennes crossing the Sahara desert. On foot. In slow motion. S-L-O-W M-O-T-I-O-N.

The book is a much more fast-paced experience. I have a fairly cast iron kink for hearing people who know stuff talk about stuff they know that this hit big time. I think I was sold from the first time he made a comparison between film editing and mammalian genome evolution. That makes it sound terribly dry but it really isn’t. A good read.

Coming downstairs after getting the boys to sleep last night I found Neil Jordan's 1986 film Mona Lisa on the TV. Now that's a retelling of 'Beauty and the Beast' I really can appreciate.
( spoilers for the movie )