The problem with becoming a vidding fan, as an obsessive person, is that there will always be more to watch. I seriously have a SPREADSHEET of vids to catch up on. Thanks to par_avion, veni_vidi_vids is now compiling recs via delicious, which is invaluable for keeping tabs on the buzz. I also have charmax's A-Z of women-centric vids, geekturnedvamp's girls girls girls playlist, and laurashapiro's IBARW vids of color list queued up to go through. But I'm about to be deluged with vividcon, so this is it for my back-catalogue at the moment. Except I do still have ambitions of making the rounds of Torchwood (as a preview, run don't walk to fan_eunice's Papa Don't Preach for the boys and sapote3's The Test for the girls). NB: fanworksfinder is being buggy, so I haven't ported over any of this recent spate of reviews.


3 newish vids

vidder(s): giandujakiss
title: Origin Stories
music: "Coffee" by Aesop Rock featuring John Darnielle
fandom: BtVS/Angel (Robin, Nikki, Kendra, Dana, Spike)
availability: download, imeem
summary: It's Nikki Wood's fucking coat.
comments: What I'd like to comment on with respect to this vid, especially with my very limited knowledge of the source, is the comment(ary) itself. Its entire trajectory -- the genesis of the vid in the Sweet Charity auction, the collaborative creative process, the pointed intervention within larger meta debates on race, the overwhelming feedback from its audience, the word-of-mouth ripples, and the vidder and viddee's retrospective analysis/response posts (linked) -- is an exemplar of what vidding at its best can be and do as a community-based political art form.

vidder(s): laurashapiro
title: Sawatte Kawatte (Touch! Change!)
music: Spitz [J-pop]
focus: Hiro/Ando
availability: download, imeem
summary: Hiro needs Ando.
comments: The POV in this vid is true genius. It looks, and sounds, and TASTES like Hiro's remarkable charm and exuberance, without skirting the darkness that he faces (somehow without dimming his buoyancy). Its narrative is plenty strong enough to sustain the unintelligible language, and throughout these two (the BEST of the show itself) are just impossibly loving and lovable.

vidder(s): charmax
title: Angel with an Attitude
music: The Ditty Bops
fandom: Pushing Daisies (Chuck)
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: Being born again is fun.
comments: It's impossible not to smile while watching this, yet it's more complex than many lighthearted vids. A virtuosic harmony between show, song, and editing, with so many delightful visual links and transitions. I especially love the dead folks sequence leading into the car chase bridge. And it seems it's an effective recruiter vid!


3 oldish vids

vidder(s): renenet
title: Man in Motion
music: John Parr, "St. Elmo's Fire"
fandom: The Matrix trilogy
availability: download (xvid), imeem
summary: Neo is Jesus, get it?
comments: I had the pleasure of watching this for the first time in the presence of the vidder, and discussing it with her. Out of the gajillion vids I've been watching lately, it's one of the few that have truly gotten under my skin, that I've wanted to see many times, that I'm dying to TEACH. Because if there ever were a metaphor for fan power in the age of convergence, it's The Matrix, right? But The Matrix has always troubled me (or at least, I learned at school that it's troubling) because of its paradigm of disembodiment, common to so much cyber-utopianism. These battles will NOT be fought only in the virtual video-game world, but in the ravaged material dystopia. And of course, as a corporate franchise, The Matrix is selling back to us our fantasies of liberation. So I watched this vid for the first time (not knowing it's officially dubbed a LKBV) and want: "YES, THIS is the critique I've always wanted!" Committing unrelentingly to schmoopy 80s cliche, it exposes the facile, derivative emptiness of this narrative. But, precisely through wallowing in this romanticism, it's creating a subject position that's incredibly complex (more so than the trilogy itself) -- because what it ALSO captures is how much we DO believe this fantasy (both its slash dimension and its utopian dimension), giving us (yes, even me) an occasion to revel in it shamelessly. That, to me, is the most evolved inflection of the Lord King Bad Vid mode.

vidder(s): marycrawford
title: Improper Dancing
music: Electric Six
fandom: multi (Club Vivid)
availability: download, imeem
summary: Just don't scare the horses.
comments: I don't think we can ever have too many multifandom dancevids. What sets this one apart is the unrivaled diversity of the sources used. Fantastic dancing (and other more unexpected) parallels make for a wondrous celebration of how the exuberant, ridiculous, "improper" moments are often the ones that fans cherish the most.

vidder(s): kiki_miserychic
title: The Girl or the Weapon
music: Michael Andrews
fandom: Firefly/Serenity
availability: download, imeem
summary: Who we gonna find in there when she wakes up? The girl? Or the weapon?
comments: This magnificent experimental vid to an instrumental score tells River's story in colors, movement, and impressions. Its psychedelic style suggests one rendering of the synthetic and mind-bending way River herself perceives the world. [(Written months ago --->) Rapidly becoming one of my very favorite vidders, though I've managed to review her work only sporadically.]


3 cyborgean Sarah Connor Chronicles vids

vidder(s): kiki_miserychic
title: Does Cameron Dream of Electric Sheep?
music: "Black Gold Blues" from Laura Veirs
availability: download (divx), imeem
summary: See title.
comments: It's fantastic how alien this vid feels -- quite unfamiliar and jarring in a way that takes you to Cameron. The fast cutting is remarkable. And it's balanced by the clarity of the vid's overarching structure. The trajectory from Cameron as a machine and like a machine to her burgeoning, uneasy humanity in her relationships with humans was palpable (I LOVE THE SARAH/CAMERON PART). That's something I'm really missing in the show: a sense of her interiority and development. Culminating in the bizarre and haunting aria of the ending.

vidder(s): halcyon_shift
title: Human Behavior
music: Bjork
availability: download (divx)
summary: There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic.
comments: This vid's powerful opening sequence intercuts Cameron's performance of "human behavior" with the grisly pragmatism of flesh that is her reality. In a loose POV that encompasses both her meticulous observation of the Connor family and the way they see her, it unfolds its rhetorical strategy of juxtaposition in unexpected directions. I read it as a reflection on the staggering violence that humans inflict on each other in the name of their emotions (a genocidal drive of which Cameron is a by-product) -- ultimately no more humane than the entirely entirely unsentimental intersubjectivity that they find so unsettling in Cameron. Less about Cameron learning feelings than about humans learning to be killing machines. With awesome jump cuts!

vidder(s): serrico
title: Paris Is Burning
music: St. Vincent
availability: download (wmv)
summary: We are dancing a black waltz.
comments: Waltzing with machines is the best way I can describe this. And the humans are losing that chess game. In the tradition of vids that render violence as dance, this portrait of a war seductively traces the relentlessness of a technological enemy. The theme is perfectly captured in its second shot of the world as the Terminator's snow globe. Check out 1:27-1:28, but I'm probably most gleeful about the flourish of data from 1:48-1:58.


In a perfect world, I would have had time to write something about all the following vids as well. In this one, I'm just going to rec them and leave it at that.

3 instant classics (metavids)
Plenty of smart folks have had a LOT to say about these.

vidder(s): thingswithwings
title: The Glass
music: Angelo Badalamenti, from A Very Long Engagement (instrumental)
focus: multifandom slash (boy and girl varieties)
availability: download (temporary), imeem
summary: A long time ago, Henry Jenkins wrote an article that had a line in it that got deservedly famous in fandom. He said, of Kirk and Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, that slash is what happens when you take away the glass. And even though that article is mostly obsolete nowadays, that line still resonates with me. So I made a vid about it.

vidder(s): giandujakiss
title: Hourglass
music: Squeeze
focus: Groundhog Day, the trope
availability: download, imeem
summary: All this has happened before and will happen again. [don't miss the linked post with notes]

vidder(s): ash48
title: Channel Hopping
music: various TV Theme tunes
focus: Supernatural
availability: download (filefront), YouTube
summary: The Boys watch TV.


3 politically engaged Heroes vids
I'm probably a bad person for not reviewing these, but I'm becoming increasingly sensitized to the many things that annoy me about Heroes, and I just can't spend any more time with it.

vidder(s): shati
title: Persona
music: Blue Man Group
focus: (Bob) The Haitian
availability: download, imeem
summary: Every morning I put it on / I walk outside and I am gone

vidder(s): lcsbanana
title: Jack, or, Adventures in Reading Against the Text
music: The Nields
focus: Niki, Claire, Monica
availability: download (scroll down)
summary: A fanvid for the show they should have made.

vidder(s): kuwdora
title: Grace Cathedral Hill
music: The Decemberists
focus: Maya
availability: download, imeem
summary: I emphasize with Maya and her struggle and her confusion and wish that things were different, or could have been different for her.


3 Niki/Jessica vids
I think it's NEAT that there are THREE vids about the dimension of Heroes that pushes my buttons in a GOOD way -- the problem of self-identity mediated by mirrors, the problem of representing the split subject onscreen, and of course, the doppelcest.

vidder(s): charmax
title: The Wreckoning
music: BoomKat
availability: download, imeem, youtube
summary: Jessica pov. It's all about the jekyll & Hyde, the love/hate, the sub/dom, the protector/protected relationship of Niki and Jessica.

vidder(s): martoufmarty
title: Wasted
music: And One
availability: download (not currently available), imeem
summary: The song is about plastic surgery. Michele thinks I'm crazy for thinking that it fit Nikki/Jessica. To me, it fits. Perfectly. There's just something about it.

vidder(s): fahrbotdrusilla
title: Only
music: Nine Inch Nails
availability: download (wmv), imeem
summary: Niki thinks she's going insane.

It's a disgrace that I haven't been reviewing femslash vids more concertedly. Please accept the following bonus rec as a gesture of contrition:

vidder(s): charmax
title: I'm Your Man
music: Patricia O Callaghan
focus: hot girls everywhere
availability: download, imeem, youtube
summary: A celebration of media clichés.


BREAKING: I just officially got into VVC!!!!!!!!!!!