Dear Festividder 2024
Oct. 5th, 2024 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthrosThank you for making me a vid!
I have a couple things that I put outside the cut tag, because I have two visual triggers:
1) Super fast flashes of lights or colors that have high contrast. Almost all vids are fine for me, but some that intercut scenes for two or three frames at a time can trigger this. It depends on the amount of contrast between the two scenes—stutter cuts are fine between two similar scenes, but not between one dark green and one bright red lit scene, between a nighttime and daytime scene, etc. Strobe lights and strobe effects, full-screen glitch effects, full-screen lighting effects, or fast lightning flashes can also trigger this. The stutter cuts have to be very fast to bother me—think three lightning strikes in a second (dark, light, dark, light, dark, light, dark in one second).
2) Frame rate fuckery—when a show or a vid plays 24 fps footage in 30 fps or vice versa. So, like, when a film puts footage at the wrong frame rate to make it feel awkward or tense, which is super common in action films. (For example, the Bucky/Steve knife fight on the street in Winter Solider or like the entirety of Mad Max Fury Road.) It can also happen by accident, if footage at one frame rate is put into a project with a different frame rate, or sometimes when a show needs to stretch or compress footage and they do it by duplicating every third frame. (You might not be able to see this—many people see this as smooth motion, because our brains are already interpreting stills as motion.)
I'll call these out in the source notes below for any fandom where they're relevant.
Please also feel free to run a sample bythingswithwings. She can explain them with examples if that would be helpful.
The rest of this post is additional details if you're interested!
Types of vids: I really enjoy the diversity of vidding styles and genres at festivids and I look forward to seeing your style! I'm down for: any rating, outside source (including crossovers), still footage, critiques, action, deep character studies, shippy vids, action vids, dance vids, slash, femslash, het, gen, canon pairings, and non-canon pairings.
Things I love: people who put care into the work they do; building communities; history and places being related to people and feelings; queer people; joy; speculative fiction; eating the rich; fighting for justice; people supporting each other.
Music: I am happy to watch vids to all kinds of music! I love vids to instrumentals, to dense lyrics-heavy songs, to hip hop, to fun dance songs, to classics, and to things I've never heard of before. I also like vids to non-music, like spoken word pieces or sound effects. I am fine with dialog in a vid.
That said, I'm hard of hearing in a way that makes it difficult to understand lyrics that are mumbly or obscured by the instrumentation (or, like, 50% of the dialog in a modern action movie). I'd appreciate it if you offered subtitles, especially if you intercut dialog and song lyrics.
I asked for: Backspot (2023) [SAFETY], Der Schwarm | The Swarm (Germany TV 2023), Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper, Fancy Dance (2023) [SAFETY], The Great Canadian Baking Show (TV), Home Movie: The Princess Bride [SAFETY], Lego Video Games [UMBRELLA], Mythbusters (TV), Night Raiders (2021) [SAFETY], This Place (2022) [SAFETY]
Backspot (2023)
Backspot is a indie film about queer competitive cheerleaders Riley (Devery Jacobs from Reservation Dogs) and Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo). This is a queerleading film that's largely about cheerleading and anxiety and perfectionism; Amanda and Riley are already dating at the beginning of the film, so the tension is mostly from their different approaches to cheerleading and different backgrounds affecting their relationship. Also Evan Rachel Wood plays their stern coach (also queer), who Riley idolizes.
Why to watch: Devery Jacobs as a queer cheerleader! A sweet relationship! Women's sports taken seriously!
Contains: Anxiety (mostly expressed as trichotillomania), sports injuries, vomiting (as a result of difficult sports + anxiety, not framed as an eating disorder).
Request details: You could take a bunch of fun angles on this film! The relationship between Riley and Amanda is super sweet, and I appreciate the way Riley has to work on the relationship when cheerleading and her relationship conflict. I also think there's something interesting in this film about the way Riley idolizes Eileen and her intense drive, and how Riley later comes to appreciate Devon and his support for her after their moment in the club. I'd also be down for a vid about cheerleading as a sport; the hard work the cheerleaders do as well as the way that Riley has difficulty with the presentation and femininity that are expectations of the sport.
Trigger notes: The go pro footage that opens the film is borderline for me framerate / shakycam wise—it's fine to vid it but a long sequence with a bunch of it in a row might be a problem.
Der Schwarm | The Swarm
Der Schwarm is a German tv mini series (eight episodes) about mysterious things happening in the ocean, which straddles disaster-film and ensemble-works-together and apocalypse genre tropes. It's internationally produced and multi-lingual; the ensemble is mostly scientists in marine research and environmental protection work all over the world.
Why to watch: A group of people taking science seriously and working hard! Gorgeous locations! The ocean is indeed creepy and mysterious!
Contains: An epidemic, climate change, some disaster-movie type gore, animal harm.
Request details: Okay this series is uneven but the vibes are great. YES I do want to have an ocean disaster movie with menacing crabs and orcas and YES I also want a bunch of scientists to work together and YES I want to think about other forms of intelligence. A vibes-and-shenanigans vid could be super fun here! Or a vid about research and science! Or like be on the whales' side if you want, #teamwhale. I do not care at all about most of the relationships I'm supposed to be invested in, though—Charlie and Douglas, please stop making out, you're getting in the way of this shot of sea ice, thanks.
Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper
Christian Cooper travels around the USA, meeting scientists and conservationists and also eagles. He gets to work with people banding birds to learn about changing ecosystems, travel through caves to see rare birds, and learn about conservation efforts. And also he adds many new birds to his life list over the course of the show!
Why to watch: Christian Cooper is a great host: interested, funny, dedicated, and fascinated by what he sees. The show is also often gorgeous, including interesting landscapes and birds! Three episodes (Hawai'i, NYC, and Puerto Rico) are available on youtube so it's easy to find and watch if you want something soothing but fun to watch.
Contains: some conversations about animal harm (endangered birds, habitat destruction, etc), some Nat Geo-type touristy language about places like Hawai'i.
Request details: Is this a second request about people doing hard work and science together to save an ecosystem? Yes, yes it is, but it's also about Christian in particular—his joy is infectious, and he's super good at connecting to people! I'd love a vid focused on the birds, on conservation, or on Christian bringing those things together.
A note about this canon: Christian Cooper emphasizes "superhero" in the opening because he was a Marvel comics editor; he was one of the first openly gay comics editors at Marvel and he co-created Victoria Montesi, the first explicitly lesbian character in Marvel comics. ("Explicitly" because Mystique and Destiny were coded queer in the 80s.) Anyway that's super cool! Christian Cooper is also the birder who was the target of the Central Park birdwatching incident in 2020, when a white woman called the cops on him, and so it's extra joyful to see him delighting in birding and sharing it with people.
Fancy Dance (2023)
Fancy Dance is an indie film in which Jax (Lily Gladstone) tries to take care of her niece Roki (Isabel DeRoy-Olson) on the Seneca-Cayuga Nation reservation after Roki's mom disappears. CPS sends Roki to the grandparents she barely knows, and Jax has to try to juggle taking care of Roki, pressuring the federal police about missing Nawi, and investigating the disappearance herself.
Why to watch: Lily Gladstone knocks it out of the PARK, wow. They are just great as Jax, who has to step up now that Nawi's missing; Jax is obviously working hard trying to change her life and be there for Roki in a really tough situation. Lily Gladstone called this a coming-of-age story for both Jax and Roki, and that's really true: like, this is a coming-of-age story and a thriller and also a road trip movie.
Contains: themes of missing and murdered indigenous women, grief, racism, brief gun violence, cops
Request details: There are so many interesting things you could do here! A character study of Jax would be really lovely. There's also maybe something fun in the Jax-and-Roki heist film and road trip movie? Feel free to make a vid that doesn't come to a resolution, and just suspends in that last moment of the dance scene. Although I think it's interesting that Frank and Nancy aren't really framed as villains here, I wouldn't want a vid that focused primarily on them.
A note about this canon: parts of this film are in the Cayuga language, and the director, Erica Tremblay, talks about making a film that's partly in a language with only twenty fluent speakers (none of whom are the actors) in this interesting interview. Lily Gladstone also talks about their portrayal of Jax, queerness, and gender in this interview.
The Great Canadian Baking Show
The Canadian spinoff of the Great British Bake Off, with Canadian themes and ingredients (like Montreal bagels. birch bark syrup, seaweed, and saskatoon berries) and some truly stellar groups of interesting, thoughtful, awesome contestants.
Why to watch: We all know the Bake Off model, but the Great Canadian Baking Show is somehow an even sweeter spinoff. The judges are interested and delighted by new flavors, and they don't get defensive when they don't know something. Instead, they're peering into the oven next to the contestants and speaking to them as peers. And are SO MANY good contestants on the show!
Season eight (!!) trailer:
Request details: Soooo I did make a vid for this show several years ago, but I was only able to use the first two seasons. The trailer for season EIGHT just dropped! There have been so many great bakers and so many great running around with cake montages and so many disastrous bakes that weren't in my vid! I love the energy in the tent and the way the contestants help each other and laugh together. I love the delightful and surprising successes, the way sometimes a technical bake just comes out and the baker doesn't even know why. I'd just like something sweet and fun about this show and these great bakers! I also really like the judges being interested in learning and trying new things.
Home Movie: The Princess Bride
Home Movie: The Princess Bride is a version of The Princess Bride made in 2020, while Hollywood wasn't filming, starring many different actors filming in their back yards and houses, on cell phones. It's absolutely nonsensical—ten different people play each character and all the costumes are things like bathrobes and sometimes a cat stands in for a character—but everyone is clearly having a ton of fun. It's a romp!
Why to watch: fun, silly, communities telling stories together! Joy and make believe.
Contains: All the same stuff as The Princess Bride, including forced marriage, torture, ableism
There's no trailer, but here's a sample scene:
Request details: So I missed this in 2020, but when I saw it later it gave me warm feelings about creativity and community. It's about telling silly stories, doing the lines exactly as written because you have them memorized, but doing them while pretending stairs are a cliff and an umbrella is a sword. I have no idea how to vid it narratively because it's hard to tie all the actors playing the same character together, but I think it could be gloriously fun and silly and about people coming together. Also Diego Luna does a STELLAR Inigo Montoya and if they ever do a remake for real he could bring something great to the character.
A note on this canon: this is filmed on vertical cell phones, but the version most people have uploaded to youtube has a background comparison screen. I'd be fine with a vid that used just the cell phone video or with a vid that was in 16:9 or included the comparison screens. Also, if you want to read more about it, there's a Vanity Fair article about the making of the movie where director Jason Reitman talks about how the ethos of the production was that it was more fun to use your imagination (and have a corgi play a giant rat) than to get a fancy sword from a studio.
Lego Video Games [UMBRELLA]
Lego has been licensing video games since 1995! The list of games includes many franchises remade as Lego (Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Lord of the Rings, etc), puzzle games, turn-based strategy in which the characters are classic Lego minifigs, racing games, fighting games, and sandbox games. On the franchise side, they've figured out how to say "I am your father" in a game without dialog, written a disco remix using film dialog and then made a game mechanic to make all the characters dance when it plays, given all the marvel characters custom team up moves, and, for some reason, given Robin an "attract suit" that sucks studs. What they all have in common are Lego bricks—many of the worlds are built using real world Lego brick pieces and logic—and a bunch of silliness.
Why to watch/play: Creativity, building things together, taking things apart, punching flower pots to make Lego bits, putting things back together again, poking loving fun at the Star Wars franchise, every decision about a Robin suit is hilarious, just generally a fun time.
Request details: I love the idea of a vid that combines a bunch of these games into a glorious cascade of minifigs, bricks, and lego bits! I'd love a vid that includes a wide section of all the different ways to play with blocks, a vid that's all franchise games, or a vid that's all standalones: vid the subsection you're most interested in! If you want to do the franchise game side, I'd love a vid that assembled a bunch of franchise game silliness into something funny, sweet, or slapsticky; I listed some favorite bits up above, but in addition every Robin suit is hilarious (Batman: I can glide through the night, Robin: I'm a magnet!), I appreciate the Lego Marvel Super Heroes games for their broad comics-y feel of mixing different Marvel teams together to fight an assortment of villains, I am weak for Star Wars content, and I am charmed by riding around Rohan as various LotR characters. On the standalone side, I think Lego Builder's Journey is a particularly interesting game, since it has a calm vibe that's so different from the other types of Lego games. Lego Bricktales has that big open world vibe that replicates actual brick-building in a fun way! There are many games I haven't played, and franchise games where I've never seen/played the original, but I like the Lego game vibe generally.
A couple do-not-wants here: the Lego Harry Potter game in its entirety, which I can no longer view as fun; parts of Lego Indiana Jones, which replicates what the movies are doing in a way that replicates the racism; Captain Jack Sparrow. (That said, if you want to make a critique vid of the way the franchise games can replicate or emphasize problematic content in the originals, I'd be fine with the Indy content there.)
Mythbusters
A tv show about science and testing things out: can you make a lead balloon? Does a duct tape boat float? What happens if you jump in a falling elevator? Could that thing from that episode of CSI work? What about that Star Wars physics?
Why to watch: Science, silliness, building things, a cool team working together. Testing things from Hollywood and also from classic math class thought experiments.
Contains: varies depending on the episode, but there are WAY too many cops on this show. Also some myths lead to racist or sexist conversations or costuming.
There aren't any good trailers, so how about "is an axe or a gun the best way to kill zombies" instead:
Request details: Mythbusters started out as low-pressure tv for me—I started watching it withthingswithwings when we were making a giant multi vid about Yuletide, because it was something that definitely wasn't going in the vid so I didn't have to think about clipping. We recently started a rewatch of fun bits and have been enjoying it again, so this is my nostalgia request! I have forgotten a lot of the details so it's fun to see myths again, and also it's fun to watch everyone working together to do absolutely ridiculous things like attach rockets to cars or drop cars from helicopters or make boats out of duct tape or frozen newspaper. I enjoy their low-budget, we're-shopping-at-Mr-S's-and-trying-to-find-cheap-used-cars start, and I also enjoy the later season go big or go home moments. I'd enjoy hijinks, falling down, building-things-and-working-together, team appreciation, or a vid about the build team or Adam and Jamie or both. Kari, Scottie, Grant, and Adam are my faves, and I also really appreciate Jamie's intense weirdness.
Night Raiders (2021)
An indie scifi film about an indigenous response to a dystopian post-war setting in which children are trained to be soldiers, mostly focused on Niska (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, who was also in Blood Quantum) and her daughter Waseese (Brooklyn Letexier-Hart) as Niska tries to protect Waseese from the military schools. It's Danis Goulet's first feature-length movie, and she describes it as inspired by Children of Men and by the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, if that gives you a vibe.
Why to watch: Niska is a cool middle-aged action mom! A final heist in which Cree and Māori people steal their children back! Indigenous scifi!
Contains: racism, colonialism, imperialism, fascism; a scifi parallel to residential schools; child harm and endangerment; an epidemic
Request details: I'd love to see something centering on Niska and Waseese, or about the group working together to steal children back! This film is very clearly low-budget so it's not about amazing vistas or complex cgi—the heart of this film is Niska's move from isolation into being part of a community fighting back, and that's what the film nails and what I like about her journey. This dystopia and this government divides people, and they have to work to find community again. Some reviewers were mad that the ending was so small in scale—saving some people but not everyone, a moment of hope rather than an overwhelming success—but honestly that's part of what I liked about it, and I think that the Waseese moment at the end of the movie is interesting and cool and deeply deserves to be vidded.
This Place (2022)
A sweet, complex queer film about Kawenniióhstha (Devery Jacobs) and Malai (Priya Guns) falling in love in Toronto, both of them in the middle of complex relationships with place and home. Malai is Tamil; her father fled Sri Lanka and she's never seen it. Kawenniióhstha is Kanienʼkehá꞉ka and Iranian; she loves her home in Kahnawà:ke and she loves her mom, but she's never met her Iranian father and sees moving to Toronto as a way to try to meet him. Kawenniióhstha and Malai's relationship is sweet and warm, their family drama is complex and interesting, and the sense of trying to find home in this place pervades the whole movie. It's also in four languages because of the character's stories: English, Mohawk, Tamil, French, and Persian.
Why to watch: Lovely relationship! Stellar performance by Devery Jacobs and Priya Guns! A sweet falling in love story where the tension comes from the two leads dealing with home, understanding, and forgiveness for their families!
Contains: parental death, alcoholism, reference to the Kahnawà:ke bridge blockade in the Oka Crisis, reference to the Sri Lanka Civil War
Request details: Do my requests include two Devery Jacobs queer films? Yes, yes they do. Backspot is more of a sports film with a queer relationship in it, and This Place is more of a falling in love story with a complex backdrop. I'd love a ship vid here! Or a vid about finding forgiveness and understanding for the pressures your parents were under, and coming to terms with those choices. This is so much a film about community and identity and I think there are really interesting things to do there!
I have a couple things that I put outside the cut tag, because I have two visual triggers:
1) Super fast flashes of lights or colors that have high contrast. Almost all vids are fine for me, but some that intercut scenes for two or three frames at a time can trigger this. It depends on the amount of contrast between the two scenes—stutter cuts are fine between two similar scenes, but not between one dark green and one bright red lit scene, between a nighttime and daytime scene, etc. Strobe lights and strobe effects, full-screen glitch effects, full-screen lighting effects, or fast lightning flashes can also trigger this. The stutter cuts have to be very fast to bother me—think three lightning strikes in a second (dark, light, dark, light, dark, light, dark in one second).
2) Frame rate fuckery—when a show or a vid plays 24 fps footage in 30 fps or vice versa. So, like, when a film puts footage at the wrong frame rate to make it feel awkward or tense, which is super common in action films. (For example, the Bucky/Steve knife fight on the street in Winter Solider or like the entirety of Mad Max Fury Road.) It can also happen by accident, if footage at one frame rate is put into a project with a different frame rate, or sometimes when a show needs to stretch or compress footage and they do it by duplicating every third frame. (You might not be able to see this—many people see this as smooth motion, because our brains are already interpreting stills as motion.)
I'll call these out in the source notes below for any fandom where they're relevant.
Please also feel free to run a sample by
thingswithwings. She can explain them with examples if that would be helpful.The rest of this post is additional details if you're interested!
Types of vids: I really enjoy the diversity of vidding styles and genres at festivids and I look forward to seeing your style! I'm down for: any rating, outside source (including crossovers), still footage, critiques, action, deep character studies, shippy vids, action vids, dance vids, slash, femslash, het, gen, canon pairings, and non-canon pairings.
Things I love: people who put care into the work they do; building communities; history and places being related to people and feelings; queer people; joy; speculative fiction; eating the rich; fighting for justice; people supporting each other.
Music: I am happy to watch vids to all kinds of music! I love vids to instrumentals, to dense lyrics-heavy songs, to hip hop, to fun dance songs, to classics, and to things I've never heard of before. I also like vids to non-music, like spoken word pieces or sound effects. I am fine with dialog in a vid.
That said, I'm hard of hearing in a way that makes it difficult to understand lyrics that are mumbly or obscured by the instrumentation (or, like, 50% of the dialog in a modern action movie). I'd appreciate it if you offered subtitles, especially if you intercut dialog and song lyrics.
I asked for: Backspot (2023) [SAFETY], Der Schwarm | The Swarm (Germany TV 2023), Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper, Fancy Dance (2023) [SAFETY], The Great Canadian Baking Show (TV), Home Movie: The Princess Bride [SAFETY], Lego Video Games [UMBRELLA], Mythbusters (TV), Night Raiders (2021) [SAFETY], This Place (2022) [SAFETY]
Backspot (2023)
Backspot is a indie film about queer competitive cheerleaders Riley (Devery Jacobs from Reservation Dogs) and Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo). This is a queerleading film that's largely about cheerleading and anxiety and perfectionism; Amanda and Riley are already dating at the beginning of the film, so the tension is mostly from their different approaches to cheerleading and different backgrounds affecting their relationship. Also Evan Rachel Wood plays their stern coach (also queer), who Riley idolizes.
Why to watch: Devery Jacobs as a queer cheerleader! A sweet relationship! Women's sports taken seriously!
Contains: Anxiety (mostly expressed as trichotillomania), sports injuries, vomiting (as a result of difficult sports + anxiety, not framed as an eating disorder).
Request details: You could take a bunch of fun angles on this film! The relationship between Riley and Amanda is super sweet, and I appreciate the way Riley has to work on the relationship when cheerleading and her relationship conflict. I also think there's something interesting in this film about the way Riley idolizes Eileen and her intense drive, and how Riley later comes to appreciate Devon and his support for her after their moment in the club. I'd also be down for a vid about cheerleading as a sport; the hard work the cheerleaders do as well as the way that Riley has difficulty with the presentation and femininity that are expectations of the sport.
Trigger notes: The go pro footage that opens the film is borderline for me framerate / shakycam wise—it's fine to vid it but a long sequence with a bunch of it in a row might be a problem.
Der Schwarm | The Swarm
Der Schwarm is a German tv mini series (eight episodes) about mysterious things happening in the ocean, which straddles disaster-film and ensemble-works-together and apocalypse genre tropes. It's internationally produced and multi-lingual; the ensemble is mostly scientists in marine research and environmental protection work all over the world.
Why to watch: A group of people taking science seriously and working hard! Gorgeous locations! The ocean is indeed creepy and mysterious!
Contains: An epidemic, climate change, some disaster-movie type gore, animal harm.
Request details: Okay this series is uneven but the vibes are great. YES I do want to have an ocean disaster movie with menacing crabs and orcas and YES I also want a bunch of scientists to work together and YES I want to think about other forms of intelligence. A vibes-and-shenanigans vid could be super fun here! Or a vid about research and science! Or like be on the whales' side if you want, #teamwhale. I do not care at all about most of the relationships I'm supposed to be invested in, though—Charlie and Douglas, please stop making out, you're getting in the way of this shot of sea ice, thanks.
Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper
Christian Cooper travels around the USA, meeting scientists and conservationists and also eagles. He gets to work with people banding birds to learn about changing ecosystems, travel through caves to see rare birds, and learn about conservation efforts. And also he adds many new birds to his life list over the course of the show!
Why to watch: Christian Cooper is a great host: interested, funny, dedicated, and fascinated by what he sees. The show is also often gorgeous, including interesting landscapes and birds! Three episodes (Hawai'i, NYC, and Puerto Rico) are available on youtube so it's easy to find and watch if you want something soothing but fun to watch.
Contains: some conversations about animal harm (endangered birds, habitat destruction, etc), some Nat Geo-type touristy language about places like Hawai'i.
Request details: Is this a second request about people doing hard work and science together to save an ecosystem? Yes, yes it is, but it's also about Christian in particular—his joy is infectious, and he's super good at connecting to people! I'd love a vid focused on the birds, on conservation, or on Christian bringing those things together.
A note about this canon: Christian Cooper emphasizes "superhero" in the opening because he was a Marvel comics editor; he was one of the first openly gay comics editors at Marvel and he co-created Victoria Montesi, the first explicitly lesbian character in Marvel comics. ("Explicitly" because Mystique and Destiny were coded queer in the 80s.) Anyway that's super cool! Christian Cooper is also the birder who was the target of the Central Park birdwatching incident in 2020, when a white woman called the cops on him, and so it's extra joyful to see him delighting in birding and sharing it with people.
Fancy Dance (2023)
Fancy Dance is an indie film in which Jax (Lily Gladstone) tries to take care of her niece Roki (Isabel DeRoy-Olson) on the Seneca-Cayuga Nation reservation after Roki's mom disappears. CPS sends Roki to the grandparents she barely knows, and Jax has to try to juggle taking care of Roki, pressuring the federal police about missing Nawi, and investigating the disappearance herself.
Why to watch: Lily Gladstone knocks it out of the PARK, wow. They are just great as Jax, who has to step up now that Nawi's missing; Jax is obviously working hard trying to change her life and be there for Roki in a really tough situation. Lily Gladstone called this a coming-of-age story for both Jax and Roki, and that's really true: like, this is a coming-of-age story and a thriller and also a road trip movie.
Contains: themes of missing and murdered indigenous women, grief, racism, brief gun violence, cops
Request details: There are so many interesting things you could do here! A character study of Jax would be really lovely. There's also maybe something fun in the Jax-and-Roki heist film and road trip movie? Feel free to make a vid that doesn't come to a resolution, and just suspends in that last moment of the dance scene. Although I think it's interesting that Frank and Nancy aren't really framed as villains here, I wouldn't want a vid that focused primarily on them.
A note about this canon: parts of this film are in the Cayuga language, and the director, Erica Tremblay, talks about making a film that's partly in a language with only twenty fluent speakers (none of whom are the actors) in this interesting interview. Lily Gladstone also talks about their portrayal of Jax, queerness, and gender in this interview.
The Great Canadian Baking Show
The Canadian spinoff of the Great British Bake Off, with Canadian themes and ingredients (like Montreal bagels. birch bark syrup, seaweed, and saskatoon berries) and some truly stellar groups of interesting, thoughtful, awesome contestants.
Why to watch: We all know the Bake Off model, but the Great Canadian Baking Show is somehow an even sweeter spinoff. The judges are interested and delighted by new flavors, and they don't get defensive when they don't know something. Instead, they're peering into the oven next to the contestants and speaking to them as peers. And are SO MANY good contestants on the show!
Season eight (!!) trailer:
Request details: Soooo I did make a vid for this show several years ago, but I was only able to use the first two seasons. The trailer for season EIGHT just dropped! There have been so many great bakers and so many great running around with cake montages and so many disastrous bakes that weren't in my vid! I love the energy in the tent and the way the contestants help each other and laugh together. I love the delightful and surprising successes, the way sometimes a technical bake just comes out and the baker doesn't even know why. I'd just like something sweet and fun about this show and these great bakers! I also really like the judges being interested in learning and trying new things.
Home Movie: The Princess Bride
Home Movie: The Princess Bride is a version of The Princess Bride made in 2020, while Hollywood wasn't filming, starring many different actors filming in their back yards and houses, on cell phones. It's absolutely nonsensical—ten different people play each character and all the costumes are things like bathrobes and sometimes a cat stands in for a character—but everyone is clearly having a ton of fun. It's a romp!
Why to watch: fun, silly, communities telling stories together! Joy and make believe.
Contains: All the same stuff as The Princess Bride, including forced marriage, torture, ableism
There's no trailer, but here's a sample scene:
Request details: So I missed this in 2020, but when I saw it later it gave me warm feelings about creativity and community. It's about telling silly stories, doing the lines exactly as written because you have them memorized, but doing them while pretending stairs are a cliff and an umbrella is a sword. I have no idea how to vid it narratively because it's hard to tie all the actors playing the same character together, but I think it could be gloriously fun and silly and about people coming together. Also Diego Luna does a STELLAR Inigo Montoya and if they ever do a remake for real he could bring something great to the character.
A note on this canon: this is filmed on vertical cell phones, but the version most people have uploaded to youtube has a background comparison screen. I'd be fine with a vid that used just the cell phone video or with a vid that was in 16:9 or included the comparison screens. Also, if you want to read more about it, there's a Vanity Fair article about the making of the movie where director Jason Reitman talks about how the ethos of the production was that it was more fun to use your imagination (and have a corgi play a giant rat) than to get a fancy sword from a studio.
Lego Video Games [UMBRELLA]
Lego has been licensing video games since 1995! The list of games includes many franchises remade as Lego (Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Lord of the Rings, etc), puzzle games, turn-based strategy in which the characters are classic Lego minifigs, racing games, fighting games, and sandbox games. On the franchise side, they've figured out how to say "I am your father" in a game without dialog, written a disco remix using film dialog and then made a game mechanic to make all the characters dance when it plays, given all the marvel characters custom team up moves, and, for some reason, given Robin an "attract suit" that sucks studs. What they all have in common are Lego bricks—many of the worlds are built using real world Lego brick pieces and logic—and a bunch of silliness.
Why to watch/play: Creativity, building things together, taking things apart, punching flower pots to make Lego bits, putting things back together again, poking loving fun at the Star Wars franchise, every decision about a Robin suit is hilarious, just generally a fun time.
Request details: I love the idea of a vid that combines a bunch of these games into a glorious cascade of minifigs, bricks, and lego bits! I'd love a vid that includes a wide section of all the different ways to play with blocks, a vid that's all franchise games, or a vid that's all standalones: vid the subsection you're most interested in! If you want to do the franchise game side, I'd love a vid that assembled a bunch of franchise game silliness into something funny, sweet, or slapsticky; I listed some favorite bits up above, but in addition every Robin suit is hilarious (Batman: I can glide through the night, Robin: I'm a magnet!), I appreciate the Lego Marvel Super Heroes games for their broad comics-y feel of mixing different Marvel teams together to fight an assortment of villains, I am weak for Star Wars content, and I am charmed by riding around Rohan as various LotR characters. On the standalone side, I think Lego Builder's Journey is a particularly interesting game, since it has a calm vibe that's so different from the other types of Lego games. Lego Bricktales has that big open world vibe that replicates actual brick-building in a fun way! There are many games I haven't played, and franchise games where I've never seen/played the original, but I like the Lego game vibe generally.
A couple do-not-wants here: the Lego Harry Potter game in its entirety, which I can no longer view as fun; parts of Lego Indiana Jones, which replicates what the movies are doing in a way that replicates the racism; Captain Jack Sparrow. (That said, if you want to make a critique vid of the way the franchise games can replicate or emphasize problematic content in the originals, I'd be fine with the Indy content there.)
Mythbusters
A tv show about science and testing things out: can you make a lead balloon? Does a duct tape boat float? What happens if you jump in a falling elevator? Could that thing from that episode of CSI work? What about that Star Wars physics?
Why to watch: Science, silliness, building things, a cool team working together. Testing things from Hollywood and also from classic math class thought experiments.
Contains: varies depending on the episode, but there are WAY too many cops on this show. Also some myths lead to racist or sexist conversations or costuming.
There aren't any good trailers, so how about "is an axe or a gun the best way to kill zombies" instead:
Request details: Mythbusters started out as low-pressure tv for me—I started watching it with
thingswithwings when we were making a giant multi vid about Yuletide, because it was something that definitely wasn't going in the vid so I didn't have to think about clipping. We recently started a rewatch of fun bits and have been enjoying it again, so this is my nostalgia request! I have forgotten a lot of the details so it's fun to see myths again, and also it's fun to watch everyone working together to do absolutely ridiculous things like attach rockets to cars or drop cars from helicopters or make boats out of duct tape or frozen newspaper. I enjoy their low-budget, we're-shopping-at-Mr-S's-and-trying-to-find-cheap-used-cars start, and I also enjoy the later season go big or go home moments. I'd enjoy hijinks, falling down, building-things-and-working-together, team appreciation, or a vid about the build team or Adam and Jamie or both. Kari, Scottie, Grant, and Adam are my faves, and I also really appreciate Jamie's intense weirdness.Night Raiders (2021)
An indie scifi film about an indigenous response to a dystopian post-war setting in which children are trained to be soldiers, mostly focused on Niska (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, who was also in Blood Quantum) and her daughter Waseese (Brooklyn Letexier-Hart) as Niska tries to protect Waseese from the military schools. It's Danis Goulet's first feature-length movie, and she describes it as inspired by Children of Men and by the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, if that gives you a vibe.
Why to watch: Niska is a cool middle-aged action mom! A final heist in which Cree and Māori people steal their children back! Indigenous scifi!
Contains: racism, colonialism, imperialism, fascism; a scifi parallel to residential schools; child harm and endangerment; an epidemic
Request details: I'd love to see something centering on Niska and Waseese, or about the group working together to steal children back! This film is very clearly low-budget so it's not about amazing vistas or complex cgi—the heart of this film is Niska's move from isolation into being part of a community fighting back, and that's what the film nails and what I like about her journey. This dystopia and this government divides people, and they have to work to find community again. Some reviewers were mad that the ending was so small in scale—saving some people but not everyone, a moment of hope rather than an overwhelming success—but honestly that's part of what I liked about it, and I think that the Waseese moment at the end of the movie is interesting and cool and deeply deserves to be vidded.
This Place (2022)
A sweet, complex queer film about Kawenniióhstha (Devery Jacobs) and Malai (Priya Guns) falling in love in Toronto, both of them in the middle of complex relationships with place and home. Malai is Tamil; her father fled Sri Lanka and she's never seen it. Kawenniióhstha is Kanienʼkehá꞉ka and Iranian; she loves her home in Kahnawà:ke and she loves her mom, but she's never met her Iranian father and sees moving to Toronto as a way to try to meet him. Kawenniióhstha and Malai's relationship is sweet and warm, their family drama is complex and interesting, and the sense of trying to find home in this place pervades the whole movie. It's also in four languages because of the character's stories: English, Mohawk, Tamil, French, and Persian.
Why to watch: Lovely relationship! Stellar performance by Devery Jacobs and Priya Guns! A sweet falling in love story where the tension comes from the two leads dealing with home, understanding, and forgiveness for their families!
Contains: parental death, alcoholism, reference to the Kahnawà:ke bridge blockade in the Oka Crisis, reference to the Sri Lanka Civil War
Request details: Do my requests include two Devery Jacobs queer films? Yes, yes they do. Backspot is more of a sports film with a queer relationship in it, and This Place is more of a falling in love story with a complex backdrop. I'd love a ship vid here! Or a vid about finding forgiveness and understanding for the pressures your parents were under, and coming to terms with those choices. This is so much a film about community and identity and I think there are really interesting things to do there!
