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Dear Festividder 2016
This year with "sales pitch" summaries and screen shots, inspired by a friend!
Dear Festividder and anyone who might like to make a treat:
QUEEN MARGOT
Sales pitch: Gorgeous costumes! Intricate court politics! Passionate sex like only the French can do! Strife between Catholics and Protestants! A night of stunning bloodshed! Sibling-sibling and mother-son incest, if that's your thing! Isabelle Adjani, Pascal Greggory, Vincent Perez, and even baby Thomas Kretschmann! A Patrice Chereau film, based on the Alexandre Dumas novel.
Vid request: This movie has such beautiful, rich imagery that it just begs for vidding. Anything you make will make me happy, including a whirlwind portrait of the color and blood and passion and perversion and deviousness. Personal favorite parts are the massacre, the hatred-to-love story between La Mole and Coconnas, and Anjou's face. Plus, generally, all the homoerotic undercurrents.
FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE
Sales pitch: More gorgeous costumes! M/M pining! Epic love triangle where one man and one woman both want the other man, intertwined with early- to mid-20th-century Chinese history! Leslie Cheung's tormented face, usually under women's makeup! Opera and opium and voyeurism and betrayal! Not sure if it's a selling point or a warning for you that the main character is forced from a young age to think of himself as a woman. Did I mention Gong Li is in it? A Chen Kaige film, based on the Lillian Lee novel.
Caveats: Uh, basically everything terrible that can happen to a character happens to these characters. Yikes, I'd forgotten how miserable and mistreated everyone is in this movie.
Vid request: I just, I have liked this movie a lot for a long time, and having a vid for it would be so lovely, whatever form it takes. Immersion in the aesthetics, from the opera costumes to the framing of individual shots to the relentless close-ups on anguished faces? Focus on Douzi/Dieyi's and Shitou/Xiaolou's heart-wrenching disaster of a relationship? Summary of the plot and/or how life imitates art? Non-chronological focus on symbols, repeated images and the concept of fate? Have at it.
Oh, worth mentioning that, although it's probably not desirable to skip their childhoods entirely in a vid, I'm more interested in Dieyi and Xiaolou as adults.
Aaah, why did Xiaolou have to be straight? Why can't the three of them solve their issues with polyamory?
Bonus gif:
STRANGER BY THE LAKE
Sales pitch: Erotic gay thriller set on a lakeside beach in France, with a mustachioed object of obsession who looks like he just stepped out of the early '80s (intentional connotations, reviewers say) and a side character who is basically the Rodney McKay to the protagonist's John Sheppard. (Graphic) sex, murder, philosophy.
Vid request: A vid for this movie would be wonderful. It's so intense—the intertwining of sex and death; the attraction and repulsion Franck feels toward Michel; the tension between physical and emotional connection embodied by Michel and Henri, respectively; the questions about why Franck moves in on Michel and protects him and pursues him despite the clear danger. The visual focus on the setting and the male bodies. You really can't go wrong, whatever angle you want to take.
GODS & MONSTERS
"You could be my second monster."
Sales pitch: Do you like the movies Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein? Fictionalized biopics of their director and the buff gardener he befriends decades later? Do you like dapper gentlemen in 1950s California? Tragic gay love stories? Flashbacks to WWI? A man whose brain starts to mix all of the above together after a stroke? Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser and Lynn Redgrave? Then this movie is for you, and your vid is for me!
Vid request: I would love something that shows the intermingling of the story of Frankenstein's monster, the process of making the movie, the war, and Whale and Boone's relationship, thematically and visually, which the movie itself does well but of course in a more spread-out way. The second half of the film is the more powerful, to me: Boone baring himself, Whale confessing what he wants Boone to do, the gas mask, the dreams, the monster sketch, Boone walking like Karloff. Would be cool whether you wanted to focus on Whale's perspective or Boone's or do more of a third-person thing. Less thrilled with Whale as a "dirty old man" or that annoying interviewer kid, but I'm sure you can make me care if it's important to the story you want to tell.
THE GOLEM AND THE JINNI
Sales pitch: A woman made of clay meets a man made of fire in turn-of-the-20th-century New York. There's challah baking and desert flashbacks and sexy seduction and supernatural possession, and, just in time for Purim, evil viziers. Beautiful, comforting prose.
Vid request: I read this book earlier this year and still can't talk about it without drawing little hearts around it. One of the things I loved about reading it was its vibrant setting, its creation of an atmosphere I wanted to wrap around myself forever. I think what I'm hoping for in a vid is a sort of mood piece, where you feel like you're in this magical 1900-ish Lower East Side or Central Park, where things are—as much as I make fun of it in movies—teal and gold like the cover of the book. (The closest movies I can think of for visual inspiration of the city are Gangs of New York or Once Upon a Time in New York, but I'm sure there's lots more out there I just haven't seen. The books Forever and Winter's Tale, which held the same sort of early-NY magic, aren't going to be much help, alas.)
And maybe you will give an impression of this large-boned Eastern European woman and this elegant Arab man (I mean, I don't expect our imaginations of Chava and Ahmad to be the same, so I look forward to whomever you choose for your fan cast, if you fan cast them). Maybe there will be a bakery and a metalworker's forge, or a desert and a temple, or Jewish and Syrian immigrant communities, or impressions of seduction or murder or enslavement or the clash between subservience/suppression and dominance/recklessness, or maybe there are other aspects of the story you want to highlight, or nothing so complex because it all seems very intimidating. Whatever you make, it's going to be wonderful.
I just ask that you please be sensitive if you choose to cast Schaalman or Schall. No Hollywood stereotypes of giant-eyebrowed, pointy-eared, scheming Jews. Thank you. <3
WILDLIKE
Sales pitch: Ella Purnell, who played young Maleficent! Bruce Greenwood, who played Christopher Pike in the Star Trek: Reboot movies and was in lots of other stuff! Alaskan landscapes from Juneau to Denali! A sort of hurt/comfort story starting with—content warning—a creepy and abusive uncle, and progressing to the unlikely connection between a teenage girl and a gruff older backpacker!
Vid request: I would be so happy to have a vid of this movie that just told the story, focusing on Mackenzie and René's developing relationship and taking advantage of the visual splendor of the Alaskan setting. FWIW, the emotional high point of the movie for me was René's protectiveness once he found out what really happened with Kenzie and her uncle, specifically when René bundled her back into the ferry cabin. I like to think he made good use of that bear spray when he made that stop in Juneau. :)
Really hope you aren't looking for specific song recommendations, heh. Whatever you choose will be the right music. If you're at sea, though, here are some notes on preferences. I'm also open to spoken-word and other nontraditional forms of audio, but if you mix dialogue with music, please make the dialogue very clear/easily audible.
Of course, make whatever vid appeals to you, regardless of whether I've asked for it. We've been matched because we both like something, so whatever you choose to do with that should be wonderful. Hopefully you have an idea you'd like to pursue.
Dear Festividder and anyone who might like to make a treat:
QUEEN MARGOT
Sales pitch: Gorgeous costumes! Intricate court politics! Passionate sex like only the French can do! Strife between Catholics and Protestants! A night of stunning bloodshed! Sibling-sibling and mother-son incest, if that's your thing! Isabelle Adjani, Pascal Greggory, Vincent Perez, and even baby Thomas Kretschmann! A Patrice Chereau film, based on the Alexandre Dumas novel.
Vid request: This movie has such beautiful, rich imagery that it just begs for vidding. Anything you make will make me happy, including a whirlwind portrait of the color and blood and passion and perversion and deviousness. Personal favorite parts are the massacre, the hatred-to-love story between La Mole and Coconnas, and Anjou's face. Plus, generally, all the homoerotic undercurrents.
FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE
Sales pitch: More gorgeous costumes! M/M pining! Epic love triangle where one man and one woman both want the other man, intertwined with early- to mid-20th-century Chinese history! Leslie Cheung's tormented face, usually under women's makeup! Opera and opium and voyeurism and betrayal! Not sure if it's a selling point or a warning for you that the main character is forced from a young age to think of himself as a woman. Did I mention Gong Li is in it? A Chen Kaige film, based on the Lillian Lee novel.
Caveats: Uh, basically everything terrible that can happen to a character happens to these characters. Yikes, I'd forgotten how miserable and mistreated everyone is in this movie.
Vid request: I just, I have liked this movie a lot for a long time, and having a vid for it would be so lovely, whatever form it takes. Immersion in the aesthetics, from the opera costumes to the framing of individual shots to the relentless close-ups on anguished faces? Focus on Douzi/Dieyi's and Shitou/Xiaolou's heart-wrenching disaster of a relationship? Summary of the plot and/or how life imitates art? Non-chronological focus on symbols, repeated images and the concept of fate? Have at it.
Oh, worth mentioning that, although it's probably not desirable to skip their childhoods entirely in a vid, I'm more interested in Dieyi and Xiaolou as adults.
Aaah, why did Xiaolou have to be straight? Why can't the three of them solve their issues with polyamory?
Bonus gif:
STRANGER BY THE LAKE
Sales pitch: Erotic gay thriller set on a lakeside beach in France, with a mustachioed object of obsession who looks like he just stepped out of the early '80s (intentional connotations, reviewers say) and a side character who is basically the Rodney McKay to the protagonist's John Sheppard. (Graphic) sex, murder, philosophy.
Vid request: A vid for this movie would be wonderful. It's so intense—the intertwining of sex and death; the attraction and repulsion Franck feels toward Michel; the tension between physical and emotional connection embodied by Michel and Henri, respectively; the questions about why Franck moves in on Michel and protects him and pursues him despite the clear danger. The visual focus on the setting and the male bodies. You really can't go wrong, whatever angle you want to take.
GODS & MONSTERS
"You could be my second monster."
Sales pitch: Do you like the movies Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein? Fictionalized biopics of their director and the buff gardener he befriends decades later? Do you like dapper gentlemen in 1950s California? Tragic gay love stories? Flashbacks to WWI? A man whose brain starts to mix all of the above together after a stroke? Ian McKellen, Brendan Fraser and Lynn Redgrave? Then this movie is for you, and your vid is for me!
Vid request: I would love something that shows the intermingling of the story of Frankenstein's monster, the process of making the movie, the war, and Whale and Boone's relationship, thematically and visually, which the movie itself does well but of course in a more spread-out way. The second half of the film is the more powerful, to me: Boone baring himself, Whale confessing what he wants Boone to do, the gas mask, the dreams, the monster sketch, Boone walking like Karloff. Would be cool whether you wanted to focus on Whale's perspective or Boone's or do more of a third-person thing. Less thrilled with Whale as a "dirty old man" or that annoying interviewer kid, but I'm sure you can make me care if it's important to the story you want to tell.
THE GOLEM AND THE JINNI
Sales pitch: A woman made of clay meets a man made of fire in turn-of-the-20th-century New York. There's challah baking and desert flashbacks and sexy seduction and supernatural possession, and, just in time for Purim, evil viziers. Beautiful, comforting prose.
Vid request: I read this book earlier this year and still can't talk about it without drawing little hearts around it. One of the things I loved about reading it was its vibrant setting, its creation of an atmosphere I wanted to wrap around myself forever. I think what I'm hoping for in a vid is a sort of mood piece, where you feel like you're in this magical 1900-ish Lower East Side or Central Park, where things are—as much as I make fun of it in movies—teal and gold like the cover of the book. (The closest movies I can think of for visual inspiration of the city are Gangs of New York or Once Upon a Time in New York, but I'm sure there's lots more out there I just haven't seen. The books Forever and Winter's Tale, which held the same sort of early-NY magic, aren't going to be much help, alas.)
And maybe you will give an impression of this large-boned Eastern European woman and this elegant Arab man (I mean, I don't expect our imaginations of Chava and Ahmad to be the same, so I look forward to whomever you choose for your fan cast, if you fan cast them). Maybe there will be a bakery and a metalworker's forge, or a desert and a temple, or Jewish and Syrian immigrant communities, or impressions of seduction or murder or enslavement or the clash between subservience/suppression and dominance/recklessness, or maybe there are other aspects of the story you want to highlight, or nothing so complex because it all seems very intimidating. Whatever you make, it's going to be wonderful.
I just ask that you please be sensitive if you choose to cast Schaalman or Schall. No Hollywood stereotypes of giant-eyebrowed, pointy-eared, scheming Jews. Thank you. <3
WILDLIKE
Sales pitch: Ella Purnell, who played young Maleficent! Bruce Greenwood, who played Christopher Pike in the Star Trek: Reboot movies and was in lots of other stuff! Alaskan landscapes from Juneau to Denali! A sort of hurt/comfort story starting with—content warning—a creepy and abusive uncle, and progressing to the unlikely connection between a teenage girl and a gruff older backpacker!
Vid request: I would be so happy to have a vid of this movie that just told the story, focusing on Mackenzie and René's developing relationship and taking advantage of the visual splendor of the Alaskan setting. FWIW, the emotional high point of the movie for me was René's protectiveness once he found out what really happened with Kenzie and her uncle, specifically when René bundled her back into the ferry cabin. I like to think he made good use of that bear spray when he made that stop in Juneau. :)
Really hope you aren't looking for specific song recommendations, heh. Whatever you choose will be the right music. If you're at sea, though, here are some notes on preferences. I'm also open to spoken-word and other nontraditional forms of audio, but if you mix dialogue with music, please make the dialogue very clear/easily audible.
Of course, make whatever vid appeals to you, regardless of whether I've asked for it. We've been matched because we both like something, so whatever you choose to do with that should be wonderful. Hopefully you have an idea you'd like to pursue.