Yes, he works for Criterion now. You can see his video essays as special features on some Criterion releases for the past year. I know he did one on Tampopo.Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
Yes, he works for Criterion now. You can see his video essays as special features on some Criterion releases for the past year. I know he did one on Tampopo.
Movie Theater Diary
Oh, that's awesome! I'm assuming they can't be seen online, though.
This is one guy I'm super on-board with. His recent videos on the "adorkable misogyny" of The Big Bang Theory have been thorough as hell (it's easy to bag on a sitcom, hard to make a meaningful coherent argument against the philosophy of that sitcom), and his video on his own trope idea of "Born Sexy Yesterday" forced me to re-examine my own feelings on movies like The Fifth Element and Tron: Legacy.
For me, "adorkable misogyny" was a case of stating the obvious. "Big Bang" is a Chuck Lorre show and Lorre (1) repeats the same motifs in everything he produces and (2) those motifs include heavy doses of sexism. If you watch across "Dharma & Greg," "Two and a Half Men," and "Big Bang Theory" it's not hard to notice that each show features an 'ice queen' mother figure---an emotionally distant, overeducated WASP who regularly torments the male protagonist and skewers his masculinity. Lorre's idea of the sitcom mom is Joan Collins as Nurse Ratched. It's just one pattern that stares regular viewers in the face. So congrats to the Pop Culture Detective for paying attention and watching TV while sober.
"Born Sexy Yesterday" was a good one, though. I wish he had pushed a bit further and pointed out that the trope extends beyond its obvious hard sci-fi roots. "Wonder Woman" becomes an example when it positions the heroine as a babe-in-the-woods naif while the male hero gets to mansplain the world.
"If 'the unknown' in Over The Garden Wall is meant to be so mysterious, then why is it so familiar? This video essay looks at why the show's creators might have chosen to reference so much nostalgic Americana and Germanic fairy tales and how it shapes 'the unknown'."
A nice analysis of one of the best cartoons I've seen this year.
Tony was the best. No other video essays can compare.
Agreed
This one, on ESotSM, actually does fairly interesting analysis:
The Boat People - 9
The Power of the Dog - 7.5
The King of Pigs - 7
For the record, he addressed Wonder Woman in a post on his Patreon page.
Wait til that dude finds out Netflix does the same thing.
Someone should send this to whoever is in charge of movie titles in Spanish. For example:
Scott Pilgrim vs the World --》 Scott vs Los Ex de la Chica de Sus Sueños (Scott Pilgrim vs the Exes of the Girl of His Dreams)
Hahah word. I think my favorite quirk about translators of titles in Spanish is when they extrapolate what they did with one movie to others of the same genre. For example, Police Academy was translated as Locademia de PolicÃ*a (a made up portmanteau word but basically meaning Crazy Police Academy) and then they used that for all other goofy comedies, so that everything was "loco" (crazy).
I sometimes chuckle at the reasoning behind some of these changes. I picture the dude thinking to himself "but Scott doesn't fight the whole world... only the exes of the girl of his dreams".
Locademia is absolutely a great title.
Movie Theater Diary
And in Spain, Die Hard was renamed as La Jungla de Cristal (The Crystal Jungle), I think because Predator was fresh on everyone's mind as the template for action movies.
So when the sequels came and they were not set inside a skyscraper anymore, they were still The Crystal Jungle which was even more nonsensical.
So here's Renegade Cut's 2 hour long feature length episode that he's been talking about doing for a couple of years now. And sad to say, now that it's here, I honestly have no interest in actually watching it myself. 1. the runtime just completely puts me off, but that's mostly because 2. I've honestly kinda grown bored of his show by this point. I'm a little disappointed how much of his content chooses to focus on religion lately, and find a lot of his episodes have started to meander around topics in a way that finds him barely even discussing the movie in question, but rather using those movies as an excuse to discuss a topic in a more general sense, such as his episode on anarchy in his recent V for Vendetta episode, where he barely even brings his discussion back to the movie at hand and how at actually implements this element. So yeah, I've found myself either skipping or tuning out on a lot of his more recent episodes for this reason, which is a shame, because I found his style really refreshing and insightful initially.
But anyways, figured I share it here for anyone who might be interested in checking it out. I can appreciate him actually going through with an episode such as this, but just wish he hadn't chosen a subject that I honestly couldn't care even the slightest shit about. He's posting about how he really hopes this episode will do well and maybe even go viral, and that would be great for him and all if it did. But honestly, I can't help but feel that runtime is more bound to turn people away immediately, particularly considering how uninteresting a subject matter he's chosen to discuss at such length, IMO.
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