Last year's post on Youtube video essays was a lot of fun to put together, so I'm doing it again. Below, is a selection of my favorite video essays, analysis, and criticism from roughly the last year. Most are related to media, though there is one that is really stretching the definition. There are several creators from the previous list that are back with new videos, but I tried to include a good selection of newcomers.
CJ the X: Subjectivity in Art - A breathless ramble about art - how to create art, how to consume art, and how to contextualize art. It also contains a rant about "Encanto," a discussion of the photos of Vivian Meier, and the establishment of a content creation continuum with CJ and Mr. Beast on opposite ends. And if you've got a take on the dead flowers, I'd love to hear it.
Accented Cinema: When Hollywood Speaks Chinese, I Cringe - Accented Cinema presents takes on Asian cinema from an explicitly Chinese POV, which is invaluable. This essay tackles one of my long-held pet peeves, the sloppy, uninformed use of spoken Chinese in western media by people with no familiarity with the language. After suffering through so many well-meaning actors murdering Chinese dialogue in everything from "Firefly" to "Daredevil," it was so gratifying to hear someone else validate what I'd known for years.
Super Eyepatch Wolf: What the Internet Did to Garfield - I toyed with writing a post about the r/imsorryjon subreddit, because I found it fascinating to see so many people sharing in this same impulse to render Garfield as an eldritch abomination. So I'm glad to see that Super Eyepatch Wolf spends so much time talking about that community, while also exploring other Garfield fanart and media, and the enduring cultural impact of a popular and seemingly uncomplicated comic strip character. Oh, and extra credit for the research that went into breaking down how a Garfield strip actually functions.
Brows Held High: Sins. Cinema. - I've seen other Youtubers take aim at Cinema Sins before, but few with the amount of editing skill and well-informed exactness as Kyle Kallgren. I like that he gives the channel its due as a creator of reliably entertaining content, while also taking their format to task for being utterly useless for anything else. Seeing the application of the familiar Cinema Sins critiques to beloved art films like "Holy Mountain" and "Koyaanisqatsi" is wonderfully absurd, and the final revelation of what the channel's biggest contribution to the discourse actually is warms my nerdy, cinephile heart.
Broey Deschanel: Spring Breakers and the End of Indie Sleaze - It's surely a sign of getting old when a movie that you think of as being pretty recent is suddenly a nostalgic favorite. Well, maybe that's not the best way to describe "Spring Breakers," which Maia posits started as a critique of the early 2010s youth culture of permissiveness and excess, and has now come to largely embody it. It's always fascinating to see the process of how the past is remembered and quantified, and which cultural signifiers end up sticking to a particular era. "Spring Breakers," against all odds, seems to be sticking.
Patrick Willems: Sam Raimi's Best Scene (Is in a Movie He Didn't Direct) - I'm not going to take a position on the stance taken in that title, but it's always fun to see a straightforward breakdown of the way an interesting scene is directed. It helps that Willems is so enthusiastic about Raimi's work, and the scene itself really is one of the only good things about a remarkably mediocre Coen brothers movie. And if you haven't figured out which scene this video is about by now, you'd better go and watch it.
Defunctland: Disney's FastPass: A Complicated History - Finally, I'm probably cheating a bit by including a video about queuing strategies at the Disney parks, but this is genuinely one of the most impressive videos I've seen this year on any topic. We get what is essentially a feature length documentary on the rise and fall of the FastPass system, a look into the workings of the Disney parks, and way more information than I ever needed about crowd management analytics. And it's engrossing stuff.
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