I feel like he probably popped up in your recommendations because you watched a bunch of videos by those other guys, because I’ve never heard of him.
That said, I think that in general, “politics I disagree with“ or “politics the group/subculture disagrees on or find controversial“ is pretty much the colloquial definition of “political“ as it is used on the Internet. If I make a story about how liberal democracy is a superior form of government to authoritarian despotism, no one would ever call that political even though it 100% is by any fair definition.
(Almost said “objective definition“ but there’s another word that’s been ruined by these people.)
How this guy is considered by some people one of the best reviewers on Youtube is beyond me.
I\'m not going to sit here and tell you you\'re wrong about The Critical Drinker\'s work being overtly political. Because that\'s 100% accurate. I\'m also not going to tell you that your opinion about his politics is wrong, because as Spectral Time pointed out, we generally don\'t think of things as \"political\" unless we disagree with them. Therefore, any disagreement I have with your assessment of his politics would be informed by my own biases. However, I would gently advise you to maybe think about what makes his politics so disagreeable in your mind, because just as my disagreement with your review is biased, your dislike of The Critical Drinker\'s work is likely biased in some way.
On the one hand, I have absolutely not watched a lot of videos by those other guys, but they also regularly show up in my recommendations too. Youtube really thinks that because I liked Spider-Man: No Way Home, I must want to know what Ben Shapiro has to say about it. Pah.
Ta for the comment Flopsy, appreciate it and I definitely am biased on some level against the guy, but I believe that my opinion influenced my bias, not the other way around. And trying to write an unbiased review would be like trying to formulate an unopinionated opinion.
Well Elmo, it sounds to me like your bias does influence your opinion, considering a large amount of the examples you gave pertaining to why you dislike his content were times you disagree with him politically. But if that\'s what you believe I\'m not terribly interested in changing your mind. Have a nice day.
So, what, if him ranting about his political opinions in angry fashion makes up a fair chunk of a given review, not enjoying it is \"unfair bias\" now?
You know, just looking at the YMMV page for that MauLer guy\'s show, I bet they legitimately think it is.
What baffles me about Critical Drinker is that he was a somewhat accomplished novelist before he got into the youtube gig, which would imply a fairly strong grasp of plot devices and writing conventions. And yet he seems to be baffled by these basic conventions when they come up in the stuff he\'s criticising. It\'s almost like he was a grifter, saying whatever he needs to say to appeal to his youtube audience.
Book me today! I also review weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs.
He is pretty biased, and that does lead him to drawing some false conclusions, but more often than not is he does make valid criticisms and observations of works. Right for the Wrong Reasons if you will. Like, his criticism about Midsommar where he criticizes the movie because if you were to swap Dana and Christian\'s genders people would be outraged rather than praising the movie. Now, he\'s right about the way critics and audiences would react to such a thing, but blaming the makers of a movie for an audience\'s reaction is very unfair and rooted in his personal bias. If anything, pointing out that audiences would only tolerate a boyfriend dying in such a scenario is actually justifying the movie creator\'s decision to do it that way.
That all said, I do think he is one of the better Youtube critics because he\'s genuinely entertaining. A lot of critics on Youtube are either very dry (like if you ever saw any of Chris Gore\'s videos) or go full comedy like Mr. Plinkett. Drinker takes a middle-ground approach where he is clearly doing a bit and clearly playing a character, but also gives a very straight-forward critique. There\'s definitely a catharsis factor too, for people who have felt burned by the way franchises like Star Wars have gone, or are turned off by overly preachy films: watching this guy rip them a new one in a very over-the-top but very genuine way is very satisfying. Him thrashing Terminator Dark Fate was so satisfying for me because I was genuinely hyped for that movie and felt so betrayed watching it. What he does too, which I greatly appreciate, is he\'s willing to admit when he was wrong about a movie (Like Prey), is willing to talk about aspects of disliked movies which he actually likes (See his The One Thing I Don\'t Hate About You entry), and I love his Drinker Fixes series. I definitely think it\'s unfair to accuse him of sexism or racism though, as he likes too many works with diverse casting and tends to give valid reasoning for why he doesn\'t like a lot of new \"diverse\" and \"woke\" works.
All in all, he should be taken for what he is: a biased critic who is not perfect, and who\'s criticisms should NOT be taken as fact or gospel truth.
To be fair, I think most critics\' criticisms shouldn\'t be taken as fact or gospel truth; that\'s just healthy grown-up-i-ness.
Like, I personally feel that finding one critic who likes the stuff you like for the reasons you like it will steer you better most of the time than Rotten Tomatoes or whatever, and even then, that critic for me, Jeremy Jahns, doesn\'t have a perfect overlap with my own tastes because he likes stupid slasher gore-porn horror movies and I don\'t.
Yeah, in general while I might be subbed to game/live actions critics I like and know for a fact lean pretty left I don't end up agreeing with all their takes on a subject. That's just something in life you need to expect and come to respect.
Conversely I wouldn't call myself a Mauler fan because I can see clearly why he's so off-putting to a good deal of people, but I don't mind sitting through some of his videos if he's covering a subject that I know I watched other youtubers cover.
To me the compare and contrast is more important and interesting that just finding someone who shares all your opinions already, whether you're watching a youtube video or reading reviews on website.
And I say all that because I cannot stand the Critical Drinker enough to even try and watch his videos. There's something really petulant about the way he acts about politics and his own takes that exacerbates the already questionable nature of his content that make me steer clear of him the way I wouldn't do to some of the people in his circle. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite, but either way I feel like he has nothing worthwhile to offer me either way.
That all said, I do think he is one of the better Youtube critics because he\'s genuinely entertaining.
I beg to disagree. I genuinely don\'t get what people find entertaining about him making a bad impression of a drunk person.
Also, \"willing to admit he was wrong\" with Prey? Like how he changed the name of his video and thought nobody would notice?
I've watched a few of his videos, albeit probably not enough to be able to write an informed review about him. Apart from his rather obnoxious drunkard personality, I found that he tends to view movies of the past with rose-tinted glasses, and seems to cherry-pick the best movies of the past so that he can compare them with modern movies he dislikes, rather than choosing a movie of a similar caliber. Perhaps doing so can illustrate the problems with some modern movies, but there have been great, mediocre and terrible movies in every era of filmmaking.
While I haven't seen all of his reviews, the bits I've seen on his trope page, as well as the commented-out(and since deleted) Unfortunate Implications examples on the YMMV page(check the History if you want to see them) don't paint a very good picture of him as a reviewer.
If I want to decide whether a film is worth seeing, I'll read a professionally-written review, not watch a video made by a man who rants about political correctness and thinks that acting like a drunk on YouTube is funny.
@Spectral Time: Honestly, I don\'t think any critic should be taken as gospel truth. At best they\'re biased, at worst they\'re outright being paid off for their stamp of approval. Especially now that any Tom, Dick, or Harry can set up a webcam, start a Youtube channel, and \"become a \'professional\' critic.\" People really need to take the statements of critics for what they are: an opinion from someone and nothing more.
It\'s like statements made on this site. Anyone can post anything they want with absolutely zero vetting, and the only people who can stop them are other people who can post whatever they want with absolutely zero vetting. You have no fucking idea who the person was behind the keyboard of anything done to this site. I don\'t like to insult folks, but anyone who takes ANYTHING written on this site as fact is an empty-headed fool. We should have that same attitude for critics, even if they have the vacuous stamp of \"professional\" critic.
At the end of the day, if you enjoy watching that critic then watch that critic. If you don\'t, then don\'t. It\'s all good. Unless it\'s Keeping Up with the Kardashians: again, I don\'t like to insult folks, but anyone who unironically enjoys that show must have something wrong with their brain ;)
I just love how after he got roasted by everyone for his knee jerk reaction to Prey, he changed the video title from \"How to spoil a good idea\" to \"Prey trailer breakdown\". What an absolute clown. Knowing Drinker, he won\'t learn his lesson (ironically doing the Sam\'s thing he accuses female superheroes for).
Scar himself looks like foreign, weak, and with very female moves.
His review of Glass Onion popped up when I was looking up the film and holy shit. He ignores multiple scenes explaining plot points just so that he can complain about plot holes that don\'t exist because they are explained in scenes that he is either actively ignoring, or just... somehow missed?
It\'s only human to make mistakes but when you make a seven hour video about a movie and you somehow miss something that explained directly to your stupid face and then complain that it was never explained... it\'s almost like Drinker and Mauler actually have zero talent in terms of media criticism, they just regurgitate Cinema Sins-tier critiques from a right-wing slant.
Dude loves clichés but hates them in others\' works. Makes sense.
The Glass Onion review made me wonder if Critical Drinker had ever read a detective novel. He complains about Blanc being famous in the world of the film, because he apparently holds a murder mystery to standards of realism that have never applied to the genre. Not only was it established in Knives Out that Blanc is well-known as a detective, but it's a long-standing tradition of the genre. Sherlock Holmes was well-known to all manner of people in his version of London, both rich and otherwise. Hercule Poirot is known by name in his books. His reputation often precedes him.
Also, Drinker asks some really dumb questions: Why does Blanc have a convenient bottle of hot sauce? Because Bron gave him a bottle earlier. This is a very basic setup and payoff. It's Storytelling 101, so what does it say about Drinker that it went over his head?
Yeah, I'm all for forgiving the occasional mistake, but imagine being a professional movie critic and somehow missing/falling asleep through a scene which explains a plot point in excruciatingly explicit detail and then complaining that the plot point doesn't make any sense.
Almost as if he just decided in advance to bash Glass Onion because he didn't like Rian Johnson's work on Star Wars. But that would make him lazy, biased and unreliable, so clearly that can't be it.
I used to follow this guy’s non-YMMV page off the back of this review you know. I had to stop doing that, because too much of it kept coming across to me as uncritically repeating his opinions, which I found deeply flawed and adding to the stress of my every day life that is literally causing me back problems as I try to dictate this into my phone with speech to text.
I mean, if you ever feel like there's too little stress in your life and you need some more, we still have the page for MauLer, who's basically just Critical Drinker but without the alcoholic persona and he takes ten times longer to get to the point.
EDIT: Shouldn't have joked about it because I just checked his page and gave myself a migraine from cringing too hard. I counted a dozen references to how Mauler is not like other girls reviewers, because they review things subjectively, based on their opinions, while he only reviews things based on objective facts. Which is just a really wanky and cowardly way of implying "Your opinion is based on how you feel about things (you know, the... definition of an opinion?) whereas my opinion is solely based on facts and logic, making it the empirically correct opinion to have." What a thin-skinned tool.
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Genuinely Mistaken For Parody
It wasn't until I was halfway through my third video of his that I realised that 'The Critical Drinker' wasn't doing a bit. A lot of that is down solely to the name; if I was going to create a parody of the neverending slog of generic middle-aged YouTubers who have built a career out of getting really angry at Brie Larson as a substitute for having any sort of personality, then 'The Critical Drinker' would be near the top of names I would choose, second only to something even more stupidly obvious, like 'The Rageaholic'. So it wasn't until the second or third "This ain't your momma's review! I've got the balls to tell you when something fucking sucking fucks!" that I realised that this almost 40 year old man was unironically trying to encroach on the territory of circa 2008 Angry Video Game Nerd.
You may recognize The Critical Drinker from showing up in your YouTube recommendations despite never having searched for him. He shares all the hallmarks of his peers; plenty of shouting to cover up that his critiques are on the same level as a particularly rushed episode of CinemaSins, the confidence to assert that he understands the meaning of works like Squid Game even better than their own creators - and incidentally, those meanings always align with his own views - and assurance that he definitely isn't a sexist, he just predominantly hates works with female or minority protagonists. But he does like Arcane, so that proves that he doesn't have a problem with women, as long as they're animated. There's a very obvious and crude joke to be made there, but I'm far too classy to make it.
Still, The Critical Drinker puts a lot of work into his criticism; sometimes, so much work that he feels the need to include them even when they are directly addressed or contradicted by the source material. He didn't like Midsommar because he believes the film implies that Christian deserves what happens to him, when... no, it very clearly doesn't - the opposite, in fact. Even his praise hits the wrong note; he liked Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder, but phrases it as "Weirdly, the film even dares to offer a somewhat positive view of fatherhood," which I would totally agree with, if he wasn't trying to drag the plot into some trite culture wars argument about perceived misandry. In his series on "How to Succeed at YouTube" he argues that you should always stay out of politics, but perhaps it would be more accurate to suggest that he just wants people to stay out of any politics that he personally disagrees with.
The biggest saving grace to The Critical Drinker is also his downfall; he's substantially better - well, less bad - than some of his peers, which makes him less interesting. He doesn't have the sincere "This is not an act, I am genuinely angry to an unhealthy degree" vitriolic rage of Razorfist, or the dedication of MauLer to make a seventeen hour twelve-part video series about a seven second toothpaste commercial because one of the teeth was voiced by a woman. He's just sort of... there, in the mix, but never quite standing out. Simultaneously not good enough to watch, but also nowhere near notable enough to go out of your way to avoid.
It's fitting that The Critical Drinker was introduced to me by popping unannounced into my YouTube recs, because his work has about the same intellectual merit as a viral video of a cat trying to catch toilet paper that has been taped to a ceiling fan. The only meaningful difference is that you might enjoy the video of the cat.