A YouTube movie critic has become something of a phenomenon. He currently has nearly 2 million subscribers, and his videos have been popping up in unusual places, including Instapundit and HotAir’s headlines section.
There’s a simple reason for that: he is brilliant and has provided perhaps the best analyses of why Hollywood has been cracking up. His reviews of individual movies are generally reliable, and his series on such subjects as “Why Modern Movies Suck” is compelling and generally spot-on, and he is funny as hell.
Speaking of hell, you can expect more than a bit of blue language, so if NSFW is unacceptable, I would skip over his videos. He will offend you about twice a minute.
His shtick is that he is just a guy from Scotland spewing his opinions while having more than a few drinks, but that is only a shtick.
His brand of cultural criticism is anything but stuffy–any reasonably intelligent but not especially sophisticated person can grasp his points immediately–but there is nothing crude about his actual takes. They are deeply thought through but presented with precisely zero pretension.
He is like that smart buddy who says what you are thinking quicker and more articulately. He is the construction worker with a 135 IQ who is a blast to talk with.
Just as I like it.
One of the things the Critical Drinker gets–and reminds those of us who spend too much time thinking about politics and policy–is that culture comes before politics.
While people like me spend a lot of time deeply immersed in issues and intellectual battles, most social change is driven by what people see in movies, literature, language, and attitudes.
Culture is the air we breathe and the food we eat. It informs the language and metaphors we use to understand and describe our world.
The Left understands this and has systematically taken over our cultural institutions, and if we want to take them back, we need to understand what makes them tick, what works and what doesn’t, and what the Left is doing.
For years, what the Left has been doing has worked–until recently, that is. Ironically, the more the Left has injected its ideology into its cultural products, the less effective its strategy has been.
The Critical Drinker gives you insight into why that is, and it’s satisfying to watch him put into words what we have been grasping at a sub-rational level.
And, of course, his reviews tend to be spot-on for those of us looking for recommendations of shows and movies to watch. There is so much “content” being pushed out the door that our “to watch” lists can get as long as one’s arm. It’s good to have a reviewer out there whose take on a show is reasonably likely to match your own tastes.
In short, The Critical Drinker fits a niche that is underrepresented on the Right: a smart cultural critic who speaks to both our yen for good entertainment and our frustrations with the current culture. He is a movie reviewer, an entertainment critic, and a cultural analyst all in one. And funny to boot.
More often than not, when watching one of his videos, your thought will be, “Hell Yeah!”