The Barren Wasteland of YouTube Film Criticism

The bad, the ugly, and the Doug Walker

The intro to these are always the same: an explosion, guitar lick, and of course the catchphrase. You might be thinking to yourself, “Is he writing about straight to VHS action movies?” And to that I say I wish I had just watched some Cannon Films Chuck Norris flicks instead of researching this week's subject. Today I want to talk about the desolate intellectual wasteland that is YouTube film criticism. For a brief yet also far reaching rundown there are more or less three kinds of film critics on YouTube you have your heavy hitters The Stuck (Chris Stuckman) the brain dead and charmless defender of the holy Disney IP collection, the too cool for school Your Movie Sucks (maybe the worst of them all) a very dumb guy who thinks he is really smart but his videos are usually somehow lazier than The Stuck style of YouTube film critic, and of course the legend himself Doug Walker. Let us not forget the other random weirdos who all basically say some variation of whatever the three archetypes say. They’re the champions of Disney, the reactors to trailers...usually Disney, and above all else will never ever make original content that differs from the norm. Well actually Doug Walker does, but he somehow does the worst thing possible instead, but don’t worry we will get to him. Just a quick note spending the last few days watching these guys for research has caused me to go insane, so this article will be a mess.

To really understand these guy’s mindsets imagine you have only ever seen two movies and those movies are Star Wars and Shaun of the Dead. For people who are constantly talking about how much they love movies they have seen a shockingly few number of them. Do you remember the excruciatingly terrible AFI Top 100 list? Well that is their bible, well except for the Your Movie Sucks style guy whose bible is whatever junk list IndieWire has put out that month. Movies made before 1976? They don’t watch them. Foreign films? Oldboy and other action films exclusively and probably a Bergman or two, and of course the champion of the pseudo intellectual, Guillemoro Del Toro who honestly doesn’t deserve the distinction but is stuck with it. You may be wondering what exactly is the difference between these guys and let us say a reviewer for Entertainment Weekly? Well they’re kind of the same. They tend to have a weird parallel consensus, but I would argue they may be worse for film literacy mostly because unlike mainstream outlets like Entertainment Weekly or Variety these guys on YouTube actually have an audience. Believe it or not people are actually more than happy to watch a dumb guy in a room full of Star Wars toys very poorly review a movie. And why is this? I don’t know. I’m stumped, I can’t figure it out at all. I’m not sure what the point of YouTube film criticism one guess is that it seems that they’re telling their audience what they want to hear: the MCU is important, the Oscars are real and you should care and you should be angry superhero movies don’t win them, and also buying toys is the same as reading Jonathan Rosenbaum. Ah what am I saying they don’t know who even Jonathan Rosenbaum is. Well maybe not the last part, but kind of. The weirdest thing about these guys is most if not all of them have no real personality. Now Siskel and Ebert weren’t particularly good film critics, but they had charisma and watching them could be genuinely interesting. Siskel not so much, but Roger Ebert not being a particularly skilled critic really didn’t matter because he had a deep knowledge and love of film. He was the perfect ambassador for film culture. Sure he had his weird moments, but that made him interesting. For example read his bizarre review of Taste of Cherry that although just plain incorrect at least shows the man had a pulse. Now as for these YouTube guys they have no charisma, no knowledge of what they’re talking about, and a very cynical view of films as some kind of commodity that is only used to push merchandise that they go out and buy all of. The scariest issue with these YouTube critics is the massive audience they have. I think this comes from if you were a 14 year old boy obsessed with Captain America and saw on YouTube a guy who seemed like a professional critic say, “You’re right Captain America is the best, screw your mom you shouldn’t read a book!” Well that is gonna do it for that 14 year old, and then suddenly he’s 35 years old has seen every Marvel movie, and hasn’t ever had an encounter with a thought provoking or challenging work of art in his entire life. Imagine if someone was teaching at a local high school that Banksy or some other dreadful artist was not just superior to Picasso or Kahlo but more important? Or to be more like YouTube film critics the hypothetical teacher not just never mentioning Kahlo, but the teacher having no idea who Kahlo even is.

The other big issue is all of the videos are literally the same. I’ve read a lot of film reviews for the same movie where you can tell chunks of the review were approved by the studios, but YouTube takes it to the next level. If you told me that the studios (in particular Disney the absolute favorite movies to review of critics on YouTube who by the way never have a negative thing to say about the films) sent out a script and just didn’t give a shit if these guys were reading the scripts word for word with no individual tweaks I would believe you. Another weird kind of video that somehow every single one of them does is TRAILER REACTIONS. It is exactly what you are imagining, it is you the viewer watching them the critic watch a movie trailer. No joke, and they’re usually trailers for huge movies with hundreds of millions of views already. So the question is have we as a society become so in need of hand holding when we experience art that some of us have become so stupid we need a guy to show us how to react to a movie trailer? Probably. And now we’ve got some people whose brains have literally melted to this point. Once again probably overreacting I just don’t understand the appeal at all of watching these guys. I know this sounds naïve and stupid, but when I was younger I actually did read film reviews, and it never occurred to me to watch a YouTube film critic, well except one. The one YouTube film critic I can recall having a positive experience with was James Rolfe. Back in the day (somewhere around 2008-2009) his channel Cinemassacere would do something called Cinemassacre Monster Madness where every year in which James Rolfe would pick a theme and review horror films that fall under that theme starting as early as the late silent era and ending in the modern era. I learned a lot of movies as a young guy from it, and his videos he would do throughout the year highlighting different well known but also obscure genre films including everything from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Basket Case. He had a legitimate love for a niche corner of cinema and actually had some knowledge on that niche as well. I would even say that James Rolfe and his videos were a massive influence on me as a cinephile seeing as horror and science fiction films were my first loves. But the majority of guys on YouTube are only talking about movies released in the last 5 years and not even in much detail. They have no interest in film beyond whatever is recent, and they have no knowledge of film as a craft or as an art form. Since most of these guys have big audience bases now they have even less of an excuse. This is their job and they don’t know how to do it. If they worked in any other sort of profession they would be fired. The obvious answer to how these guys know so little is that their knowledge of even mainstream cinema only goes back to 1992 at earliest, so they’ve never even bothered to look back through film history. Why would they? There aren’t any action figures for the films of John Ford nor Jean Renoir. Note: I did find some for Akita Kurosawa so fingers crossed!

There is another corner of movie YouTube with guys like Your Movie Sucks. Content creators who have about as much knowledge on film history as your typical Marvel reaction video creator, but with a few post 1998 art films thrown in. They’ve seen every Xavier Dolan movie, but they have no idea who Jacques Rivette is. These are who I like to call the imposters. They want you to think they have a deep understanding of film as an art form, but their tastes and knowledge is completely surface level. One of the more insane things I’ve heard Your Movie Sucks say is that all movies with black people in them should be about slavery. He thinks he has made a point by saying that 12 Years a Slave is superior to something like Barbershop. Which in my opinion he is incorrect, but the fact that film critics are so negative towards black joy is a different article. YMS has all of the pretensions with none of the knowledge. All of his videos are unnecessarily obnoxious. He thinks he is being clever by calling Eraserhead bad, but if you keep listening to his review you start to realize the only thing he ever really says is that he is mad that the DVD doesn’t have chapters on it. I have owned 3-4 different copies of Eraserhead and they all had chapters on them, so it seems like he was just taking the easy way out. The YMS archetype will offer you the same vapid and pointless critiques as Chris Stuckman, but he might say some buzz words like Michael Haneke or Von Trier every now and again. One last comment, they all love Haneke but they don’t seem to actually understand his films. No word on why they enjoy Haneke so much but rest assured that they do.

And now we arrive at the final boss of the YouTube Film Criticism archetype, Doug Walker. Where do I even begin with Doug Walker? You probably already know he’s an idiot. You probably already know that he’s a 39 year old man with the same taste as a 14 year old. I was tempted to use MovieBob as this archetype, but MovieBob is his own sort of beast and I will have to devote an entire article to him. Honestly I could write a book on him after he has his eventual full break from reality and takes his local GameStop hostage. Doug Walker was in early on the scene. Way back in the lost years of the mid to late 2000s Doug Walker began his Channel Awesome empire with his alias The Nostalgia Critic. The point of the character was pretty simple: he was a grown man who exclusively reviewed movies made to sell toys. For the time it was par for the course and in hindsight is hard to be mad at because it is too empty and vapid to have anything to be mad about, but Doug Walker did set the template for so many of these YouTube films critics. He really was sort of the originator of all of these guys, but that is like saying he perfected lacing recreational drugs with fentanyl. There are a few things you will need to be like Doug Walker, first thing is an insane level of confidence on a subject you know nothing about for example Doug Walker made 3 movies about bad movies that were all ironically some of the absolute worst movies ever, and at the end of the third film Doug Walker ascends in to a cosmic and omnipotent form. This is not a joke at the end of his magnum opus, To Boldly Flee he becomes one with the cosmos because he is just so good at saying The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is bad. The second thing is you can only talk about things meant for people between 5-17, and this is the important one because you or your audience can never be challenged by a work of art; it must only ever be either franchise films or a movie everyone has already unanimously declared is bad. Being a Doug Walker is a pretty easy formula that is pretty much all it takes. Oh there is also the part where you destroy all of the people around you, and well are you shocked Doug Walker perpetuated a hostile workplace at Channel Awesome? Read this article from Polygon to learn more about the situation: Here

Sure this wasn’t a comprehensive look at all of YouTube film criticism, but all in all I couldn’t really find much good on it. I’m sure there are some people doing some good, but I just couldn’t find it anywhere. So the question that is posed is could the young people on YouTube looking for some film criticism find the good stuff? It doesn’t seem likely and that is more likely the real issue at hand. So what is the solution to this problem? I’m not sure there may not be one. It seems incredible that the YouTube algorithm will ever change, so I would have no choice but to advise young cinephiles to just avoid YouTube film criticism altogether. And I know there will be people wondering, so I did not talk about Lindsay Ellis because I do not care about Lindsay Ellis.

Random movie recommendation of the week: Easy Living (1937); Jean Arthur stuns in this working girl makes good screwball comedy written by Preston Sturges and directed by the underrated Mitchell Leisen.