I was in on the ground floor with Doug and the whole Channel Awesome thing from an early stage, and I eventually drifted away from it after all of the Spoony bullshit went on, with a couple of exceptions - I still watch Linkara, who I am discovering through rewatching his older videos was using words like 'ableism' in his reviews way back before I'd ever heard of the term, let alone knew it was literally a prejudice against people like me. His stuff stands up pretty well. I also still watch Todd in the Shadows, who seems to have evolved into a pretty compassionate and enormously knowledgeable music critic. I've even drifted over to Obscurus Lupa's channel these days, although only really for her Baywatch stuff.
Doug, though - he was genuinely a bit of an innovator, or at least fore-runner, of the form of the video critique back in the day. Before it became what it is now, which is basically another part of academia, him and the Angry Video Game Nerd were some of the first truly popular people in that form. Of course I was only about 19 when I got into them, and over a decade later it is amazing to see how poor his videos look with hindsight. And then #ChangetheChannel happened, and I was pretty glad I avoided most of them nowadays. Especially Cinema Snob, who seemingly is of the opinion that survivors of abuse should quit complaining so much.
I still cautiously recommend Lindsay's stuff, but I've found in her last few videos that she's started getting a bit too invested in 'drama,' including her own, and there are just... people out there who are not white women, but people of colour, or transpeople, who have much more to say about some of the stuff she talks about, just not as much popularity or production value.
Anyway, as for actual movies we've been watching.
Our movie nights have rolled on, week before last was Crazy, Stupid, Love, which may as well be a fedora-wearer's handbook. I was very disappointed by this because my memory of it was as a superior romantic comedy that doesn't fall into many of the problematic traps that other ones do. And frankly, I think it's actually vastly worse than something like 27 Dresses, because that at least knows what it is. Romantic comedies typically know what they are and what you're here for, and Crazy thinks it's above all that and just isn't. This is a movie that features a 13-year-old boy receiving the advice from his dad that if you love a girl you 'never give up.' The girl he likes is 17, and has already told the kid explicitly that he is making her uncomfortable. Later in the plot he declares his love for her in front of their whole school, and then is confused when she is mad at him. Many more terrible things happen later in that plot, but the payoff to it is the girl giving the boy some naked photos of herself. Yes, that's right, this definite future rapist was rewarded for his stalking and pressurising behaviour by being given child porn, while being a child himself! Hooray! Romance! Love! This movie has aged badly. So badly I might even write in my blog about it, and I have put two posts on that thing in the last four years.
This week, however, we watched The Full Monty. I expected this to have aged appallingly, but to be blunt I think it's a masterpiece and is probably even better now than it was previously. It has aged immensely gracefully. It's a bit overloaded with the male perspective, but as a movie which is about masculinity, I think it succeeds admirably in that regard. It avoids many of the pitfalls of typical 90s movies - there is a whiff of the 'birth father is true father' to it, but this is only subtextual and the movie never seems to actually side with this viewpoint. The male characters discuss feminism, but admit they don't understand it. And there is a male body image and depression subplot, which is just a beautiful thing to see and pretty rare even now. In fact, male mental health is a major theme from an early point in the movie and I was immensely impressed at how the movie was unashamed about men supporting each other through troubled times. Strong recommendation.
