at last, it's time for another roundup! things were fairly dry for a minute there. i tend to go through peaks and valleys vis-a-vis video essay consumption, where i'll watch a bunch of them for a few months and then not be able to watch any for a few months after that. this has been especially true as i've been getting back into the habit of making my own scripted essays. did you know i did one about the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials a few months ago? i share this so you can judge for yourself if i know what i'm talking about enough to be worth taking recommendations from. i am a fallible beast, and our tastes are likely not the same! also i'm proud of that video and i'd like you to watch it.
but we're here to talk about other people's work, and let me tell you, the last month and a half has yielded a real bounty. let's jump in.
"Investigating a forgotten Edward Snowden Quote" by Allie Meowy.
edward snowden was a bit of a mystery to me beyond the headlines. all i knew was that he leaked highly classified documents detailing secret mass-surveillance, and that he liked hentai games.
this is one of the funniest, strangest essays i've encountered in years. what happens when the wikipedia page for games based on movies doesn't include Elf: The Movie: The Game for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, and also you happen to discover that Edward Snowden is on the record as liking "some" hentai games? i'm not even sure what this essay ultimately adds up to, but i had such a blast watching it that i honestly don't even care. a wild ride that's well worth your time.
"a pocket full of stones" by Glouder Glens.
i've been thinking about an interview with People's Joker director Vera Drew where she talked about how many young queer artists have relegated themselves to the anti-recognition of youtube. if her film was proof that there's room in the film fest circuit for artfully essayish digital cinema, then we have no choice but to campaign for the incredible works of Sylvia Schweikert, AKA Glouder Glens, to reach a similar level of recognition. if you've yet to encounter its work, Sylvia's half-essay half-werewolf-erotica about it/its pronouns is a classic, but everything on her channel is a gem (not to mention its excellent short films). lately, Sylvia's been experimenting with the form in a big way. her last essay, "Self Discovery Stories," is artfully vertical, a true phone video that digs deep and hits hard. "a pocket full of stones" takes a huge step sideways, rendered in 4:3 at a scalding 360p and edited with a post-adobe-flash Lynch-esque animation style that rockets you back in time to the earliest days of internet video in the best way. what i wouldn't give to see this one on the big screen, i'm telling you. this kind of work simply doesn't have a place on youtube as far as youtube's concerned, so it's up to us as champions of the medium to share widely what the algorithm will not. definitely heed the content warnings though.
"The Miraculous Horror of Stop Motion" by Henry Kathman.
here's a cozy, enthusiastic dive into the often unforeseen externalities of stop-motion animation, that doesn't outstay its welcome or get too sanctimonious. i appreciate Kathman's use of alternate backdrops to give each section its own mood. through three unique and interesting examples of stop motion, he explores how the medium itself is an artform that can't be streamlined through technology the way so many other forms of animation have been-- even just to recreate the feel of stop motion digitally, you still pretty much have to hand animate it with an equivalent amount of brute labor. it's a satisfying analysis, which is unsurprising from the ever-consistent and thoughtful Kathman. and the soundtrack by Molly Noise is, as always, fantastic.
"The Religious Gamification of Indika" by Pim's Crypt.
i watched an essay a couple weeks ago about Indika which heavily criticized it for being boring and overly talkative, that really just convinced me that i wanted to see someone look at the game on its own terms. Pim here does a great job doing exactly that, wasting zero seconds of the universe's limited window of coherence on lip service to the harsh critical consensus in favor of simply examining what Indika says on its own terms. they explore how the complexities of faith are successfully gameified in Indika, making a compelling case for its quality. i've highlighted Pim in a previous roundup, and i'm happy to see them back with another solid work.
"So What's Up With Those PS2 Castlevanias?" by Trans Witch Reviews.
this one's pretty much what it says on the tin. when it comes to analyzing game franchises long-running enough to have titles across multiple console generations, i'm always drawn to essays that dig into the red-headed step-children no one ever really talks about. like the PS2 Castlevania games. i didn't even know they existed until now! granted that's probably because i never owned a Sony console before the ps4, but whatever. like a lot of games with 2D roots, Castlevania seemed to struggle finding its feet in the third dimension, and the historical consensus seems to have largely landed on "the 2D ones were best." i think this Trans Witch makes a very compelling case that at the very least Castlevania: Curse of Darkness is an underrated classic-- enough so, anyway, to make me want to give it a shot. i appreciate how she highlights the music of the series by focusing on the work of specific composers, though i think she lingers on those samples for a bit too long. regardless, this is a well put together essay made with readily apparent enthusiasm, and sometimes that's all you need.
"Why The Ring Didn't Use Color Grading" by WatchingtheAerial.
an astonishingly thorough deep-dive into the very specific in-camera techniques used to give Gore Verbinski's American remake of The Ring its signature blue look. like a lot of people i always assumed this was accomplished with digital color grading, though unlike many detractors i adore The Ring's visual identity and think it's at least as worthwhile a film as its Japanese counterpoint. this is the kind of video essay i adore-- a technician with extensive domain knowledge utilizing resources laypeople wouldn't know about to answer a seemingly simple question at exhaustive and surprising depth. the real kicker here though is that the creator also wants to recreate this technique for themself, all the way up to tracking down the kind of film stock The Ring was shot on and using it in a 35mm stills camera. i immediately went from this video to watch everything else on his (?) channel, and i wasn't disappointed. here's someone who cares a lot about the labor of shaping and lensing light, and the emotional properties these processes bring to a film. "Collateral & the Death of Neon" is SUCH a satisfying watch if you care even a little bit about the visual identity of city streets across history. great stuff all around
"New Zelda isn't Zelda" by Eroymak.
it's novel to see one of these shot in the mountains! vibes like a younger, ganglier nakeyjakey. i like to imagine that there's an escalating war of spectacle happening between white outdoorsy middle-class nerds all trying to one-up each other by casually filming an otherwise anodyne video essay in increasingly precarious locales. how long until a 22 year old DJ from Wisconsin dies on the slopes of Everest trying to film an essay about Mario 1-1? who's going to be the first human being to levy a citation-heavy critique of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead while skydiving? how long until Shiey accidentally loses Jacob Geller down an abandoned mine shaft? anyway, Eroymak is extremely correct here about what makes modern Zelda games a drag, namely that their "go anywhere do anything" attitude ruins the sense of progression that once defined the franchise. i worry about this with the upcoming Echoes of Wisdom, which seems to be applying the Of The games' open toolset philosophy to the 2D Zelda template, but i digress. for being only 7 minutes and 20 seconds, this is a pretty succinct and broadly comprehensive summation of why the open world Zeldas lack a certain magic that was once so easily flaunted by their forebears.
"so that's why they cut all her scenes from the movie" by CinemaStix.
i've seen CinemaStix videos in my recommended feed multiple times and avoided them like the plague. i mean, come on. "CinemaStix"? at a glance this conjures a monstrous Third-Way chimera betwixt CinemaSins and CinemaWins, and i would sooner stave my own head in with a rock than give such a thing the time of day. EXCEPT... Constantine 2005 is one of my favorite comic book movies. i saw it in theaters and it changed me. in the years since, i've defended Constantine's honor from the haters to little avail (thankfully the tides have turned in recent years and people are realizing that they totally missed the second-best John Wick movie), and it's top of my list of fun movies to show guests when we're bored. this special interest overrode my kneejerk book-cover judgment survival mechanism, and i'm so mad that i don't regret it. this video is about the editing of Constantine 2005, and how many of the film's iconic moments were constructed in post. as the title suggests, a substantial amount of time is spent trying to understand why an entire character was ultimately cut, a question that's also plagued me ever since watching the deleted scenes on the DVD in 10th grade. whether you've seen Constantine 2005 or not, this is an excellent portrait of editing as a substantive authorial process. i've since gone and watched multiple CinemaStix videos, and god damn it, these are some quality essays. sometimes popular things are good, she said grumpily.
"Conservative Comedy Ruined My Life" by Big Joel.
oops, can you tell this vidrev roundup has been sitting in my drafts for a long time? this video came out on April 2nd of 2024 and has nearly 2.5 million views, so i won't belabor the point. this is a great deconstruction of conservative comedy that looks hard into why so much of it sucks beyond the empty platitudes endemic to smarmy liberals. it's some of Big Joel's best work in my opinion.
"On Online Entitlement" by CJ The X.
an excellent autopsy of the rhetorical implications of an overly familiar instagram comment-- a description that i know probably sounds obnoxious, but genuinely is not the case. Mx. The X goes to great lengths to assure us that this is not about the person who left the comment, but the various attitudes and assumptions that are implied in its construction. gen z essayists in particular seem to specialize in this sort of editorial post-game breakdown of the things people say when they think they're saying something else, and i think they're always worth paying attention to. consider this something of a downstream epilogue to Shannon Strucci's seminal Fake Friends series. even as i don't always agree with the totality of their conclusions, i do always come away from CJ The X videos feeling like i've learned something about how i and other internet-dwelling social animals think.
"How Uber Is Destroying Food Delivery" by More Perfect Union.
More Perfect Union is not typically in the business of video essays, focusing more on feature stories that heavily rely on interviews and on-the-ground reporting. this one's a unique development in that it is just straight up a video essay, using the business model of Uber as an avenue for understanding Corey Doctorow's theory of platform decay (except he calls it Enshittification because god forbid 21st century materialist philosophy grow out of its twee blogosphere adolescence). if you know the theory then there's probably not gonna be much here that surprises you, but i felt it a notable inclusion nevertheless.
do you have recommendations for video essays i might not have seen, new or old? well my askbox is open and i'm always looking for ways to penetrate my experiential-algorithmic youtube bubble. hope you found something enjoyable in this collection, see you in the next one!
<- ROUNDUP #5
