writing

Super Eyepatch Wolf analyzes why The Simpsons declined after its golden age, pointing to changes in the writers' room and a shift in the style and complexity of its comedy.

The first of seven parts of RedLetterMedia's long review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. It argues that the film's central flaw is its characters and the lack of audience connection.

Nerdwriter1 shows how rearranging the scenes of the film Passengers, so the audience shares the female lead's confusion, would change the movie. It draws on discussion of the original script.

Jacob Geller's video essay on empty cities and what they say about our relationship to places, using games, literature and aerial imagery. It touches on works such as Invisible Cities.

A three-minute rant by Harlan Ellison, excerpted from the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth, on why creative professionals should always be paid for their work rather than work for free or 'exposure'.

A kinetic typography animation set to Stephen Fry's spoken essay on language. Fry argues against grammar pedantry and for the way language evolves, including the verbing of nouns.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay asking why Marvel films lack memorable musical themes. It blames temp tracks and directors scoring to filler music.

A short clip of Stephen Fry defending swearing as a rich and essential part of the English language and rejecting the idea that it is unnecessary.

A short excerpt from The Pervert's Guide to Ideology in which Slavoj Zizek analyzes John Carpenter's They Live. He uses the film's fight scene and sunglasses to explain how ideology works.

An episode of jan Misali's Conlang Critic series reviewing Toki Pona, a minimalist constructed language with about a hundred words. It is a short, humorous critique of the language's design.

The first part of Lindsay Ellis's video essay series on the troubled production and critical reception of The Hobbit film trilogy.

Maggie Mae Fish analyzes the documentary My Octopus Teacher as an eco-horror film, critiquing it as a story of a man projecting his own needs onto a wild animal.

Corridor Crew VFX artists react to the visual effects of the 2021 Dune and compare them with David Lynch's 1984 version. They discuss which effects were practical and which were CGI.

RocketJump Film School argues that we only notice bad CG while great CG is invisible, so CG seems to be everywhere ruining movies when it often is not.

A clip from Charlie Brooker's BBC show Screenwipe showing how reality TV uses editing to manufacture emotion and narrative. It demonstrates how the same footage can be cut to give very different impressions.

A film-analysis video essay linking Blade Runner 2049's Cells Interlinked sequence to Nabokov's Pale Fire. It examines the poetry and meaning behind the film's references.

A roughly two and a half hour YMS video on Kimba the White Lion that investigates the claim that Disney's The Lion King copied it.

Mike and Jay of RedLetterMedia discuss Starship Troopers, covering its legacy, why people like or dislike it, and its reading as sci-fi action satire versus the Heinlein book.

A long video essay arguing against the claim that Blazing Saddles could not be made today. It looks at the film as satire of the sanitized Western genre and what it did to that genre.

RedLetterMedia's Mike and Rich review the first episode of Star Trek: Picard. It is a long, jokey and critical take from long-time Star Trek fans.

Tom Gally, a former professional translator and University of Tokyo professor, discusses in April 2023 how GPT-4 and similar models may affect translators' careers. He draws on Japanese-English translation experience.

Pop Culture Detective examines how the US military works with Hollywood, using the Independence Day sequel's Army recruitment tie-in as the starting point. It looks at the joint marketing between 20th Century Fox and the military.

A video essay from Pop Culture Detective arguing that The Big Bang Theory normalizes sexism and toxic masculinity through its portrayal of nerd men. It analyzes recurring tropes in how the male leads treat women.

A three-minute side-by-side comparison of scenes from Star Wars (1977) and the WWII film The Dam Busters (1955). It shows how closely the Death Star trench run mirrors the earlier film.

Former CIA Chief of Disguise Jonna Mendez reviews spy scenes from film and TV and explains how realistic they are, including disguise techniques and masks.

A critique of the HD remaster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, walking through cropping, color and effects problems that damaged the original look. It also advises which versions to buy.

Physicist Angela Collier's roughly hour-long video on how string theory was hyped to the public and what that did to science communication. She traces the history of the theory as a narrative and argues it is interesting but was oversold.

Louis Rossmann explains how Google delisted his repair business site for almost a year, and how having AI rewrite his authentic content into corporate-style text finally restored his rankings.

2kliksphilip examines UserBenchmark, a hardware comparison site known for strongly biased, pro-Intel writing. The video explains the site's credibility problems and points viewers to better sources for CPU and GPU information.