Deconstructing the Star Wars Prequels

Red Letter Media's epic seven-part video essay on Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace has been making the internet rounds for quite a while now, and seemed like a bizarro one-off tour de force that somehow combined genuine film criticism with a deconstruction of the kind of sociopathic nerd culture associated with this kind of obsessive fandom. But just as George Lucas succeeded in confounding fans' lowered expectations with Attack of the Clones by writing and directing a film that managed to be somehow worse than the first prequel, the second epic YouTube take-down is longer, more coherent, and at least as funny as the its predecessor.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Master of the Snappy One-Liner

For funny stuff on April 1, I say you can't go wrong with this great collection of patented one-liners and come-backs from the Austrian Oak. All the classics are there, from the orgasmic satisfaction of The Pump in Pumping Iron to the hysterical hijinks from Jingle All the Way, peppered throughout with his infamous nonstop punning as Mr. Freeze in Batman and Robin.

1% Inspiration, 99% Cliché

A pretty seamless montage of 'inspirational' moments from Hollywood history.

"Eponymous: The Movie"

A surprisingly amusing montage of characters saying the name of the movie they're in.

Look Behind You!: the Mirror Scare

A collection of shots that illustrate one of the most enduring visual clichés of the horror film genre: the mirror scare.

Zombies vs. Vampires

Now that the horror genre has been entirely mainstream for several years now, the zombie trope is slowly being eclipsed by the vampires of True Blood, Twilight, etc.

An essential starting point for understanding the zombie genre is this piece by the master of the video essay, Matt Zoller Seitz.



Sam Leith's excellent article for Prospect productively relates the zombie figure to the vampire by way of the class implications both tropes represent: "Vampires are monsters of the right; zombies are monsters of the left."

Meanwhile, vampire expert

Visual Effects in Film History

The Dialectics of Do the Right Thing

Another brilliant video essay courtesy of Matt Zoller Seitz, this one on the dialectical nature of Spike Lee's classic Do the Right Thing, which is indeed about 'more than race.'

Superhero movies: if you've seen one...

How long has it been since my last blog post that had anything to do with superhero movies (supposedly my object of research)? A long time. And why is this? Because obviously all superhero movies are exactly the same. See below for evidence...

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Tarantino and Food

Revisiting a whole bunch of Tarantino films in the last few weeks in tandem with the home video release of Inglourious Basterds, I was struck once again by the crucial role food has played in his movies throughout his career. The diverse ways in which he has been able to incorporate rituals of eating, ordering and preparing food got me thinking about putting together a selection of clips from his body of work that mirror each other in interesting ways. So I spent an afternoon going through his movies, hunting down moments that seemed to fit together, sometimes in very obvious ways, and sometimes (hopefully) in less obvious ones. Anyway, here's the result.

Agents of Chaos

Once again, a Dark Knight-related YouTube clip pushes me towards an eternally-overdue blog update. This time it's a new video essay by Film Freak Central reviewer Jefferson Robins, whose Agents of Chaos brings an entirely new perspective to the film characters that came closest to capturing a particular contemporary Zeitgeist.