What's the Next Video? You Decide!

Hello again, all you lovely patrons!

With another video finished it's time for me to make a poll where you, the patrons, select the next video from a selection of topics that I pitch. The poll will be open for a week, after which the next topic will be announced on a stream.

For this poll I've decided to cut back on some of the options I've listed previously - not because I'm abandoning them but because I've realized that I need to flesh them out more before I could pitch them.

The Top [insert number here] Comic Book Movies OF ALL TIME!!!1!!

Hell yeah, comics can be cinema! From the page to the screen, these are my TOP [number] COMIC BOOK MOVIES OF ALL TIME! There will be costumed punch-em-ups! There will be intimate slice-of-life dramas! There will be high-concept horror films! There will be searing political satires! There will be a web-series ambitious enough in its scope to be considered cinema! There will be a film praised by Martin Scorsese! There will be at least one silent film! I might include Robert Altman's Popeye! WHO KNOWS!?! A look at the vast world of comics adaptations that goes far beyond the ones mass marketed by Certain American Companies. (spoiler - Honorable Mentions: The Dark Knight, Blue is The Warmest Color, It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!)

We’re All Going to The World’s Fair and Online Cinema

I don't often talk about such recent releases, but Jane Schoenbrun's debut feature has left me so speechless that I have to write about it (yes I'm aware of the inherent contradiction in that sentence). An ambiguous horror/tragedy/coming of age tale about an isolated teen that gets sucked into a creepypasta subculture, We're All Going to The World's Fair explores late 2010's cyberspace with an ingenuity worth celebrating. It depicts the online mind in a revolutionary way, showing the dreaminess of the internet, its crushing loneliness, and its constant pressure to create ever more daring, damaging content. A must-see for the terminally online, like me, and like us all. This video needs to include an in-depth interview with fellow Film YouTuber May Leitz, who has a memorable cameo in the film.

William Shakespeare's The Avengers

Because ages ago I reviewed William Shakespeare's Star Wars, a while back I was given a review copy of Ian Doescher's latest in his iambic pentameter pop culture adaptations: a compilation of all four Avengers movies: The Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame, rewritten as an Elizabethan drama. The highest-grossing franchise of all time done in the style of The Greatest Writer In The English Language (TM)? It'll be wild! I'll end up talking a lot about dramaturgy, story structure, the difference between screenplay dialogue and verse drama, and possibly a smidge about a little bitty topic called cultural imperialism. Fair warning: I'm on Martin Scorsese's side.

Performance (1970 dir. Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg) of Masculinity

Not enough people on YouTube talk about this counterculture classic starring Mick Jagger playing a version of himself sending a London gangster on a bad trip that messes with his entire identity. Chas, you see, is a "performer" for the London crime scene. That is, he performs the dirty deeds that demonstrate the mob's power. On the run after killing the wrong man, Turner (Jagger) takes him in and through the power of rock n' roll, gender identity, and psychedelic mushrooms, makes him question the roles he "performs." A classic that I've been aching to write about for years, this video will talk about the alpha-beta-sigma male cultures and the ways in which masculinity, like all gender, is "performed".

Mr. Burns: A Post Electric Play and the Future of Storytelling

Matt Groening's "The Simpsons" is one of the longest running television shows in history. Jokes about how its longevity and ubiquity have irrevocably shaped popular culture are everywhere. You could probably think of about five memes derived from The Simpsons in the span of reading this sentence. In 2012, playwright Anne Washburn imagined something few writers would dare to give The Simpsons: their afterlives. Her play begins with a group of urban refugees, without electricity after a series of unexplained disasters, struggle to recall one of their favorite episodes. Over the course of the play, we see how one episode of The Simpsons transforms over time into a story that tells the most necessary truths of the day. I've never done an episode about an individual work of theatre, but I love the post-apocalyptic pop culture of "Mr. Burns: A Post Electric Play" so much I ache to write about it. I just think it's neat.

God is a Woman: mother! And Theology

Darren Aronofsky's universally reviled face stomp of a movie about Jennifer Lawrence's relationship with Javier Bardem, "Oops, All Allegory" is often summarized to "an environmentalist retelling of The Bible," with a baby being eaten like a Thanksgiving turkey thrown in for good measure. In Aronofsky's previous work he's shown a very unique take on the Abrahamic religions (see also: Pi, Noah) so how could lowercase "m" other exclamation point be viewed as a work of comparative religion? And what gender is God anyway? To be discussed: medieval mystery plays, the Goddess movement, PragerU's insistence on using he/him pronouns for God, and the theology of "mansplaining."

Once again, polling will last a week, multiple options can be selected, and the winner will be announced at next week's livestream on my YouTube Channel.

Can't wait to see the results! DTF stands for Death To Fascism,

- K