What's the Next Video Essay? You Decide! AGAIN!

Another video essay has been made, and the ever hungrier maw that is the demand for Content commands me to make ever more. And if you think I'm worth a dollar a month, you get to decide my next topic.

As with the last poll, I plan on doing all of these ideas eventually - this poll is just to decide what I'll do next. If something isn't picked this round, it will (likely) still be on the docket for the next poll once this project is done.

The Top 20 Comic Book Movies OF ALL TIME

Hell yeah, comics can be cinema! From the page to the screen, these are my TOP 20 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!)

Bisexual Lighting REDUX

It's been five years since I did a video about so-called Bisexual Lighting. Revisiting the concept after years and after the fad has since become standardized, what that color scheme has come to mean in cinema, and in bisexual culture. The blue-and-pink mixture doesn't always mean "bisexuality" in cinema - but it does often mean "liminality." Or maybe just "fashion" - or nothing at all. A more in-depth look at queer coding and color theory than our first outing.

Trash Humpers and New New Queer Cinema

This would be another "Redux" video - going back to an old thing that I mocked and reexamining it through a new lens. And Harmony Korine's, er, mid-period work could be reexamined through the lens of, of all things: Queer Theory. Hear me out. We'll be talking John Waters, the Kuchar brothers, Jack Smith, Barbara Hammer, and TikTok.

William Shakespeare's The Avengers

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. I suppose I should review it? I'll end up talking a lot about dramaturgy, story structure, and the difference between screenplay dialogue and verse drama. Fair warning: I'm on Martin Scorsese's side.

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.

Mary Harron’s American Psychos

Note the title is "Psychos" - plural. Sure, Patrick Bateman is a meme, an icon of "sigma males" or whatever the hell they call themselves, but Christian Bale's iconic performance wouldn't have taken off without the nuanced direction of Mary Harron. Let's look at Bateman's character through the lens of two of Harron's other, non-fictional, homicidal subjects: Valerie Solanas (I Shot Andy Warhol) and Charles Manson (Charlie Says), through the lens of the subversive screenplay by Harron and Guinevere "The gay sex scene I did with Cheryl Dunye got the National Endowment for the Arts defunded" Turner, and through Bale's own ironic detachment to his character. Patrick Bateman, like Howard Beale, is a character too big for the culture to handle - so let's examine what this iconic performance says about masculinity and violence. Also it will unfortunately have to include a theatre exercise I had to do back in college that involved American Psycho as a prompt.

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.

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's "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? With Aronofsky in the news again with his adaptation of The Whale To be discussed: medieval mystery plays, the Goddess movement, and the theology of "mansplaining."

A Movie Happened. There Were No Survivors.

While writing the video on Network one film came up as an obvious descendant to Lumet and Chayefsky's tale of the failure of mass media: Adam McKay's Don't Look Up. I left a passage about that film on the cutting room floor of the Network video because the more I thought about it the more I realized I had to say about not only Don't Look Up, but the entire subgenre of apocalyptic film. Specifically, films that end with the world completely destroyed, with not even a lone wanderer and their dog to scavenge the wastes. Since we've all just survived an apocalypse (er, still surviving - the pandemic is still ongoing and climate change will get us all), let's talk not only about the clichés of end-of-the-world stories, but the ontological delights of watching such movies. Movies, after all, have definitive endings - life doesn't. Films to be discussed: Don't Look Up, End of the World, Knowing, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Kaboom, Save the Green Planet, These Final Hours, Miracle Mile, Until the End of the World, The World the Flesh and the Devil, Dead or Alive, When Worlds Collide, The Day The Earth Caught Fire, The Quiet Earth, Last Night, Dr. Strangelove, 4:44 Last Night On Earth, Take Shelter, and Melancholia (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