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Post #1318612

Author
idir_hh
Parent topic
The Rise Of Skywalker — Official Review and Opinions Thread
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1318612/action/topic#1318612
Date created
9-Jan-2020, 1:40 PM

Broom Kid said:

DrDre said:

These sort of videos have been popular ever since the days of good ol’ Plinkett.

Plinkett never called his videos “two-hour-rages” though. Plinkett’s early-internet popularity is the curse that keep giving, absolutely, and was very instrumental in the YouTube grift that is actively making the world a worse place every day, despite the fact all Red Letter Media really wanted to do was have fun goofing on Star Wars and Star Trek —they didn’t intend to help lay the groundwork for a Tantrum-Throwing-Industrial-Complex, obviously. But Red Letter Media has never gone out of their way to either suggest their critique is all that meaningful, and they’ve, so far as I know, never bald-face presented their work as the product of pure rage, either. Even their most acid takes are presented as easy-going, not-all-that-important jests.

If you click on something called “Two Hour Rage” and you actually watch all of it, and feel frustrated trying to convince people the title isn’t an accurate description of its contents, I don’t understand. Movie-length-reviews of movies are honestly a thing that barely justify their existence even IF they’re well-made and presented as rational and reasonable. If you stack the deck even further against yourself by making your critique encompass the behind-the-scenes making-of (that is almost hardly ever made public and necessitates assumption, conjecture, theory-crafting applied to REAL people, and typically a bunch of bad information) and then you couch the actual film criticism part of your review as a “two hour rage” it shouldn’t be a mystery as to why people might avoid it on general principle.

Advocates for this sort of online rage obviously benefit financially from this approach because appealing to prurient interests and unearned anger is a good grift on the algorithm-focused platform that is YouTube. But it’s also worth keeping in mind a lot of people prefer to enjoy things, and not “rage” at them. If you present a thing that is asking for two-hours of your time and you’re promising it will be filled with “rage” people will probably give it a pass as there’s enough “rage” inducing content out there in people’s real lives that giving more time to it (over something as low-stakes as a Star Wars movie) will seem pretty unappealing.

I still haven’t read or heard a piece of criticism about Rise of Skywalker that did as much to point out the film’s weaknesses in a clear, concise, easy-to-understand (and feel) manner than the film freak central review, and even if someone took the harshest possible interpretation of that review as a “rage” it still wouldn’t come close to 10 minutes if someone simply read it aloud, and it takes even less time to actually read. “Two Hour Rage” is the sort of indulgence that only in a very, very rare instance could possibly justify itself, and I have hard time believing “MauLer” on YouTube is gonna manage that justification.

Right… So you’re basically judging a book by its cover.