Ignore The Critical Drinker at your peril, Hollywood.
Few movie scribes slam bad movies like Scotland’s YouTube sensation. The Drinker’s withering putdowns have earned him nearly 2 million subscribers.
It helps that Tinsel Town keeps lecturing audiences instead of entertaining them. That’s where the Drinker shines.
“There’s nothing wrong whatsoever with progressive messages and interesting ideas being put forward by movies,” The Drinker tells The Hollywood in Toto Podcast. “That is fine by me to the point where it crosses over into woke. And this is a word that I don’t like to use very often in my own videos because it’s been overused to the point where it’s essentially meaningless right now.”
What’s woke to the Drinker?
“It’s when political messaging and ideology gets in the way of the actual story that you want to tell,” he says. “It becomes the overriding factor that takes precedence over good storytelling, good character development … all that stuff.”
Woke, he adds, also “takes you out of the experience.”
“You’re watching a movie. You’re getting wrapped up in the story. You care about the characters and then boom, there’s a lecture, there’s a message and it’s so obvious,” he says. “It’s in neon lights, and then all of a sudden you’re thinking about that, not the story.”
The Drinker tackles the biggest movies of the moment, often drawing a huge crowd in the process. His takedowns of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” scored more than 10 million views in total.
He’s also unafraid of reviewing films like “Lady Ballers,” a comedy that sent some critics scrambling for cover. He didn’t love The Daily Wire’s subversive comedy nor how his fellow movie reviewers avoided the film entirely.
“It’s an element of intellectual cowardice, as far as I’m concerned,” he says, describing a “guilt by association” sentiment tied to the comedy.
“Even just talking about a film like that, like instantly gets you labeled as being right wing somehow in certain circles,” he says.
The Drinker may have his share of right-leaning fans, but he doesn’t apply partisan filters to his critiques.
“I approach it very much from a politically neutral standpoint. And that’s always been my opinion on movie reviewing or media consumption or anything like that,” he says. “I’m not interested in the politics blinders. I just want to review on its own merits.”
The Critical Drinker, much like The Quartering, Pop Culture Crisis and Nerdrotic, appears to be right-leaning in nature.
That’s hardly the case.
“My general view of politics is like, Oh, God, that’s the stuff for old men, like, it’s so boring. I don’t want to get involved,” he says. “As a movie reviewer, you want to try and be apolitical because I don’t want to automatically s*** on a movie just because it’s liberal or because it’s conservative. I don’t want to discount certain stories or certain viewpoints just because they fall within a certain point on the political spectrum.“
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The past 12 months have seen a rise in content from outside mainstream thinking, be it Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” anthem or The Daily Wire’s “Lady Ballers.” The Drinker notes that some projects have “punctured the bubble,” letting consumers see something fresh that hails outside the standard Hollywood gatekeepers.
He says shows like “South Park,” which routinely skewer subjects most comedians won’t touch, cross over in ways that should frighten traditional Hollywood.
“I think what you have to do is puncture the bubble. And the way you do that is through shows or movies that cross those boundaries,” he says of the Comedy Central series.
Consider the “Joining the Panderverse” episode of “South Park,” an installment that mocked Disney’s far-Left transformation.
“That’s a show that is mainstream enough that people in the industry would know about it,” he says. “And when it happens, it sends ripples through what they do. That’s how you change the perception. Because it’s one thing for comedians to be operating on their own streaming platform, or YouTube or whatever, and you can choose to watch that or ignore it. But that’s the stuff that really crosses the boundaries, things that have appeal to both sides of the divide.”
The Drinker shares which prominent filmmaker thanked him for a positive review, recommends a killer new Netflix show and much more in the full Hollywood in Toto Podcast interview.
The post Why Critical Drinker Avoids the Word ‘Woke’ (When Possible) appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.