What's So Great About That?

An upcoming web series about film and television. In the meantime, enjoy the image and gif sets I'm compiling.

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Greetings and Salutations! I just wanted to say that I appreciate the work and dedication you put into your video essays, especially your in-depth analysis of film. I’m sure that you receive many recommendations on what film to analyze next, but I couldn’t help but recommend something. If you haven’t seen the German satire Es ist Wieder Da (2015) or in English Look Who’s Back, I cannot recommend it enough. I won’t spoil it, but the film follow Hitler in modern day Germany.

Hello! I have no idea when you sent this message haha but I’ve only just seen it!Thank you very much :D

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My head: don’t make a cliche meme out of Frozen 2 My heart: [see gif]

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 31 Blue: The Most Human Colour Blue is the world's favourite colour, so what does this colour mean to us?

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 30 Untitled Goose Game: Is it Good to be Bad? The nameless goose of Untitled Goose Game has been declared an agent of chaos, but is it really chaos that makes inhabiting its destructive body so satisfying?

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 29 Horror is the Best Genre (and here's why) When we weigh the merits of media, there's a tendency towards to absolutes, towards seemingly objective statements. And this is similarly a feature of the writing on 'why people like horror', which tends to focus on scientific studies and cites the adrenaline of safe scares as the cause. But horror as a genre is much more concerned with the interstitial, the malleable, the uncertain -  a genre that, even outside the context of art, strives to make a mockery of objectivity.

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 28 The Speed (and Stillness) of Being Online (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the memes) We're all familiar with the idea that, with each passing decade, we're moving ever faster, becoming more and more easily distracted - but, in the age of the hour long YouTube video and the increasingly overwhelming volume of media, can an argument be made for the opposite? 

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 27 First-Person Shooter: Mysterious Photography in Firewatch

We're all good at finding evidence to justify our personal narratives, whether it's believing we're the centre of a conspiracy or using one minor mechanic to thematically explore and entire game. This essay looks at Campo Santo's 'Firewatch' through the lens of its virtual camera.

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 26 Kondo-Culture: The Fall of the House of Stuff

The recent decline of objects goes beyond decluttering, so why are we suddenly so keen on getting rid of things? And what role do objects play in our increasingly digital world? This essay follows the rise and fall of 'stuff', through art, philosophy and Marie Kondo.

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 25 Phantom You [Tube]: Fighting Our Digital Doubles

With our online and offline lives becoming increasingly connected, to what extent do we create our own other? And to what effect? Since the 1990s, horror and sci-fi have considered how we might create our own worst enemy - and the friendly face of this dystopian future is yours.

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 24 Spirited Away: What’s In A Name? The importance of names is a recurring idea in both philosophy and fiction. How do we define object and meaning, how do we define identity - and, of course, the most pressing question: "how did you know my name?" And Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 film 'Spirited Away' provides a kind of index for this mythology of naming. 

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 23 Next Stop, Analysis: The Contradictory Trains of Cinema

Ever since the Lumière brothers’ ‘Arrival of A Train At La Ciotat Station’, the train has been embedded in both English and cinematic language, with too many iconic scenes and potential puns to ever fit in one video. The train transcends genre, the setting of adventure, romance, horror and mystery. So how can it be so many things at once?

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 22 From Zombies to Cannibals: Finding Humanity in ‘Raw’

Zombies have always interrogated our humanity, but flesh-eating is no longer about the dead but the living, and Julia Ducournau's Raw suggests that it speaks to something more human than monster. As a mortician tells a detective in the Mexican film 'We Are What We Are': “It’s shocking how many people eat other in this city.”

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 21 Adventure Time and the Nature of Endings

From it's ageing protagonist to visions of apocalypse, Adventure Time has always been driven towards it's own end. But if every ending is also a beginning, what does it even mean to end?

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Adventure Time | Sunsets

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 20 Feathered Foes: Birds in Horror

There's no shortage of birds in horror. Perched on grave stones, flying into windows or just turning up dead. So, what is it about birds specifically that endears them to the makers of horror films? Why are they always rapping, rapping at our chamber door?

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What’s So Great About That: Episode 19 The Last Unicorn: Why Must You Always Speak In Riddles

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle is a book of riddles. Nothing is as it seems, and no one will give you a straight answer. But what can be gained from this evasiveness, in being cryptic and deceptive? Why must you always speak in riddles?

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What’s So Great About That?: Episode 18 Evil Dead: Loving The Unnatural

The special effects in 'The Evil Dead' don't have the same impact now as they did in 1981, but there's something uniquely appealing about this sort of low budget production. So what draws us to these crude effects? And in what way do they recontextualise how we look at imperfection and failure?