Anghus Houvouras on Jordan Vogt-Roberts and the value of Cinema Sins…
Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts delivered one of the most satisfying blockbusters of 2017 with Kong: Skull Island. Given the film’s popularity, it was only a matter of time before it wound up going through the gauntlet of YouTube channels that dissect pop culture like an obsessive-compulsive mortician.
In recent years a number of different channels on YouTube have emerged as purveyors of cinematic satire. One of the most popular is the ‘Everything Wrong With’ series over at CinemaSins, a channel that prides themselves on savagely raking any and every popular film over an acre of broken glass assigning ‘sins’ for every plot hole, continuity error or perceived gaffe.
This has ruffled the beard hairs of Vogt-Roberts who took to Twitter in his own feverish dismantling of the ‘Everything Wrong With Kong: Skull Island‘ video. In a real-time style stream of consciousness rebuttal, Vogt-Roberts took the channel to task, saying “Things like CinemaSins simply suck the life blood of other people and are often just wrong about intent or how cinema works. It’s terrible.”
I used to enjoy CinemaSins. Back when the channel first launched and the videos were coming in around four to five minutes. Originally the channel posted marginally amusing content with some slight observations. Now each video is nearly 20 minutes long and the comments are a melange of poorly thought out snark that feels brutally forced. Like many YouTube channels, the content has suffered greatly by attempts to elongate content to achieve higher earnings and attempts to diversify the brand by rolling out the EWW brand to music videos, commercials and anything else deserving of their contempt.
A channel like CinemaSins feels like an inevitability in this meta culture we currently exist within. Where thoughtful analysis goes generally unappreciated but a long-winded bout of bile spewing earns you millions of followers. You can’t call Jordan Vogt-Roberts an unbiased party in this, but does he have a point? Is CinemaSins another example of the disintegration of the concept of film criticism? There are those who would argue that CinemaSins is an avenue of entertainment and their commentary is more comedy than criticism. Does it’s non-serious nature immediately invalidate any actual criticism of the disservice Cinema Sins does to the cinematic medium?
CinemaSins is another classic example of the evolution of binary theory. Everything is a “0” or “1” i.e. a masterpiece or a piece of shit. Audiences have been weaned on the concept that every movie has to be graded on a pass/fail mechanic. The Everything Wrong With series is an uglier genesis of this theory. Every movie they tackle is automatically considered a failure. Even well-reviewed, popular movies get poured through a filter of ‘wrong’. It’s classic deconstructionism in a way that feels both easy and strained.
I think Vogt-Roberts has brought up a valuable point: more time is spent online deconstructing stories than creating them. He pointed out the “Pilot length videos” from Cinema Sins. YouTube as a creative medium seems much more interested in useless commentary than storytelling. During a similar train of thought Vogt-Roberts said:
It just gets me that a lot of things get critique seem to have a lack of understanding of cinematic lincense / has an odd disdain of film…
— (((Jordan Vogt-Roberts))) (@VogtRoberts) August 15, 2017
For me, that’s the the core of this bile-spewing black heart. I find CinemaSins ultimately dissatisfying because it comes from an ugly place. One where no film is ever above their pissing-on process and no filmmaker is smarter than the faceless off-camera commentator shouting barbs from the back row.
Eventually, the gimmick begins to feel less like amusing satire and more like beating a dead horse. And as long as Cinema Sins has been pouring out content, that horse is little more than a pile of bloody pulp.
Anghus Houvouras
Originally published August 15, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
