The Critical Drinker
Why is the YouTube Podcast so popular?
The Critical Drinker is a terrific channel on YouTube, but with some caveats. His take on things, especially movie reviews, are extremely entertaining and right on the mark. You can tell he's a professional fiction writer from the way he presents his diatribes in an entertaining manner.
In his older videos from several years ago, the Drinker's speech is meant to sound as if he is drunk and slurring. The newer videos don't focus on that style anymore and now he focuses more on sarcasm and ranting.
That was a natural evolution in his presentation style, and thank god, because sounding inebriated gets old really fast. His video podcast has a comedic aspect and his delivery (when not pretending to be drunk) is very fun to listen to. He also participates in larger group discussions live with friends and has a pretty huge core audience of people who enjoy his content.
The Critical Drinker is a producer and writer known for Rogue Elements: A Ryan Drake Story and the Dick Dynamite1944. His YouTube channel officially started in 2012 has risen to prominence for critically reviewing movies. He has built a huge following by destroying a lot of the movie industry in his straightforward and compelling takes.
He adds new content just about twice a week and his certainly a more provocative entertainer than many other mainstream reviewers. Like many online creatives, his YouTube movies reviews went viral unexpectedly during COVID when people had nothing to do.
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. I think it is easy to understand what leads to his popularity for a couple of reasons:
- People like to hear about the bad side of things more than the good side of things.
- There is a LOT of bad coming out of Hollywood and Disney right now.
Background
Just who is this Drinker, I hear you ask?
The Critical Drinker is actually named Will Jordan. He was born in 1983 in Fife, Scotland, UK. The Kingdom of Fife is also known throughout the world as the Home of Golf and boasts more than forty courses, from the famed fairways of St Andrews and several traditional seaside links to beautifully landscaped parkland and heathland courses suitable for golfers of all levels.
He has been married since 2009 and has two children.
He does have a tendency to attack movies with a strong focus on diversity, and it is easy to label him as misogynist at face value.
For example, he attacks films where Hollywood is attempting to include more inclusion of non-binary characters, more women, and representation of minorities. It is incredibly easy to chock this up to: "he is just another racist and sexist asshole" but his content doesn't generally focus on the race or sex of characters, and more the mission statement coming from Hollywood, the actors, or what the mainstream media is presenting.
An example of this is his most recent review of The Marvels.
His points aren't generally covering the actors themselves, but rather the tiredness of the entire MCU, the pathetic writing (both of this movie and the streak of things that brought us to this project...for example, making Captain Marvel the most powerful being in the universe and having to create a silly "problem" so that she can't fix things instantly) and other outlying details.
The Drinker definitely exists within a certain ecosystem of entertainers, and he wants to maintain popularity with other conservative leaning commentators and grow his audience. This is at the expense of more liberal leaning folks.
He doesn't seem to believe that change for change's sake is a blessing, and he stands firmly against "the message" that Hollywood has been selling for the last twelve years.
He rallies aginst inclusion for it's own sake, which is a negative viewpoint to promote even when he is correct. Hollywood has pretty well bombed itself out of existence with their recent goal of pushing projects they think people need instead of creating projects people want and ask for, and is certainly struggling to find a new path to making money, but this was done in service of trying to make the world a "better place" for diverse people.
In and of itself, this isn't a bad idea, and the only true issue with it is that when the only focus is on the diversity and not the storytelling, both the medium itself AND the diverse people being shoehorned into every project suffer. If, instead, good projects were created that featured a diverse cast without bashing the audience in the face with their "diversity" they would thrive.
Woke
Overused and meaningless
"Woke" is a term that the Drinker does not use very much. He believes the term woke is overused and meaningless at this point. He says:
'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.'
To him, you are watching a movie and getting involved in the story. Then there's a message or a lecture. It takes the focus away from the movie you are actually watching.
Whether or not you are conservative or progressive or liberal, the Drinker provides a venue to skewer Hollywood and what Hollywood thinks the average person wants to watch.
Go away now!
