The Weekend Review: League of Super Critics Part 1 - The Best of Nostalgia Critic

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

The reason why this installment of The Weekend Review is so late largely comes down to not knowing what to write about.  I didn't see or play or read anything especially memorable this week.  The movies I rented were either extremely "okay" (Return of the Living Dead, Conan the Barbarian and The Exorcist III) or were pushed back until during the week (ie, Cloud Atlas).  I'm slowly working my way through Alpha Sapphire right now, but really don't have much in the way of a review about it right now.  Work aside, it was just a lazy weekend that I mostly spent web-surfing.

Aye, now there's the rub!  The majority of my aforementioned web-surfing came in the form of catching up on the League of Super Critics: in particular Nostalgia Critic, Nostalgia Chick and Cinema Snob.  After all, this article series isn't about big-budget entertainment - just entertainment in general, which means that these minor internet celebrities are legitimately on the table for discussion.

But why limit myself to just one critic when there are so many to choose from?  So for the next three weeks, I will be reviewing the best of the best: the best videos featuring the Nostalgia Critic, Nostalgia Chick and Cinema Snob.  So now I present the short-list for the best video's featuring the League's headliner: Nostalgia Critic.

5 - The Lorax  Despite the incredibly weak film that he chose to review, Nostalgia Critic's review of The Lorax is surprisingly filled to the brim  with a combination of incredibly entertaining scripted material and incredibly warranted criticism.  It's the first time that we are introduced to recurring nemesis Hyper Fan Girl: a weirdly endearing character who not only features in videos that barely missed the grade (Old vs New: Spider-Man Movies), but also on a video which appears higher up on this list (spoilers).

The narrative framework for the episode features two pandering network executives who produce cheap, disposable and ultimately forgettable schlock to a dumbed-down, focus-grouped audience simply to generate as much profit as quickly as possible.  And while their interactions with Critic are hilariously droll in of themselves, it does lead to a surprisingly reassuring reveal (especially when other critics would pessimistically write off the film at best and doom-say the end of quality childrens' movies at worst).

While adaptations such as The Lorax (and The Grinch and The Cat in the Hat) are all invariably terrible, they do serve an unseen social function: popular enough by themselves so that they're widely seen and discussed, but terrible enough to draw that same audience back to the books upon which they're based.  While Dr. Suess' body of work is exceptionally written (despite being aimed at children), it's a fact that is largely taken for granted.  People need to be reminded of the classics, even if reminding them means making a terrible movie based off of them, because watching a train-wreck on screen will invariably draw people back to the books that got the story, characters and even basic premise right in the first place.

4 - Princess Diaries 2  This video takes Nostalgia Critic's relationship with Hyper Fan Girl to its logical extreme.  She abducts him under threat of violence in order to force him to review Princess Diaries 2 with her and, invariably, fall in love with her in the process.  She even seduces him with a veritable treasure trove of testosterone-fueled nostalgia - comic books, trading cards, VHS action movies, retro video games.  They play off of each other with practised ease, and their friendly neighborhood hit man varyingly provides over-the-top seriousness with his gruff voice and over-sized gun as well as carefully timed interjections of narratively subversive humor.

But even with so much attention and screen time devoted to the frame story, the commentary on the film - which can only be described as God-awful - is some of the entertaining that Critic's ever put to film.  Parsing through Princess Diaries 2 in the intensive detail that they do leads to a surprising revelation about cinema:"it's not about giving people what they want, it's about helping people discover what they need [...] to balance out excessiveness with variety and intelligence," even if that just means watching Expendibles 3 while reading Jane Austin.

3 - Top 11 Underrated Nostalgic Classics  In a lot of ways, I think that Nostalgia Critic is better known in the annals of the internet for his top 11 lists than he is for his reviews of individual movies.  It's easy to see why: the lists are essentially a condensed series of mini-reviews that, owing to the absence of Critic's usual brand of elaborate scripted comedy, are often much shorter than his typical episodes.  Of these, his list of underrated classics is both his best and most memorable.

While I generally think of Nostalgia Critic as a comic first and a substantive critic as a distant (although still valid) second, this video highlights the critic in him best.  Divorced from stagy, hit-and-miss humor, he gives succinct and insightful reviews of a sizable number of films that are admittedly overlooked far too often.  Of course I don't agree with every inclusion, it struggles with the same issue that I did when reviewing Oliver & Company: is a movie really underrated if everybody agrees that it's underrated (or, conversely, if it was a popular success when it first came out?

2 - The Shining Mini Series  As I mentioned above, Nostalgia Critic is prone to excessive, elaborate, stagy, hit-or-miss humor.  That's not to say that it's bad at all, just that it falls flat as often as it meaningfully connects with me.  Even within an otherwise great set-up (like Princess Diaries 2), there always seems to be a joke that falls flat at just the wrong time (when Hyper Fan Girl blows up like Wile E. Coyote because she didn't update her software before replaying the movie).  His review of The Shining mini series, however, suffers from none of this: being truly and consistently hilarious throughout its 42+ minute run-time.

Critic is also substantive in a way that he rarely is outside of his lists, not just reenacting extensive scenes from the film to comedic effective, but comparing and contrasting it with the original Stanley Kubrick film.  In the end, he even admits the relative strengths of both adaptations, and that, at least in respect to portraying the psychology of its protagonist, the mini series was superior to the more viscerally thrilling film.

1 - Sailor Moon  This is unequivocally my favorite Nostalgia Critic video.  Although his frame narrative doesn't compare favorably against The Shining or Princess Diaries 2, it is not only funny, but avoids the pitfalls that his frame narratives often suffer from.  It even takes a few comedic swipes at other formulaic - if well-remembered - tv series like Full House and Home Improvement.

Despite the weaker framework, this episode best combines humor and criticism in an organic way that actually highlights exactly how funny and how insightful his commentary is.  His digressions concerning the age of the characters on the series, as well as the age of consent in Japan, are single-handedly the funniest he has ever been: even taking self-referential issue that he included the title character on his list of hottest animated women.

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