Tag: The Critical Drinker

Riding High on a Horse in a Star-Spangled Rodeo

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So, I’m making the plunge.  I’ve joined BookFunnel and I’ll be running a giveaway for e-copies of the “The Sniper” starting pretty soon.  The trick now will be to get as much visibility for the giveaway as I can.  So, I’ll publicize it here (of course) and I’ll put up a post on X and I’ll tell everybody I can think of that likes this kind of story.  My plan, such as it is, is to use the giveaway to garner as many reviews as I can and try to get the book more attention.  And after that I’ll put it up on Kindle Unlimited to tempt the general public that tests out its fiction one page at a time.

Will it work?  Well, I certainly hope it will but I’ll find out for sure whether I can interest the world at large.  I was listening to the Critical Drinker interview Andy Weir about the success of two of his books being turned into movies.  But I was just as interested in his story about self-publishing.  His “The Martian” was self-published on Amazon and struggled to find an audience in the beginning.  So, it’s kind of that one in a million-success story that inspires the other 999,999 writers out there toiling away in obscurity.  So just to clear the air ahead of time, for the movie version of “The Sniper,” I want Adam Baldwin to play Bogey and Gary Oldman to play Cutter.  Nick Searcy would make a good Chastain.  As for Connors, I haven’t made up my mind.  And the other parts are also up for grabs but definitely no Hollywood weirdos; that’s for sure.  I think Christopher Walken would make a good President Miller.  He’s always able to provide a memorably psychopathic character when required.  Of course I’m hoping to get myself a bit part.  Sort of like how Stan Lee always got a cameo in the Marvel superhero movies.  Maybe I can be one of the clerks at the airport in Baghdad.  I think I could really handle the part with style and finesse.  Sort of a latter-day Olivier.

But I will say it is a little discouraging to see just how much grunt work there is in navigating the world of self-publishing.  The experts don’t really seem to know that much more than the people wandering around in the dark like me.  Sure, they have a sense of things like keywords and how to attach to other books that are already popular but it doesn’t seem like they can tap into any magic formula for shining a spotlight on a new book.  It reminds me of that Glenn Campbell song “Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Where hustle’s the name of the game and nice guys get washed away by the snow and the rain.”  Of course, that’s a little dramatic because I’m doing this from the comfort of my dining room where it’s relatively warm and dry.  But metaphorically I’m pounding that digital pavement so I can sing the blues along with Mr. Campbell.

Critical Drinker Re-reviews “Falling Down”

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The Critical Drinker is a movie reviewer who provides a very entertaining product.  He’s a younger guy but he’s actually quite astute.  I like the movie “Falling Down” and I like this review for the insights he brings to it from his point of view as a foreigner (Scot).

I think I’ll rewatch it and review it myself.

Bad News – Good News

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So last night was the 97th Oscars.  Now, of course, I didn’t watch them.  I’m too old to waste several hours of my life watching boring awards show drivel about movies that no one in his right mind would actually watch and that’s even if seeing them was free of charge (which they are not).  I didn’t watch them but earlier I did hear about some of the best picture contenders.  One of them was the impossibly bad and unthinkably stupid “Emilia Pérez” which I mocked mercilessly in a post based on the movie trailer.  Another leading contender “The Brutalist” was a 3.5-hour epic about an immigrant architect from 1930s Hungary which includes the male protagonist being raped by his boss.  And a case could be made that wasn’t the worst part of the movie.  Matt Walsh reviewed it here so I was spared the horror of even watching the trailer.  And I hear the best picture winner was a movie called “Anora” which was about a sex worker that apparently contained a good 45 minutes of something resembling pornography.  Wow.

And so there we are for Hollywood 2025.  The best of the best are movies that no one would go to see and if anything actually entertaining somehow sneaks in then it will be panned by the critics and consigned to anonymity.  So that’s the way things have been run for the last fifteen years or so.  At this point even the wildly popular fantasy and superhero movies have been forced to conform to racial and gender social justice casting and plot requirements so that all the fun and excitement have been sucked out of them.  So, mission accomplished, Hollywood has murdered itself as an entertainment industry.  Requiescat in pacem.

Alright, let me try for the good news a bit.  Generation Z doesn’t go to the movies.  They play video games; they watch movies based on the video games they like.  And these movies about video games are written by “influencers” that play the same video games and have literally millions of young people following them on-line.  In other words, Netflix or some other media company will provide resources to an influencer to make a movie based on the fact that a guaranteed audience in the millions already exists for this product.

As an example, there is a guy on-line who reviews movies.  He calls himself “The Critical Drinker.”  He has 2.24 million subscribers and who knows how many casual watchers for his review videos.  He is also an author of suspense and espionage novels.  And because of his following (which is not particularly large as influencers go) he recently had a short movie made from one of his stories.  Now I’ve only watched ten minutes or so of this video but looking at the production quality, it’s equal to any of the series of this sort that gets made by Amazon or Netflix or the other studios that are taking away business from the old guard companies in Hollywood.  And recently I listened to a podcast where one of my favorite unwoke (meaning normal and entertaining) urban fantasy novelists Larry Correia was talking about these very things with The Critical Drinker.  And putting two and two together I’m guessing that people on my side of the political divide are thinking it might finally be possible to get movies made without the gatekeepers poisoning them or just plain stopping them as they’ve always done up till now.

Now, I’m not a Pollyanna.  A lot of the stuff that the kids watch is pretty goofy stuff.  The storytelling isn’t Dostoevsky.  In fact, it isn’t even Mickey Spillane.  But that’s alright.  You have to start somewhere.  The main thing is a pipeline has to be established where an audience and a creative type can trade money for entertainment without the woke gatekeepers controlling everything.  And that’s what I think is already beginning to happen.  Sure, it’ll start at the level of video game fan fiction.  But that’s no different from the pulp novels and the early movies like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  From such humble beginnings can come much better work.

Now, will I live to see anything worthwhile come of this?  Stay tuned and I’ll let you know.

An Entertaining Movie Review of “Independence Day”

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There is a YouTube channel for a guy that calls himself “The Critical Drinker.”  He has some kind of Gaelic brogue whether it’s Irish or Scottish or fake.  And he pretends to be drunk in every review.  And he swears a blue streak so be warned in advance that his videos are not safe for work or home or anywhere that genteel ears are present.  But he is extremely funny and his criticism is often very accurate.  This review of Independence Day is well done and identifies why this ridiculous film is still so enjoyable despite being a ridiculous film.