"Bring me back!" Hovering over Doug Walker’s creations in recent months – The Nostalgic Critic, Bomge Chester, Kick Assia, The Suburban Knights, To Boldly Flee, and a highly specialized amusement like the Critic and AVGN standoff – I’ve sometimes wondered: Did Doug do the right thing? Not the worst director and screenwriter in the world, a huge charisma actor, just a person with inexhaustible reserves of movie mania and specific humor, in general, no matter how you throw, the personality is interesting - he actually locked himself in his own world - the site of That Guy In Glasses. Almost everything that he shot until recently, one way or another was intended for “his”, the audience of this site, and a simple viewer who stumbled onto his film by chance could at worst not even understand who all these people are and what they are doing, and at best simply not catch some jokes and other pleasant nuances. I was very interested - that's what would have happened if Doug tried not to "surprise his only anthill", but to shoot something that does not rely on Criticism in any way, just a movie, just a series? Wouldn’t that be enough for him?
As it turned out, such thoughts came to mind and himself.
In 2012, Doug broke with Critic's reviews. It was supposed to be forever. You can understand in any case – these reviews have been published for four and a half years, and you can imagine how tired Doug was of them. The departure from the scene of this star of the Internet plot beat in the last released then film – “To Boldly Flee”, and Doug sawed another project – a parody pseudo-documentary series “Demo Reel”.
This is an amateur studio: director Donnie Dupre and four of his assistants. Together, they do what they do to remake Hollywood hit films in their own way to make them better. And, of course, none of these things ever work out.
It began as good-natured, but boring parodies of "The Dark Knight" and "Ralph", but, starting with the fourth episode, the series began to really develop and eventually turned into a whole drama about what can do to a man creepy Hollywood machine. And not only Hollywood, but in general... related to the movie. They make these movies that are supposed to make you feel good and escape the horrors of real life, but when you come to Hollywood, those horrors meet you. Frost on the skin and from Donnie's bitter venomous speech at the home of two obsessed lunatics, ridiculing him over and over again. Doug Walker vs. Hollywood as before! This time, he is talking about him seriously. He looks at him not from the outside, but from the inside. Not from the point of view of a harmful pesky viewer, but from the point of view of a filmmaker who did not want anything bad for anyone, but he was booed by just such viewers. And then there's Donnie's team thinking, "Why write if no one says you can write? Play if no one says you can play?" And the perfectly correct conclusion is that no matter what happened in the past, no matter how stupid and terrible it may be, do not let it block your future.
Is that weird for you? Yeah, if you know what Doug's been doing for four and a half years before... it's very, very significant. On the other hand, hasn’t he been on the other side, making a movie on his own and feeling what it’s like not to be accepted? (I saw his cursed reviews of his own films - dull, unpleasant, unfunny reviews, like a tortured smile through the grimace of annoyance). And the idea that it all boiled down to for Donnie and the company... what did it mean to him, who broke with the past at the time for the future? In any case, it was, of course, an unexpected and wise act to give a look at the situation from the point of view of "in every way they are like us." Even with what happened next.
For it turns out that Doug's passion for film, humor and reviews hasn't really gone away. And he, again, played this plot in the final episode, in which he starred in the role of himself and made it clear that this series did not work out, that “reviews should continue”, that he will still not be able to unleash with the Critic and that the experience “beyond” in any case was not superfluous.
And that very episode, Review Must Go On, is one of the best, seriously, one of the best films I've ever seen on the subject of creativity and the relationship of the creator with his creation. This is just an episode of an amateur web series. Filmed, again, for his own - the plot is associated not only with "Demo Reel", but also with "To Boldly Flee", and with "The Critic". In some places, he, as well as much of Doug, significantly sags. But the short scenes, where he agonizes over the most important decision for him, redeem almost everything. Behind him is his favorite child - in a hat and with a flat tie, selfish, harmful, obnoxious - and begs, pleads, demands: "Bring me back!" Bring me back! This is your destiny! ... The passion for cinema, the desire to make people laugh. I know you're hungry for that... Who says you can’t do other things? It is supposed to be, and you know what, I believe it! The great temptation of the creative person, choosing between “fate” and the need to move on, is here in all its glory, it vibrates in the air. And even in isolation from the Critic, this is such an interesting dilemma! And when you look at the retired Doug and the brazenly grinning Critic, they are literally one shot, one look you can distinguish, so they are different here.
Well... Reviews returned, and even in an updated format (the screensaver, two-week periodicity, framing plots, many secondary roles, the heading “Editorial”), and nothing prevented Doug from shooting in 2013 a 40-minute and, in principle, a good film “Dragonbored”, which has nothing to do with the activities of the site. Now I know for sure that Doug Walker could not live alone with laughter, but the laughter is definitely sweeter and closer to him. And it is fun, unobtrusive to stir up the audience’s skepticism and criticism – it is no less good than to shoot dramas, albeit good ones. Either way, he will have something to remember. And we will have something to remember, in the best sense. And if the creation took place, and it definitely took place, then in this form or another. What does it matter?