The Take
This is the Take. It's where you come to understand more about your favorite movies, shows and culture. Our video essays make the story worlds you enter richer and deeper. Think: Endings Explained, Character Studies, Hidden Messages and Symbols Revealed, Actor and Director Profiles, and more.
We want to share our love of visual culture with the world. So here's our Take.
426
The 30 Crisis - Adulting When Adulthood's Unatt...
What’s expected by the time we turn 30 has changed drastically over the last decades, leading to the new 30-crisis, as seen in titles like tick, tick... BOOM!, Inside, Starstruck and The Worst Person In The World.
18 min
427
The Power of The Dog, Ending Explained - The Me...
The Power of the Dog is ultimately a story about how toxic masculinity is a corrosive force that destroys people from the inside, and so the movie’s title refers to those dark, secret selves we fear.
23 min
428
West Side Story - All The Differences Between T...
While 1961’s West Side Story is a tragic love story with a laser focus on the Romeo and Juliet romance between Tony and Maria, Stephen Spielberg’s 2021 update is a wider story about the bigger forces in society that contribute to hate.
23 min
429
How I Met Your Mother - Why Dating Rules Don't ...
On How I Met Your Mother, Barney's "rules of dating" reflect our “laws” about how to act on a hook-up, who’s an acceptable match, and how a potential partner’s behaviors should be interpreted. But real love demands throwing out the rulebook.
23 min
430
Modern Family’s Gloria - A New Second Wife Play...
Modern Family's Gloria Pritchett tore up the "second wife" playbook, proved those caricatures aren’t all real, and gave us hope that sometimes you really can get it right the second time around.
22 min
431
The Celebrity + “Normo” Romance Boom - Normal i...
Celebrities - they’re just like us! Or that’s what we like to believe, and nothing sells that story better than when celebrities get together with “normos”.
21 min
432
Why Game of Thrones Already Feels Dated
Game Of Thrones rushed toward a finale that left a confusing and disappointing legacy. So, are we ready yet to talk about the show again - and can it ever regain that place in our hearts?
20 min
433
The “Cheugy” Problem - Why No One Can Keep Up w...
When does something stop being trendy, and start being "cheugy" – and is it time to just stop trying ever to be “up to date”?
15 min
434
Licorice Pizza and Love in Paul Thomas Anderson...
Paul Thomas Anderson's films present a portrait of love that entails accepting the good, the bad, and the ugly in another person – seeing all your partner's flaws and adoring them anyway.
21 min
435
The Disposable Black Love Interest - A Tokenist...
We can spot the “Disposable Black Love Interest” character almost instantly: they’re the fleeting guest star, presented as great in theory, yet we know the main character’s not actually going to end up with them.
22 min
436
How Euphoria Visualizes Feelings
When you’re a teenager everything can feel overwhelming and intense. Euphoria takes this to an extreme, communicating "emotional realism" through cinematic techniques.
21 min
437
The Material Girl Trend - Buying Your Way to Em...
The Material Girl TikTok Trend can be viewed as an inclusive rallying cry for marginalized people and increasingly disenfranchised youth to declare and flaunt their fabulousness, however much material wealth they have (or don’t...).
17 min
438
Unreliable Narrators - Why We Love To Be Lied To
Unreliable narrators of books, film, and TV often explore mental illness, the fickle nature of memory, and revisionist bias. And these days, it’s gotten harder and harder to trust the narrator of any story, fictional or not. This is the unreliable narrator, explained... Or is it?
20 min
439
How Margot Robbie Escaped The “Bombshell Trap”
Margot Robbie has always managed to bring something extra to her "bombshell" roles, but she became a master of her own destiny and widened the range of roles available to her by developing not just as an actor but as a producer.
22 min
440
Inventing Anna - American Dream Gone Haywire
Anna Delvey embodies the 21st century American dream gone haywire in a “fake it 'till you make it” world that treats image as reality. So what lessons can we take from her playbook on how to hustle?
14 min
441
That Girl: Turning Self-Care Into a Job
While "That Girl's" lifestyle promises shortcuts toward fulfillment, does it actually create more work, and raise expectations for women yet higher?
20 min
442
The Imperfect Mom Onscreen - Why She Deserves t...
The Imperfect Mother is so jarring because she doesn’t fall in line with our culture’s assumption that a good mother must be selfless. The controversy around this figure reveals we haven’t come as far as we might think.
22 min
443
Bennifer - The One Who Didn't Get Away
Why are we even more enthralled by Bennifer’s second go-round than their first one? In part, it’s because we’re fascinated by the concept of “the one that got away.”
22 min
444
Pam & Tommy - Our Obsession with the Barbie-Bad...
The upcoming release of the Pam & Tommy miniseries coincides perfectly with the resurgence of interest in Barbie-&-the-Bad-Boy pairings to reexamine the couple’s cultural significance, as well as the most infamous part of their story - the leaked sex tape.
18 min
445
How I Met Your Father - Why We Crave Comfort TV
How I Met Your Father understands that today, the totally uncynical rom-com sitcom is a rare, if not extinct, relic – but that struggle to keep believing in love is still real if not far more dire.
21 min
446
The Matrix Ending Explained: A Guide to Freeing...
The Matrix is far more than a sci-fi action classic - it's a practical guide to freeing your mind and fulfilling your potential, to becoming "The One" yourself. The Wachowskis ground-breaker - now celebrating its 20th anniversary - shows us how to follow the 7 steps of Neo's journey to Enlightenment.
26 min
447
And Just Like That - What It Got Wrong (And Wha...
While And Just Like That faltered early on, it ultimately got its groove back, and left us with the classic Sex And The City takeaway that it’s the ever-evolving relationship you have with yourself that matters most.
22 min
448
Pam Beesly - The Perils of Being Normal
Pam Beesly is the "normal" one in The Office. Is that actually a good thing? Here's our take and find out how being normal is both the strength and the downfall of our favorite "Girl Next Desk."
22 min
449
How I Met Your Mother - The Mother Deserved Better
How I Met Your Mother's Tracy was the perfect love interest viewers spent 9 seasons waiting for... and then the finale undercut the romantic ideals at the show's core and underestimated it's audience by treating the Mother as disposable.
22 min
450
The Little Mermaid as a Queer Allegory, Explained
Is The Little Mermaid actually a story about realizing you’re queer and the world you’ve grown up in can’t accept you as you really are? If it is - it suggests that there's a lot of pain, sacrifice, and compromise ahead of anyone who wishes to come out.
17 min