The crew: Jake (holding a picture of Mike), Chloe, Patrick, Matt, and Scott. Not pictured: Charl.
Welcome to the channel. I'm Patrick Willems. Or Patrick H. Willems if you want, but the H. is only there because someone claimed the URL PatrickWillems before I did, you don't have to say it.
— Patrick, Welcome to Patrick (H) Willems
Patrick (H) Willems is a YouTube channel run by, well, Patrick H. Willems. Willems is a filmmaker who uses the channel to post short films (or "narrative shorts"), video essays where he tries to "put his degree in Cinema Studies to use analyzing and deconstructing movies," and videos where he just talks about filmmaking or various aspects thereof.
The channel started back in 2011, but it really took off due to two videos: "What if Wes Anderson Directed X-Men?" and "Why Do Marvel's Movies Look Kind of Ugly?", a video about the color grading in MCU films. Since then, his channel has mainly been focused on creating two kinds of videos: video essays that talk about some aspect of filmmaking and Hollywood (like "Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Hollywood's Problem with Public Domain Properties") and the "Patrick Explains" series, which started with "Patrick Explains THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS (and Why It's Great)", where Patrick sits down with his parents and tells them about a movie/franchise/show and why it's great. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, while Patrick was stuck at his parents house, he also shifted the format to make a "Quarantine Talk Show." Both the video essays and "Patrick Explains" have a slow, long-running Myth Arc that began in January 2020 and concluded in the summer of 2022.
Patrick's show (which, aside from "Patrick Explains," is just called "Patrick (H) Willems") also involves Patrick's crew, who both help Patrick make the videos and star in them, so let's meet the team: Matt and Jake Torpey, Mike Curran (working remotely from Philadelphia), Chloe Holgate, Kendra James (who usually works behind the scenes in costuming/producing), and Scott Thomas. Oh, and Charl. Charl is the key to their success.
Link to the channel. Patrick also has another channel, Patrick Willems Presents, mainly for commentaries and Q&As.
Tropes in Patrick (H) Willems:
- Actually Pretty Funny: In "Why Is It So Hard to End a Trilogy", when Jake makes the joke that "coconut" backwards is "tun o coc" ("ton o' cock"), even AU!Chloe admits it's funny.
- Addiction Displacement: In the "Patrick Explains" series, Explains!Patrick started by drinking whiskey while explaining things to his parents. After an intervention (where they also explained he couldn't keep living in the barn), he switched to drinking tea and then started chugging coffee.
- Alternate Continuity: The main videos and the "Patrick Explains" videos take place in two different continuities. Well, they did until "Patrick Explains BATMAN: THE MOVIE (And Why It's Great)", which ends with the Explains!Patrick and Charl jumping dimensions and crossing over into the main universe. Except, as we've seen in the main videos, this event took place a few years ago for them.
- Art Shift: Videos often imitate or parody the style of the movies they're discussing, whether that's Terrence Malick's whispery philosophical voice-overs or Austin Powers-style dance sequences.
- As Himself: Every person is playing a version of themselves (including Patrick's agent).
- A.I.-cronym: CHARL stands for Clout Hungry Artificial Robotic Lifeform.
- Bait-and-Switch: "Is Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again the Best Sequel Ever?" He spends a half-hour video talking about how much improved the movie is in many ways from its predecessor, and then asks: is it the best sequel ever? No. That's Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.
- Beard of Sorrow: During the Quarantine Talk Show, Patrick's beard gradually gets bigger and bigger as he gets more and more isolated. He finally cuts it off before going back to the city.
- Big Bad: Charl, with Explains!Patrick as The Dragon.
- Born in the Wrong Century: His opinion on Zack Snyder. He describes Snyder as a filmmaker who would've thrived in the '80s or '90s, an era defined by directors like Tony Scott and Michael Bay with backgrounds in music videos and commercials whose work was characterized by striking visuals and iconography designed to grab the viewer's attention. Snyder instead came up in the 2000s, a time when Hollywood was moving away from the sort of big, flashy blockbusters that those directors specialized in and towards franchises, and consequently hired indie filmmakers whose work was less defined by visual aesthetics so that they could maintain a consistent style throughout the franchise.
- The Cameo: Night of the Coconut features numerous cameos from other YouTubers including LegalEagle, Sarah Z and Hbomberguy.
- Clue, Evidence, and a Smoking Gun: In "How Imax Made Christopher Nolan a Better Filmmaker", Patrick makes his case by painstakingly comparing Nolan's cinematography before, during, and after The Dark Knight (the first film where Nolan used IMAX cameras). He points out how Nolan's visual storytelling before was purely functional, and got more creative and interesting the more Nolan used IMAX. He argues that IMAX was the cause for the growth and not a coincidence, by pointing out how Nolan evolved in just the right way to take advantage of IMAX's strengths and to account for the technical difficulties of the format. Then, 26 minutes into the 33-minute video essay, Patrick plays a clip from an interview where Christopher Nolan outright says as much himself.Christopher Nolan: And frankly, the size and weight and encumbrance of the cameras, you are pushed into a slightly calmer, more tableaux style of filmmaking that, I think, improved me as a filmmaker.
Caption: WHOA HE JUST SAID IT HIMSELF - Comedic Sociopathy: Especially during the Charl saga, Patrick's approach to the comedy includes portraying himself as kind of a self-infatuated dick who does things like give a giant picture of himself to his parents and is more interested in a coconut than his actual friends. Of course, that coconut is the Big Bad...
- The Corrupter: Charl.
- Crossover: Patrick once did a crossover with Movies with Mikey about how great the Mission: Impossible movies are.
- Cute Is Evil: Charl. He isn't actually a coconut, he just uses a stolen shapeshifting module to make it look like he's a coconut, because it's cute, simple, and easily turned into merchandise. On other Earths, he's been a kiwi, a pineapple, and a large pile of rotting mangos (it was a really gross Earth).
- Dimensional Traveler: Explains!Patrick and Charl. Charl, it turns out, is a dimensional criminal, corrupting Earth after Earth.
- Drowning My Sorrows:
- In "I Joined the Turner Classic Movies Wine Club," Patrick joins the TCM Wine Club and drinks each bottle of wine while watching the movie it's paired with. He ends up drinking the entire box.
- The "Patrick Explains" series began with his explaining movies to his parents while drinking an entire bottle of whiskey, though he eventually switches over to tea and coffee.
- His two essays on Francis Ford Coppola are paired with drinking the products of Coppola's winery. Mostly, this is just for the sake of atmosphere, just a glass of the stuff paired with the film...except for One from the Heart, the movie that killed Coppola's dreams of independence from the studio system. That tragedy demanded an entire bottle.
- In "I Joined the Turner Classic Movies Wine Club,"
- End of an Age: He discusses how the box-office failures of movies like One from the Heart killed the New Hollywood era, as well as how the underperformance of Dick Tracy led major studios like Disney to stop pursuing big-name directors to helm ambitious projects, instead focusing on artistically safe and profitable franchise films.
- Fun with Acronyms: CHARL is actually an acronym: Clout Hungry Artificial Robotic Lifeform.
- Fun with Subtitles: In "What Happened to Francis Ford Coppola?", when Jake goes to Patrick's apartment, both are wearing facemasks (because of the pandemic), which makes their voices muffled, which means subtitles are used. But the subtitles for Patrick end up going on much longer than what he actually says and he ends up closing the door just as Jake says, "But I wasn't finished reading the subtitles!"
- Instant Web Hit: In "Patrick Explains," after Explains!Patrick posts the videos of him explaining stuff to his parents on YouTube, it's an instant hit and he immediately becomes famous. He's even invited on Logan Paul's podcast!
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: In-Universe, both Patrick-Prime and Explains!Patrick. They’re obsessive, often to the point of ignoring other people's interests or feelings, but they also really love and are excited about movies, television, and comics. Does this justify their actions? Depends on how you feel about the outcome. (This, of course, does not apply to the actual Patrick Willems).
- Mascot Villain: Charl.
- The Movie: The Grand Finale of the Charl saga took the form of a narrative film called Night of the Coconut that is only available on the Nebula streaming platform.
- Mysterious Stranger: A mysterious stranger with high-tech gadgets seems to be tailing Patrick and his friends in an attempt to stop Charl. In "Dick Tracy: The Most Bonkers Comic Book Movie Ever", it's revealed that they are Chloe from an Alternate Universe.
- Myth Arc: Since January 2020, there’s been a slow-burn story-arc involving Charl the Coconut. Patrick seems to believe he's alive, and he is, revealing to Chloe that he can talk and that he has big plans for the channel. It’s later revealed that he and the Patrick we’ve seen in all the videos since January 2020 are from an Alternate Universe, and that a version of Chloe is fighting against them.
- Once Original, Now Common: He feels this way about The View Askewniverse. While he still thinks that Kevin Smith in his prime was a good screenwriter, and his portrayal of people with nerdy interests as cool was downright revolutionary, his direction was flat to the point where it detracted from the story (with the exception of Clerks, whose documentary style gave it a "hangout" feel and which he thinks is the only movie in the series that's still good). He also laments Smith's refusal to grow as a filmmaker, especially after being burned by the failure of Jersey Girl, a film that Patrick thinks is severely underrated and is in fact Smith's best film. He refers to Smith as a "gateway director", a filmmaker who people discover in high school and get interested in filmmaking as a result, and believes that Judd Apatow and Edgar Wright made Smith redundant by taking what worked about his writing and adding actual directorial chops to go with it.
- Parents as People: Patrick's parents are also characters and generally try to get Patrick to do better... with not good results. But they do try. In the Grand Finale of “Patrick Explains”, when Patrick escapes prison, Patrick's father even tells him to run and that he'll take care of the YouTube channel while he's gone.
- Precision F-Strike: The subject of a whole video, "The Art of the PG-13 F-Bomb". Patrick notes that when a movie is only allowed to use the word "fuck" once, they'll commonly use it to make a big comedic moment hit harder, to make an emotionally charged scene hit even harder, or to add emphasis to a line setting up the premise in the first act, or as an Establishing Character Moment for the story's biggest badass or hardass. (The video also ends by noting the irony that, for using clips of numerous Precision F Strikes from various PG-13 movies, this video itself is a Cluster F-Bomb and would almost certainly get an R rating.)
- Previously on…: The channel will occasionally recap the story segments of the previous videos. They even did an entire recap video, "Patrick Explains - The Story So Far."
- A Rare Sentence: In his video about the Police Academy series, Patrick comments on the departure of Mahone (played by Steve Guttenberg) in the fifth movie and his Suspiciously Similar Substitute (played by Matt McCoy):Patrick: Since apparently the movies were required to have a blandly handsome white guy at the center, Mahone was replaced by the nephew of Commandant Lesard, played by Matt McCoy. And, to make a statement that I've never said before and probably never will again, this guy is no Steve Guttenberg.
- Real Men Wear Pink: Patrick loves Paddington 2 and won't miss a chance to talk about what a great film it is. He also discusses his love of musicals, and notes in his TCM Wine Club video that while he didn't watch many musicals when he was young because he assumed that they weren't for boys, he now enjoys them wholeheartedly.
- Screw the Rules, I Make Them!: In "The Best Movies of 2022", Patrick formats his rankings like an award show. For a few of the categories, he decides that it's his award show, so he can declare all the nominees winners because he doesn't feel like choosing just one.Patrick: And the Vito goes to... [Opens the envelope and reads. Looks up at the camera.] You know what? Fuck it. [Tears the envelope in half and throws it away.] They all win! I make the rules here, I think they're all great, so it's a tie!
- Sequel Hook: Night of the Coconut ends with the defeat of Charl. But the Chloe from our universe has let her 15 minutes of fame go to her head and she escapes into another dimension. Alternate Chloe says that will be a "next season problem". Also, Explains!Patrick is still at large.
- Series Mascot: Charl the Coconut. He’s also a Mascot Villain.
- Show Within a Show: There’s apparently a Charl TV show on Disney Channel, and even an after show for it that Mike hosted.
- Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Much like Some More News, Patrick has a beef with John Krasinski, since Krasinski made a quarantine YouTube talk show around the same time Patrick did.
- So Bad, It's Good: Discussed with regards to The Greatest Showman, whose plot he criticizes for being confused and oddly structured; however, the movie manages to be fast-paced and flashy enough that, when watched in the right mindset (i.e. drunk) and with friends, it's an enjoyable experience.
- Special Guest: The finale to his three-part Marvel retrospective was Patrick talking about the superhero genre with Griffin Newman of The Tick (2016) fame. He’s later The Cameo in "How Austin Powers Predicted the Future of Cinema".
- Suddenly Speaking: In "Why Baseball is the Best Movie Sport", the last scene has Charl suddenly talking to Chloe. "I have always been able to communicate with those who are willing to listen."
- Torso with a View: In "Why Is It So Hard To End A Trilogy", when Jake finally confronts Charl, Charl flies right through his chest, killing him. Like many examples of this trope, however, Jake stays alive just long enough to tell AU Chloe that "there is another" — his brother, Matt.
- Two-Part Trilogy: Discussed in "Why Is It So Hard to End a Trilogy". He cites Back to the Future, The Matrix, and Pirates of the Caribbean as the major examples of the phenomenon where the first movie is a huge success, so two sequels are immediately greenlit, filmed back-to-back in one giant production, and released just a year (or less) apart.Patrick: Okay, and this might be a hot take, but I think in every one of those cases, even though I like a lot of those movies, the trilogies would be better if each installment had been made one at a time. What happens in all of these cases is that parts two and three end up being this one big, massive, misshapen sequel, that happens to be split in half. Where the middle chapter is kind of this sprawling, messy setup for part three. The Empire Strikes Back is a middle chapter that tells an actual story. Can you tell me what the story of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is? ... I don't think you can.
- Undead Horse Trope: In "The Broken Formula of Music Biopics", Patrick argues that the "Musician Biopic" film (specifically the formula codified by Walk the Line and Ray) is impossible to take seriously after watching Walk Hard's thorough Deconstructive Parody of the sub-genre. Yet for some reason Hollywood keeps making these movies anyway.
- Unintentional Period Piece: "What Is The Most '80s Movie Ever?" is about determining exactly that, graded on the basis of their aesthetics, their music, their politics, their cultural outlooks, and how much they reflected the big film industry trends of the time. His list of ten contenders came down to Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, Flashdance, Invasion U.S.A. (1985), Purple Rain, Rocky IV, Scarface (1983), The Secret of My Success, Staying Alive, Thrashin', and Top Gun. He ultimately gave the award to Rocky IV, not just because it decisively won on points but also because, when put side-by-side with the original film from 1976, it demonstrated exactly what had changed since then: what had once been a gritty, low-budget story about a working-class everyman who beats the odds became a live-action cartoon about a superstar athlete winning the Cold War by beating an evil Soviet super-athlete in the ring.Patrick: I think, if you want to truly understand '80s America, all you have to do is watch Rocky, and then watch Rocky IV, and see what changed.
- The Voiceless: Patrick acts as if Charl is this, despite the fact that Charl is, well, a coconut. But Charl can actually speak when he reveals himself to Chloe.
- Walking Spoiler: Explains!Patrick.
- Wham Episode:
- "Patrick Explains BATMAN: THE MOVIE (And Why It's Great)", which officially reveals the existence of The Multiverse and confirms that the Patrick we’ve been watching since January 2020 is the one from the “Patrick Explains” universe.
- "Why Is It So Hard To End A Trilogy", in which AU!Chloe reveals that Charl is an interdimensional criminal that feeds off of clout, growing in power with fame until he corrupts everyone on Earth. And then Jake confronts Charl and Charl kills him.
- "Patrick Explains BATMAN: THE MOVIE (And Why It's Great)"
- Wham Line:Chloe: [talking to her houseplants] Would you like some spaghetti?Charl: No, thank you.Patrick: Okay, it’s been about thirty minutes. Charl said he needed thirty minutes to get the interdimensional portal ready.AU!Chloe: Who the hell is Matt?
