Online film culture evolved to the point where journalists, politicians, and illiterate plebs all share the same floor. While Letterboxd maintains “reviews” that are either unfunny one-liners or pretentiously overwritten blurbs, Twitter is where more things become more viral. And as that “thing” becomes stacked with four-digit RTs and likes, there will be criticisms that will point out that said “thing” is poorly thought out. But that’s a polite way of saying it’s a roundabout of perpetual moralizing.
For this reason, I’m not on Twitter very much nowadays. But when I am, I come away looking like George Bluth discovering a dead dove in the fridge. So these dead doves are not, in a way, an extensive list of bad tweets about movies. Think of it as characters in a show about terminally online people. I’ve previously documented these in Reaction Shots and Long Takes. But I want to go with one final dive to see what exactly we are dealing with here. I believe that these tweets represent a certain section of bad-faith peddlers. People call it such as Film Twitter. Whenever the phrase is being uttered, it’s often not a good sign. It’s not in comparison with other forms of __ Twitter, but Film Twitter is where the misery begins. But how does one define it?
So here they are. The worst movie tweets of the year, that I think represents Film Twitter quite well:
Most of the worst film takes come from political writers and it doesn’t take a genius to think that their political visions don't integrate well with how I think art should express itself. This is a late entry, but some context to this series of tweets. Charlotte Clymer, a former staffer for Hilary Clinton, disliked Licorice Pizza because there was an age gap between the two main characters. Of course, if you have watched the movie, you know that this obstacle was addressed in the first five minutes, but for some objectors, this is way too little, and therefore we should also address the lack of ethics in cinema. Of course, what does this look like? An invisible version of the Hays code implemented by Democratic Party staffers and Huffington Post writers? Critics were correctly shocked that someone could make such remarks. Which brings me to the next tweet…
I mentioned this before when I wrote about Moviebob, a guy whose tweets are so awful, they barely qualify for this list because, in any other context, they look inane in comparison. (Plus he’s an easy target, so I feel I shouldn’t be beating dead horses here). But he’s no different than Steven Santos, a freelance film writer who wrote for RogerEbert.com and has a hunch on anyone who disagrees with him. While they are not the cause, film critics have facilitated, embraced, and cheerleaded the culture’s descent into nihilistic progressivism, as long as it entertains the “right” people and pretends that all their grade-school commentary was about the form. In this case, Santos insists that Once Upon A Time In Hollywood represents reactionary tendencies and that he’s the one in the “right” because no one wants to talk about it. But a lot of people did, which includes the likes of Richard Brody, Miriam Bale, and Bruce Lee’s daughter Shannon. Pretending that you’re alone in your opinion, does not mean that conversations are being shut down. They just disagree with you. Or more so, they think it’s poorly thought out. Speaking of being agreeable…
Even for someone who agrees with a lot of Matt Walsh’s politics, his tweets are just smug and hard to swallow. So it comes to my surprise that he thinks Clint Eastwood, a filmmaker who you’d thought to be sympathetic to his sensibilities, is way too old to do his job. But that’s not really the point of why this thread was included. He thinks that old people should stay old. Like Joe Biden, and Madonna, which he alluded to. They’ve already reached their prime, so what’s the point? Let the young people take in the reins. There was a Wall Street Journal essay that appeared so many times on my Facebook feed. It convinced me that, as you age, you don’t stop reaching the peaks of your career. In fact, you can start however you like and you can continue being that way, regardless of how old you are. Clint Eastwood remains a Hollywood legend, and at 91, which is way above the average life expectancy for the American male, he inspires us that things don’t stop as long as you’re passionate about it. I can say that about Matt Walsh as well, who is great at being a lib-owning curmudgeon. Don’t stop believing, folks.
A recurring theme among this very esteemed newsletter is the future of theatres in the wake of an unprecedented pandemic. I’ve mentioned that for film festivals to survive, they also need theatres because that plays a significant turning point for the industry. The film critics who insist they need to be shut down, justify it as some sort of mortal sin. Whether it’s because they are inherent superspreaders (that’s questionable) who never uphold any particular standards to hygiene. Or that streaming is more accessible and safer. But what these doomsayers believe is that regardless of how many resources we have in our arsenal - vaccines, therapeutics, and NPIs - it’s never enough. They don’t just need to feel safe from a virus. They want others to adopt their way. Access is correctly considered to be an issue in equity. It’s fair that in the pandemic, the split between the vaccinated - fully, boosted, or partially - and the unvaccinated, things have been very difficult to reconcile.
Enter Noah Gittell, whose tweet I once mentioned in a previous newsletter. Here’s what I said about previously:
People experience the festival in different ways, and for me, a film festival induces belonging with other people, old and new. To be lectured by someone whose income derives from sitting on a couch, indulging on press screeners, and then jotting words down on a laptop about how they feel about the thing they’re assigned by their editors, is for a lack of a better term… elitist.
I bring this up again because I underestimate how this gets you a lot of validation, regardless of the facts we have. Much of the engagement has shown that a lot of people are very sympathetic to his ordeal. This is something that’s not strange to me, as I have endured a lockdown for almost three months, in which Australian tweeters are utterly convinced that my state government is covering up more cases, hospitalizations, ICU and deaths, despite applying so many restrictions that eventually didn’t reduce the load to an acceptable minimum amount. It is utterly insulting to anyone’s intelligence to reduce a public health crisis into a political football. Since film culture is so inseparable from culture at large, it enters its wars very naturally. But there’s a light in the tunnel. As the new Omicron variant turns out to be milder, people are ready to move on. And if they aren’t, they’re motivated by a matter of fatigue. That would mean that a semblance of normality will become a thing in vogue. And Gitell should adopt to this proposed new normal.
Finally, there’s another tweet, which is for the future and also appears very late. Erik Wade, an academic who specializes in Viking and medieval studies, tweeted that Robert Eggers is dog-whistling white nationalism in the name of his upcoming effort The Northman. For the successor ideologues, this thing is its QAnon. And I hope by 2022, we touch grass again.