Everyone's a Critic but Me

Social media has a lot to answer for. Along with everything else truly terrible about it, we also have to suffer the indignities of the existence of Letterboxd. Beyond the horrid misspelling of the word, this service has resulted in friends at parties saying, “Did you read my letterboxd review of that new Marvel Film, Chongusman? Here, let me read it to you.”

In practice, of course, this is no worse or better than any other “Oh have you seen the new Clint Eastwood film?” conversation at a party. If you hadn’t figured out by my pre-coffee snarkiness, I am not on this service. Jokes aside, I recognise why people like it. I’m sure partly it’s the inherent voyeurism of knowing what friends and parasocials are watching. But it’s no doubt also that for the handful of people who follow you, you get to have a platform to espouse your opinions about films.

Thing is, I’m very guilty of this. Even without being on Letterboxd or IMDb, about fifteen years ago I decided as a near year’s promise to myself that I’d begin to review every film I watched. It began as a challenge in brevity at the start. I opened up a new text file and for every film I watched for the first time. I punched in the name, the director, the year, and the briefest possible summary of my feelings. Sometimes, it was a single word. But over time, it got longer. I still limited myself to a single paragraph, though all this truly meant was that I ended up with increasingly long-winded paragraphs.

I should clarify here that I am not having a go at actual film criticism (something we’re losing as a career very fast). Nor am I having a go at people having opinions about film. (I mean, if you finish a film and have NO opinions whatsoever about it, that’s probably a searing indictment of either you or the film.)

My issue with this is much more personal - it’s how writing these little reviews, even if they were really just for me and nobody ever saw them, began to impact how I watched films.

I liked writing these little witticisms.

“The only thing more profoundly stupid and ill-assembled than this film’s plot is its directing and its politics.”

Yes, very glib, past-Elissa. (cringe emoji here)

Problem is that I began to think about them. Plan them out. Write them. While I was still watching the film.

I recognise that sometimes this was because the film wasn’t grabbing me, so I added a bit of extra entertainment as I went by beginning to write these in my head.

Soon, though, I realised I was doing this more often than not. Sometimes half way through a film I’d have a half-built one or two sentence bit of snark ready to put on my yearly text file.

This wasn’t all bad. It was interesting, at the end of the year, to glance back and realise how many films I watched for the first time (for the record, I’ve averaged about 75-120 films a year, not counting re-watches). But on the whole, I think it made my film-going experience worse. It’s not that I wasn’t forming opinions about what I was watching. Nor that I wouldn’t be happy to talk to friends about what I did or didn’t like about a film.

It’s just that making it a part of my process meant I found myself looking for something to criticise about every film I watched. This is very easy to do, as like any artistic medium movie pictures are subjective. Generally considered the best film ever? Well, too bad, I didn’t like the way the director and the cinematographer used that bleach-bypass filter for those flashback scenes.

The fact is, that a lot of films I watch are fine. They’re a solid two or three star experience where I can shut my brain down a bit, munch popcorn, and watch some actor earn a paycheque while delivering a few good lines and looking cool driving a car real fast or whatever.

So, I stopped. I stopped reviewing films. My latest text file suffers its last addition a few months back, and I’ve been happier for it. 90% of the time now, when I watch a movie, I can just bloody enjoy it.

But hey, I should look on the bright side here - at least I didn’t inflict my feelpinions one everyone else through a Letterboxd account.