#fuck cinemasins

[marxonculture]

Spotlight: My Weirdest Comfort Film

As of a few days ago, Tom McCarthy's best picture winning film, Spotlight (2015), became my most-watched film on Letterboxd. On its surface, the investigative journalism drama is a dour story based on the real investigation which exposed the horrific, systemic paedophilia within the Catholic church. This shouldn't be such a comforting watch, given its subject matter, so here I intend to determine what it is about this movie that keeps reeling me back in... or maybe there's just something wrong with me.

Let's start with the elephant in the room: am I just really odd? Honestly, probably, but I don't think that's why I keep coming back to Spotlight. While the film is mindful of the crimes being investigated, and particularly sensitive and alert to the pain and extreme trauma experienced by the victims, it's primary focus isn't on the scandal itself - it's very necessarily not torture porn. If I wanted to torture myself via repeated exposure to the pain of others, this wouldn't be the film to achieve that.

Instead, the focus of Spotlight is on the process of uncovering the Chruch's crimes, and the systemic issues that kept such an open secret covered up for so long. In other words, this is a film about people who are really good at their jobs, deconstructing all the ways the church in environments like Boston has its claws in every major institution, including the press.

For a long time, I wanted to be an investigative journalist. The idealism that drives exposing difficult truths in order to ensure that the electorate be informed, is an incredibly compelling reason for pursuing a career. Now that I'm older and I know that the demands of such a profession are not for me, my love of proper, idealistic journalism is channelled into films about the people who can hack it. Think Broadcast News, The Post, The Insider, Goodnight and Good Luck, and Zodiac; I'm even one of those sickos who loved The Newsroom.

I really do believe in the power and responsibility of the so-called Fourth Estate. So, one of the most compelling things about Spotlight is that it is a true story - a period piece even - about a time when the press served their intended function properly and really made a difference. A story about that kind of thing set today would almost feel like science fiction.

Tom McCarthy's filmmaking, which some have dismissed as bland or overly procedural, is genuinely inspired because of the reality it is showing. The aesthetic and tone of Spotlight is intentionally mundane and perfunctory, portraying a job that needs to be done well, but not one that needs glorifying or mythologising. The one member of the Spotlight team (Mark Ruffalo's Mike Rezendes) who is more theatrical and performative is chastised by his colleagues for his over-the-topness - it's very telling that he is the one who ends up writing the article.

I am especially drawn to the ostensible B-plot of the film: Liev Schreiber's Marty Baron stepping in as the new editor of the Boston Globe and having to contend with the extent of the Catholic church's influence on Boston life. Baron is Jewish, and immediately identified as an outsider in the majority Catholic city. His performance is, in my view, miraculous in the way it so accurately communicates the ways in which Jews in majority Christian environments have to restrain our frustration with a cultural majority that so consistently dehumanises and others us.

One scene in particular is often reason enough for me to revisit Spotlight. It involves Baron being called in for a meeting with Cardinal Law (the most senior figure at the time in the Boston archdiocese). Schreiber deftly communicates Baron's skillfully maintained composure and professionalism despite his clear discomfort at Law's blatant attempts to both bring him under the church's sketchy umbrella of influence and prostelytise at him. It is a frightening reminder of how deeply embedded Christianity is in Western institutions, and of how difficult it is to exist as a non-christian in those environments. Spotlight does not exonerate lapsed, cultural or non-practicing Catholics, but exposes how every day people will look the other way when their own community and institutions are implicated in something horrible. Like I said, science fiction.

Despite being based on a true story, Spotlight is a brilliantly crafted wish-fulfillment fantasy about a time when the press served its function and held vile, corrupt institutions to account. It's tempting to look back on its Best Picture win at the Oscars as a mistake, especially given how totemic Mad Max: Fury Road is as the last bastion of visually inventive, gonzo blockbuster filmmaking, but I really do believe that Spotlight's win was both deserved and has stood the test of time as a reminder of how we should act in the face of the systemic nightmares of our society. Every time I'm in a place of extreme pessimism about the state of the world, this film is a warm, if strange, comfort blanket.

[sideburndanny]

Okay, I’ve been keeping this in long enough: fuck CinemaSins and fuck what they've done to film criticism.

Now, this is a trend I've seen far too often: whenever CinemaSins gets criticized for the warped, intellectually dishonest method of criticism they've popularized, some of their well-meaning and non-toxic fans will defend them with "but CinemaSins are clearly satire and only a complete idiot would take them at their word!" And good for them for understanding that!

The problem, however, is that a not-insignificant number of CS fans are complete idiots and do take them at their word! Take, for example, this comment on a video criticizing what CS does:

Dude… like… how the fuck did you miss the numerous time the CS guys admitted that their videos aren't meant to be taken seriously? All the times they admitted to actually liking some of the stuff they bash? All the times they admitted that most of the time they're just nitpicking or getting stuff wrong on purpose to be funny? Fucking hell, they started their "Everything Wrong With CinemaSins" video by admitting to not being real reviewers and that most of their "sins" are things no one else would care enough about to notice!

Then again, I can't say I'm all that surprised that many CS fans don't see their videos as satirical when the CS crew themselves no longer seem to. As many have pointed out, the guys behind CinemaSins only ever pull out the "it's satire" defense when others criticize them for getting things wrong or generally acting like opinionated douchebags. The rest of the time, they do absolutely nothing to deter their more rabid fans from treating them as a serious authority on how to think about movies.

I'm sure at the beginning that the CinemaSins guys were telling the truth when they claimed to be satirical; again, they admitted to genuinely liking The Amazing Spider-Man, the first movie they ripped to shreds on their channel! Unfortunately, as time went on, the same thing happened to them as all online personalities who play characters in review shows: the writers started putting so much of themselves into the script and using the once-satirical main character as a mouthpiece for their honest opinions that it's now impossible to tell where the character ends and the creators begin.

I'm not entirely unconvinced that CS' more toxic fans aren't at least partly to blame for the channel's shift from "genuine satire" to "satire-except-when-it's-not." To explain what I mean, I'll break down the timeline into three clear points.

CinemaSins debuts and makes videos that satirize overly nitpicky movie review shows.

They gain a huge following of young, impressionable people who are unfamiliar with both the movies being riffed and proper film theory as a whole. Because of that, they fail to recognize the satire and take CS' reviews at face value

After a few years of CS fans parroting the show's criticisms, copying their review techniques in earnest, and loudly praising CS in online echo chambers as the unsung heroes exposing the dark truth about Big Bad Hollywood, the guys behind CS start to believe their own hype and restructure the show to incorporate honest attempts at critical analysis without getting rid of the hyperbolic "accentuate the negative" format that made them famous.

That may sound like a stretch, but it's the only explanation I can think of for how these people went from honestly enjoying the movies they nitpicked to posting out-of-character videos in which they rant at length about how we as a society are all stupid and evil and destroying ourselves as evidenced by… [checks notes] a Winnie the Pooh movie being made.

Yes. That really happened.

Unfortunately, the crew behind CS don't seem to realize this problem and, instead, keep doubling down by trying to have it both ways. They want to be seen as satire so they can dodge criticism for their behavior (ignoring, of course, that satire can still be criticized for not being funny), but they still want to be treated like serious reviewers because of what I assume to be ego. Yeah, as much as CS Stans like the one I showed earlier like to play the "you're just jealous" card in response to all criticism, the CS writers carry themselves with a sense of both self-assuredness of their own creative accomplishments and a genuine hatred for those of others; that in mind, I can't help but feel the show's continuing existence is less motivated by a desire to entertain and more as a way for the creators to prove themselves smarter than both the original filmmakers and other people in general.

The problem here is that… no. You can't have it both ways. You can't claim that your videos are meant to satirize bad movie critics and then complain that Hollywood isn't taking your criticisms seriously. I said before that CS' videos are a double-edged sword for them, and I stand by that.

On the one hand, these videos fail as serious movie criticism because the writers make no distinction between genuine flaws, minor nitpicks, things that they dislike because of personal biases, things that only look like flaws because they've been taken out of context, and things they just made up so they'll have something to complain about.

On the other hand, the videos also fail as satire because, much like the Babylon Bee, they only have one joke ("General observation made in a judgmental tone of voice!" DING.)

When you try for both, you'll succeed at neither.

And, as much as the CS guys nihilistically rant in their cars about art and culture being doomed because nobody is listening to their criticisms, the opposite is true: while cinema is general is still as good as it's always been (there really aren't more bad films now than there were in the "good old days"; it's just that the bad old movies were forgotten because only the good ones were worth remembering,) the major problem with mainstream entertainment these days is one that only exists because people are listening to CS and people like them.

Allow me to share my hypothesis: CinemaSins and others like them are responsible for the overuse of snarky, ironic meta-jokes in modern media.

This is a serious charge, and here is my explanation for it: review shows like CS, Honest Trailers, Your Movie Sucks, I Hate Everything, etc. popularized a style of reviewing that hinged on making the reviewed material look as bad as possible: labeling everything that's been done before a "cliche," overemphasizing minor nitpicks the average filmgoer (and, let's face it, most real critics) would be unlikely to notice, being unable to suspend disbelief and acting like fiction has to be "realistic" to he good, and criticizing the characters as "stupid" because, instead of being perfectly logical and rational at all times, they instead act like real, flawed, imperfect people who either don't know the same things the audience does or otherwise have no reason to act like they're characters in a movie because they don't know they are.

This is a very warped, dishonest, and unprofessional way of thinking about fiction — especially if you, for instance, tell deliberate lies about what you're reviewing — but it proved entertaining for huge amounts of people who watched these videos and came away thinking this is the proper way to review movies. Like most entitled fanboy controversies, this fever-pitch of pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-populist pessimism became vocal enough to be noticed by the people actually working in film and TV, who then felt the need to "course-correct" out of fear of losing their audiences.

This, I believe, is why so many movies and shows these days have characters grind the story to a halt to point out the story archetypes and narrative tropes as they happen while discussing how real people would behave in the fictional scenarios they're caught up in. It's all a panicked effort to make these stories — as one MCU writer put it — "as Honest Trailer-proof as possible."

The problems with this are twofold: first, since these writers are trying to fix what wasn't broken, stories and dialogue that rely so heavily on meta-commentary come across as cynical and lifeless; the characters start feeling like lifeless mouthpieces instead of actual people who happen to be fictional, and the creators come across as lacking confidence and, in the words of Crow T. Robot, "afraid to feel anything real." The other problem is that, if this is an attempt to preempt snarky critics by beating them to the punch, then any attempt to shut them up was an effort in futility because, as Max Gillardi once said, "You should never underestimate a bully's ability to find material to work with." When snarky CinemaSins-type reviewers come across self-deprecating meta humor in whatever they're reviewing, they just make a quick joke about "hey, stop doing my job for me" before going back to nitpicking as usual.

But hey, that's just a theory. Maybe I'm wrong and something else is responsible for modern media's over-reliance on snarky meta-humor. Even if I am wrong about that, however, it's still impossible to deny that CinemaSins has had a negative impact on how people think about fiction, and I'm not just talking about how they misrepresent specific movies so people who haven't seen them before will think they're worse than they actually are.

I'm referring to how many people think that mindless negativity and looking for things to complain about is the best, smartest way to talk about fiction. Even if this mindset didn't become a common justification for harassment and hate campaigns against the creators and fans of whatever is being bashed because "they deserve it for making/liking something bad" — and it has led to that; CinemaSins sucked at crawling so Lily Orchard could suck at walking — it's just a shallow, insincere way to review things; it's mindless anti-conformity as a substitute for good critical thinking skills, anti-intellectualism disguised as no-nonsense telling-it-like-it-is. It misses the point of fiction and art as a whole. Vinnie Mancuso of Collider referred to this as "the I-must-be-smarter-than-the-movie criticism that's ruining the way we talk about movies." As he put it in this article:

It's almost designed to miss the point. It's the film-as-riddle mindset that first formed alongside the birth of the internet, but really crystalized into something insidious somewhere between the mid-point of Lost and the exact moment Inception cut to black. [It's] the idea [that] films and television shows are something to be solved instead of felt; that stories are static objects made of ones-and-zeroes and to remove the flawed piece of data sends the whole thing crumbling. (Thus making you The Internet's Smartest Boi that day.) But movies are, in Roger Ebert's words, "machines that generate empathy"; whether it's a quiet character study or a globe-trotting adventure, the joy comes from living another life for a few hours.

In summation, if you use CinemaSins as a role model for how to think about fiction, then in the words of Patton Oswalt, YOU'RE GONNA MISS EVERYTHING COOL AND DIE ANGRY.

[i-am-suffer]

I’m starting to think that Cinemasins doesn’t actually pay attention to the movies they’re criticizing, and they just pick random scenes and make up things to nitpick about them

[detectivenyx]

i hate cinemasins so much you would not believe

[dbphantom]

Moodboard for when someone outside of tumblr mentions H2O

Bonus

[weedle-testaburger]

there's this kind of youtuber i lowkey really hate who aren't overt bigots or anything but just do this thing where they seem to try stupidly hard to look for reasons to hate media that just so happens to have a lot of marginalised rep in it. especially if it has a thematic point that would involve acknowledging politics

[knowlesian]

gonna snap one day and run through the halls of media critique screaming A PLOTHOLE IS NOT WHEN THERE IS AN EASILY EXTRAPOLATED AND OBVIOUS ANSWER TO A QUESTION THAT THE WRITERS DID NOT THINK EVEN NEEDED TO BE EXPLAINED OUT LOUD BECAUSE THEY EXPECTED YOU TO USE YOUR BRAIN JUST A L I T T L E

[leonardalphachurch]

My biggest deltayork hc is that every morning after York wakes up, Delta starts critiquing his dreams like CinemaSins. He's well aware that you can't expect the human subconscious to follow real-world logic, but he's not about to pass up any opportunity to be pedantic

BXMXJDIDJDBDKDBVKCBI ANON THIS IS THE DUNNIEST THING IVE READ IN CNXBXMXBXMCB

[gemwolfz]

a really funny thing the keroro platoon does is act confused by things they have absolutely no reason not to understand. tamama having to tell keroro to take the wrapper off his wcdonalds burger before he tries to eat it. keroro being amazed by the ocean and shocked by saltwater. iirc the concept of halloween had to be explained? keroro stepping out into the snow naked like an idiot. and like i can see why this happens. the first two are early on in the series so not everything was worked out yet most likely. we see the kids celebrating halloween on keron in the 4komas which are a later addition. etc. But it's so fucking funny

[aq2003]

how is 42 boring. doctor who video essayer are you out of your fucking mind

[throesofincreasingwonder]

"average tragic hero could have just made better choices" factoid actually just statistical error. Viewers Georg, who knows everything about the tragedy and can see outside of it to a better path separated only by one crucial decision, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[marxonculture]

The Letterboxd Phenomenon and My Four Favourites

Like many a young film lover over the last few years, Letterboxd (a film focused social media app) has been key in helping me to build my relationship with movies.

As someone who has been obsessively and compulsively making lists for most of my life (I recently found an old notebook from my teenage years full of lists ranking everything from actors to T.V. episodes to musicians - yes, I am autistic...), Letterboxd has been incredibly helpful in keeping track of my growth and change as a film watcher since I joined the service in 2017.

Back when I first joined, Letterboxd felt like this secret club where only the most pitiful little film gremlins would congregate to list and tabulate their movie experiences. In recent years, that pool of users has expanded massively into a lively, vibrant media environment, plagued with some (if not all) of the same problems as film twitter. It's quieter, though, a space that still provides users a freedom to use its features however they please.

Like I said before, I love lists. My Letterboxd is a super convenient container for all the granular ways in which I like to sort and organise the films I love. If you're interested, my Letterboxd is here.

My Four Favourites

One of the most exciting and fraught features on Letterboxd is the Four Favourites that adorn the top of every user's profile. Everyone has a different approach to filling out these four coveted slots - I regularly change mine, often to fit some sort of theme - but I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk about the films which come closest to being my actual four favourites.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) dir. Joel and Ethan Coen

My favourite film of all time is the gloomy odyssey of New York folk musician, Llewyn Davis, directed by the ever brilliant Jewish brothers, Joel and Ethan Coen.

I talk about the Coens a lot as filmmakers whose work is quintessentially Jewish across their entire filmography. Most people understandably point to A Serious Man as the clearest example of Jewishness in their work (one of the only films in which Jewishness is explicitly part of the text). That being said, however, a broad attitude of posing moral and existential questions without attempting to provide answers is present in all of their work. This attitude is a fundamentally Jewish approach to life's mysteries, and in the work of the Coens, is often misidentified as nihilism. Inside Llewyn Davis, aside from being one of the most beautifully shot, written and acted films I've ever seen, with an all-time great folk soundtrack, is a film that asks terrifying existential questions:

Is it possible to make authentic art in a commercial world?

Is it possible to be a better person when everyone keeps telling you how awful you are?

Is it possible to escape this cycle I've trapped myself in?

No answers. Just questions. Live with it.

Collateral (2004) dir. Michael Mann

Michael Mann is a director that not a lot of people know is Jewish. You wouldn't think it looking at his movies, but if you pay attention to how he ends nearly all of his stories, the same uncertainty principle which fuels the Coen brothers seems to haunt Mann, too. Nearly all of his films end with a man, who has just done something to irrevocably change his world, walking off into the distance, leaving only a question: where the hell do I go from here?

Collateral is in many ways typical of what Michael Mann does. Two men, at odds with one another, wreak havok trying to overcome each other in an environment defined by a dramatically heightened level of realism. What sets this film apart from the rest of Mann's oevre is the way its protagonist, Max (Jamie Foxx), has to adopt the persona of the antagonist, Vincent (Tom Cruise giving his very best performance), in order to escape his situation. Collateral is a film about understanding the philosophy of your enemy and determining how much of it is bullshit.

The Fabelmans (2022) dir. Steven Spielberg

I know it's cliche to say so, but Steven Spielberg is far and away my favourite director of all time. What is more controversial about my love for the guy is that I don't think he has a single low period in his career. I am a particular defender of his 21st century output - Catch Me If You Can, Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, The Post and West Side Story are all masterpieces in my book - and I really do feel that The Fabelmans is the pinnacle of his entire filmography.

A film which many have mistaken as overly soppy and sentimental, is actually a tangle of Freudian trauma and pessimism about the relationship between art and identity. The Fabelmans presents Spielberg's incredibly dark and complicated relationship with his family, his own Jewishness and his use of his talents as a filmmaker to reckon with those things. He weaponises his signiture warm, glowing, nostalgic side to frame more upsettingly the most upsetting parts of his upbringing. For Spielberg, cinema is a coping mechanism that has ripped his personal life apart, and it's truly remarkable that he is self-aware enough to admit that in front of the world.

Broadcast News (1987) dir. James L. Brooks

James L. Brooks doesn't have the best track record as a director, but when you make something like Broadcast News, it doesn't really matter what you do next because unless you're some kind of miracle worker, there's no way to top something this good.

Stories about journalists are like crack to me. I'm one of those weirdos who unironically loves Sorkin's The Newsroom; Spotlight is a comfort movie for me! Any story featuring journalists who are really great at their jobs, waxing poetic about the fourth estate, is going to work wonders for me. Add to that one of the best romantic dramedy dynamics in cinema history, and you have a recipe for the perfect Dan movie.

One of the most miraculous things about Broadcast News is the trio of performers at its centre, particularly Holly Hunter, who for my money is maybe the greatest ever living screen actor. The way she plays the burden of intelligence in conflict with a desire for connection is almost upsettingly brilliant, especially given the fact that this was her first big starring role. I really do believe that Brooks' screenplay for this film is one of the best ever written, with some of the most unflinchingly real, but still delightfully funny characters put to screen.

So, there we are. I guess you could see this as a 'four movies to get to know me' kind of thing. Coincidentally (or not, who can say), all four of these films are by Jewish directors, and all four of them feel distinctly Jewish to me in the ways they approach their themes and ideas. Beyond that, though, these are all films that make me feel a deep connection to their characters and the worlds they imagine.

What are your Four Favourites, and what do they say about you?

[mythweaverarts]

Was feeling gender dysphoria about my hair growing out cause my parents won't cut it but then realised I have the same haircut as Harry potter in the fourth film which made me feel slightly better about things

[ace-of-pussy]

Surprisingly short video but go off

[dullahandyke]

whenever i think abt danganronpa 3 i have to immediately pivot to 'haha apocalypse happened because gay', 'asahina ketchup incident' and other such jokes because if i think about it seriously for more than 2 seconds im liable to kill kodaka. (googles) ok kodaka came up with the concept but the actual writer is norimitsu kaihou. if i think about dr3 for more than 10 seconds consecutively im liable to kill norimitsu kaihou

[fuck-off-im-ace]

I honestly think that the fact that a lot of people are hating on the new Mean Girls movie is a direct proof of purity culture and the battle against authenticity and sincerity in media. What matters is not engaging or relatable representation, but if its morally good representation, and the same can be said for other elements of a script. The movie is exagerated, it's a performance, and if you hear the way Regina's mother talk and think "urgh cringe" well i'm sorry but. Yes. She was made to be. Because it is funny. Why do you not allow yourself to laugh at something sincere and dumb. Do you not have any joy in your heart. Are you allergic to fun??