COMING SOON: THE BEST MOVIE SUBSTACK

"I finished my PhD and have nothing else going on." - Carmen Petaccio

Q: WHAT IS THE BEST MOVIE SUBSTACK?

A: It’s right there in the name, baby! I will post a new movie review every week.

Q: WHEN IS THE BEST MOVIE SUBSTACK?

A: You can subscribe for free by clicking the slime-green button below. Once you’ve subscribed, my latest movie review will be automatically emailed to you every Tuesday morning. Most of these reviews will concern recent films, but I do intend to integrate essays on older movies as entries in longer collected series organized around chosen themes, filmmakers, screenwriters, actors, stylistic motifs, and/or micro-genres (Fat Suit Cinema¹, Meta-Midlife Crisis Movies², Oliveface is the New Blackface³, and so on). Either way, I’ll never write about a movie that hasn’t been released in American theaters yet. My aim is to share ~3.5 reviews per month.

Q: WHO IS THE BEST MOVIE SUBSTACK?

A: I, Carmen Petaccio, will write the majority of the movie reviews for this newsletter⁴. My qualifications to serve as a movie critic in even this pathetic, self-assigned capacity are paltry and, as this Substack will strive to illustrate, arguably irrelevant in the age of the internet—in fact, the concomitant democratization and amateurization of the critical apparatus across the culture industries will be one of the major preoccupations of this project. I suppose my main qualifying credential is that, in 2018, I wrote an article for The Outline arguing that the US government should nationalize MoviePass, the doomed movie ticket subscription startup, in lieu of financing some of its more wasteful, lethal expenditures. That article inspired a plucky and entertaining response piece in the The National Review, the august conservative periodical whose editors didn’t bother researching my gender, which led their author to refer to me as a stupid socialist woman throughout the article. My email informing The National Review that my preferred pronouns are Xe/Xim must not have been received.

What else? At last count I have four terminal degrees, and none of them involves film, production, or cinema studies. I did write precisely one other article about superhero movies for The Atlantic in 2015; wow; I’m still waiting to receive my check for $50 from the 167-year-old magazine. I’ve also taught ~10 textual analysis and film courses at the college level, most recently a 300-level American Studies class at the University of Miami titled “The Brand is the Star: Narratives of Art and Business After the Great Recession,” which engaged with so-called “business biopics” in the vein of The Social Network (2010), Steve Jobs (2015), and The Founder (2016) in an “attempt to articulate the realities and fantasies that combine to define the post-2008 American character at home and abroad.” If you were a college student in 2024, would you have taken that class to boost your cumulative GPA? Then you might want to click the slime-colored Subscribe Now button.

This is all to say that smart consumers should care less about credentials and more about what matters: the quality of the product or service provided relative to its price. I’m offering the best. And for the foreseeable future, I’m offering it for $0 a month. For a brief sampling of my rhetorical style or taste in movies, you can always read this blog post I wrote about Phantom Thread (2017), or scroll through my Letterboxd account.

Q: HOW IS THE BEST MOVIE SUBSTACK?

A: The production and dissemination of The Best Movie Substack is made possible by the Regal Entertainment Group’s Regal Unlimited Club and Substack, the digital newsletter platform of which I remain deeply suspicious. In terms of the procedure, I will gain access to various Regal theaters around the Northeastern United States to watch the movies, and then I will type out my resultant evaluations, interpretations, and flights of fancy in order to share them with my readership using Substack. Ballpark figure, I see somewhere between 35 and 45 movies in theaters on an annual basis. I watch (and rewatch) another 50-75 movies at home. My go-to concessions combo is Buncha’ Crunch, popcorn, and Cherry Coke, although—as it pains me to report—Regal theaters only sell Pepsi products. Repulsive. Unacceptable.

As a subscriber and skimmer of more than three dozen Substacks, two of which I pay for, I regard this website as an online sweatshop designed to monetize the alienated intellectual labor generated by a decentralized suicide squad of hack political commentators, validation kleptos, digital economy con artists, cringeworthy creative class mediocrities, and repressed sexual deviants. (I fall into at least two of these categories.) With that said, the corroded word-processing interface on the WordPress site where I used to post my deranged movie reviews is barely functional, and as a former user of every faddish post-LiveJournal blogging software, the San Francisco bugmen who designed this latest “new media” pump-&-dump scheme could have done a lot worse.

Q: HOW MUCH IS THE BEST MOVIE SUBSTACK?

A: The Best Movie Substack will remain free ($0 per month) to all subscribers until I roll out of bed one afternoon and decide that I’ve reached a critical mass of subscribers, meaning that some of them will then have to pony up the cost of 1/2 latte every month to maintain unfettered access to my pristine movie takes. This will likely never happen, but you’re welcome to pledge $5 a month in anticipation that it might—or just to make me smile. :)

If this paywall is ever erected, 50% of new reviews will be locked behind it, along with whatever archive of posts exists at the time. Paying subscribers will enjoy a wide variety of perks: audio recordings of my reviews, commenting and comment-liking privileges, a chance to vote every month to determine which films I will see, and garish swag. My short-term goal is to attract enough paying subscribers to subsidize the monthly cost of my aforementioned Regal Unlimited Club membership ($23.53). My long-term goal is to convince the Pulitzer Prize Board to begin bestowing the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism on Substack writers, starting with me. I will continue posting reviews on The Best Movie Substack until both of these goals are achieved.

Q: WHY IS THE BEST MOVIE SUBSTACK?

A: The short answer is that I finished my PhD and have nothing else going on. I’m seeing terrible movies in the theaters every week anyway.

The longer answer is more involved and less coherent, and though it’s a copout to say, my foremost hope is that a fully articulated response to “Why does The Best Movie Substack exist?” will emerge organically out of the gradual week-by-week accumulation of the reviews that will be written by me and featured here. You’re welcome to stop reading here if that answer suffices; if it doesn’t, please see my personal/philosophical gripes about circa-2024 film criticism below.

My Personal/Philosophical Gripes: What is the dominant voice in film criticism today? Where can you hear it, and what does it sound like? For my money, that voice is the voice of the movie podcaster, the asynchronous chorus produced by the conversations found on programs like The Big Picture, Filmspotting, The Blank Check Podcast, FILM JUNK, the /FilmCast, The Movie Mindset Podcast, Roger & Me, et al. I listen to every episode of all of these film-centric podcasts (and more) while I load and unload my dishwasher, climb the StairMaster at the gym, and drive around looking for parking spots in my Hyundai Ioniq. On the whole I find these podcasts enjoyable, informative, painfully corny, and occasionally, mildly insightful. The potential intervention that this Substack represents has little to do with the shortcomings of these podcasts or their hosts, but with the podcast medium itself, its inherent affordances and frustrating limitations, and the narrow bandwidth of messages that it can broadcast to the human brain and heart.

What listening to 10,000 hours of these film-centric podcasts has made abundantly, regrettably clear to me is that they exist to mimic and promote what is, for me, the defining mode of aesthetic production in the internet age, the mode that encourages a sustained passive engagement with an inherently cheap, creatively compromised product that deprioritizes any challenge to consensus thinking, especially when that challenge to the consensus may alienate, insult, or upset their listeners enough to make them stop listening. In a literal sense, the criticism on these podcasts tends to be insufficient because podcasts are by nature informal, easily digestible, and rhetorically self-defeating in such a way that their consistent, low-grade incoherence has become normalized. Think about how much of a given movie podcast’s runtime is chewed up by the stutters and interruptions and personal asides of the hosts, by ads for remote therapy pyramid schemes and erectile disfunction pills, by the hosts appending conflict-of-interest interviews with filmmakers to their episode, by intra-podcast collegiality and cross-promotional opportunities, and, worst of all, by the constraints imposed upon certain emotions and ideas by saying them aloud versus writing them down. What long-time listeners are left with is either: A) predictable, B) forgettable, C) perfunctory, D) pandering, or E) all of the above.

These podcasts are also undermined by the fact that the two columns on which every podcast stands, film or otherwise, are topicality and disposability. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself, How many times have I re-listened to an old episode of a podcast? How would I go about quoting a line of criticism from a podcast episode, and what do the obstacles to accessing and referencing audio-based criticism, as opposed to the written variety, suggest about the ultimate values of reviewing a movie on a podcast and reviewing one on the page? Would listening to a film podcast from the beginning teach you more about movies, or more about the neuroses and banal lives of the hosts?

As much as I have an affinity for these podcast hosts, the film enthusiasts who are trying their best to adapt to the spirit-crushing creative and economic pressures of the digital media ecosystem, I find them increasingly burned out by the performative aspects of podcasting, and increasingly disillusioned by the beseeching fan service required to turn a profit in a saturated market with minimal barriers to entry. These hosts’ taste in movies is also borderline uniform, entrenched in either a reflexive fandom for specific actors/filmmakers/genres or an over-zealous consumerist worship of the “theater experience” and the “magic of the movies,” and their foremost concern seems to be solidifying and capitalizing on the low-friction para-social relationships that sustain the internet writ large. Beyond that, they never fucking bother to read the source material when they’re reviewing a book-to-movie adaptation. (“You know,” they will say, “I didn’t have time to read the book.” Or: “Like, I haven’t gotten around, you know, to reading the book yet, but…”) Dear podcasters, you have one of the easiest and most undignified jobs known to man; would it kill you to find the 75 minutes necessary to read a Colleen Hoover novel before discussing It Ends With Us (2024)?

Here’s the second-order problem, though: When you do read a written piece of film criticism today, the voice on the page tends to echo that of the film podcaster, often because the author themself doubles as a film podcaster for whom writing has become a peripheral complement to their podcasting. Even the critics who still exclusively focus on writing overwhelmingly traffic in no-spoilers-all-summary criticism, good-or-bad focus group language, and lazy, surface-level analysis, or what I derisively refer to as “braindead book report criticism.” This style is most identifiable in how it reproduces the tone of the Rotten Tomatoes consensus, the summarizing sentence generated by the popular review aggregation website, which itself exists to obviate the reading of actual movie reviews. To quote the Critics Consensus for the sexy-snowman-comes-to-life movie Hot Frosty (2024): “Knowingly goofy with its steamy twist on the magic of Christmas, Hot Frosty is an affable rom-com that ought to thaw the hearts of even the most skeptical of viewers.”

Compare this likely intern-written, chipper-punny synthesis with that of the individual film critics recognized by Rotten Tomatoes, the professionals whose work gets sucked up, digested, and vomited back out to generate The Consensus. Exhibit A: “Still, it’s less naughty, more ice than we would have expected.” Exhibit B: “Hot Frosty packs in a lot of the entries from your Christmas Movie Bingo Card, including cookie baking, decking the halls and a dressing-room montage, as we wait to see whether Kathy’s heart will thaw before Jack’s body melts.” Exhibit C: “Hot Frosty has more than its share of corniness, but it’s a pretty charming Christmas movie that should melt the hearts of viewers willing to go along with it.” Meanwhile, I believe that Hot Frosty is about the post-pandemic psychosexual dilemma of a widowed small business owner wanting to fuck a homeless criminal with a 12-pack. Where’s the film critic suggesting that? They can now be found on The Best Movie Substack.

No one needs to be reminded of the tyrannical rule that audiovisual content exercises over our bottomless content cesspool, but it feels important to shed light on how the de-prioritization of the arguments, affects, and thought processes made possible by effective writing has come to infect not just podcasts and written criticism, but also films themselves, the cinematic landscape that inspires film criticism. This devaluation of what is written isn’t some conspiracy theory, either; celebrated filmmakers will straight up tell you that it’s the case. Consider these revealing statements that Denis Villenueve, the acclaimed French-Canadian writer-director, shared with The Times of London in an interview during the press tour for DUNE 2:

“Frankly, I hate dialogue,” Villenueve said. “…I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema, but it is something not obvious when you watch movies today.”

With all due respect to the man who cowrote the putrid third act of DUNE 2, could it possibly be more evident that filmmakers, audiences, and critics don’t care about writing anymore? That the brightest image and loudest sound reign supreme in movies, just as they do over the internet and social media? Even the degradation of the visual and sonic quality of movies gets more press than the degradation of writing. Variety asks, “Why Are Movies So Dark?” Slashfilm explains, “Here’s Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten So Hard to Understand.” Why is no one writing about how much screenwriting, and the podcastified field of film criticism borne from it, have been degraded? Why is anyone asserting that movies are more about images than about words, as if we don’t have a century of film history proving that they can be both? With The Best Movie Substack, I will to try to show that movies can still be both, and that written criticism can play a role in making the words and images that we see on screen feel equally alive, compelling, memorable.

Is it asking too much for a piece of film criticism to surprise and delight me as a reader? Can a single critic offend, unnerve, confound, or disturb me—and not just because they have revealed their horrible, embarrassing taste in movies, like a parking lot flasher exposing their baby dick? Once upon a time, I eagerly anticipated reading what different critics thought about movies, whether I agreed with them or not, but all of those critics have died, retired, been fired from various websites and magazines, developed strange illnesses, gone insane, started writing for The National Review, or become podcasters. As a result, I have decided to cut out the middleman by providing my readers with the insights, surprises, and delights that those defanged and/or dead critics once offered to me. More or less, I want this newsletter to analyze new movies the way Room 237 analyzed The Shining, except the functions of the scholars, enthusiasts, and occultists in that documentary will be performed by me, much in the way that James McAvoy embodies his multiple personalities in M. Night Shyamalan’s Split (2017).

In the spirit of M. Night Shyamalan, I will seek to blaze my own uncompromising path forward with The Best Movie Substack, never kowtowing to backlash, common sense, or prevailing trends. I will never, for instance, use the single-most corrosive phrase ever introduced to critical discourse: “I wanted to like this but…” I will never obtusely ground my reviews in box office performance, corporate HR ideology, or social media discourse. I will never evaluate a film directly through the prism of my identity as a 37-year-old Italian-American who has seen The Mars Volta 15 times in concert, and I will never describe anything in any movie as “interesting.” Oh, and I will never become a podcaster, discounting the one Oscars prognostication podcast episode that I record every year with a random guy named William. And if all that sounds stupid and pointless, you can always read my Substack about tennis.

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1. Movies that qualify as Fat Suit Cinema feature at least one character—but preferably multiple characters—wearing a prosthetic fat suit.

2. These aren’t movies explicitly about having a midlife crisis, like American Beauty (1999) or Eat, Pray, Love (2010). Rather, Meta-MidLife Crisis Movies are films whose narrative incoherence and/or humiliating derangement formalize the off-screen reality that the director is having a psychotic break, nervous breakdown, or midlife crisis. (See: ARGYLE.)

3. I define “Olive Face” as any televisual property that grafts the broad stereotyping and casual racism that typified blackface onto Italian-American characters and stories. (See: Ferrari, FX’s The Bear, House of Gucci, The Feast of Seven Fishes, etc.)

4. Guest critics will be contracted and paid to supply reviews when necessary.