Forrest Cardamenis
@FCardamenis
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Freelance film critic/programmer. By-lines in @Reverse_Shot, @Hyperallergic, @LWLies, @Indiewire, @MUBI, @TheBrooklynRail, and others. [email protected]
Joined April 2010
Good morning! I wrote about old movies, traveling around the world to watch them, Abel Gance’s Napoleon, and necrophilia. I think it’s some of my best writing, so I hope you will give it a read.
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Danielle Rose lost her job as Poetry Editor over this tweet. Complete BS. Totally outrageous.
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What’s the funniest joke in the history of television? Has to be a single joke/gag don’t come here detailing entire episodes and story arcs. “Dead dove do not eat” type of stuff.
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No interest in Wednesday but have been endeared to Jenna Ortega because apparently she’s going around saying people only like the show because streamer saturation has eroded taste and she counts A Brighter Summer Day, In A Lonely Place and Persona as among her favorite films.
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“I’ll see you again in 25 years” is the greatest called shot in the history of western art. We didn’t realize it at the time, but that was Babe Ruth pointing over the fence before another home run.
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May December is about how treating art like journalism (a bad kind of journalism) results in bad art so I’m not surprised that people with no taste wish it were more like bad journalism.
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It’s so cool that Steven Spielberg cast David Lynch—the New Hollywood compatriot whose aesthetic is probably least similar to his own but also the one who most shares his overriding belief in the power of spectacle—as “the greatest director who ever lived.” King. Both of them.
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@intothecrevasse A lot of people find communion in the NYT Cooking section and that’s fine. The best spaces for discussing something are often not in the spaces dedicated to that topic.
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The Gone-Backpacking-For-Eight-Days Lady isn't believing the recent developments.
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I know it’s become fashionable to say that we shouldn’t blame people for listening to TikTok on the subway w/o headphones because the tech companies don’t include compatible earbuds anymore or whatever, but I’m sorry that shit is unacceptable. Engage in a different hobby.
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@capybaroness @labuzamovies I basically agree with both of you but it is important to note that any kind of Halo adaptation is about 15 years past the point where it would’ve been most hyped.
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I think we’re living through the part where Donald Trump becomes a worse president than George W. Bush.
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Christina's interview with Andrew Dominik shows that assigning the most knowledgeable person to interview a director is better than just assigning whoever likes the film the most (or asks for it first). We need more of that.
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There is a tendency, with all of culture at our fingertips, to try to speedrun culture. You can watch Godard films several times and still be lost. They ask you to do your homework. One of the things Godard illustrates is that you *cannot* speedrun culture.
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What’s with the trend of burying the important stuff in favor of a bunch of meaningless first-person stuff? This is the important stuff and it begins in the TWENTY-SIXTH paragraph.
new for @TheAtlantic, on the pressing issues of our day: why are we all watching everything with subtitles now?.
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The New York Times compared this to Cahiers du Cinema.
one thing you’ll see if you check out any of the “movietok” profiles cited in the nytimes piece is that they’re exactly as “snobby” as the film critics they’re supposedly replacing. something like this is far more exclusionary than any film critic’s negative opinion of a movie
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Maybe I’m not reading the right people but it seems to me that Robbie Robertson’s brilliant score for Killers of the Flower Moon is not getting its due. It’s not flashy but it’s essential to the film’s tone and Robertson’s ties to indigenous communities are plainly audible.
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Everyone is hating on the Cannes lineup but I find it hard to believe that you all are so familiar with the films of Oliver Hermanus, Mario Martone, Tarik Saleh, Hafsia Herzi and Mascha Schilinski that you can confidently have an opinion about them.
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Every time a giant argument about Criterion erupts I remember how during the pandemic film festivals all over the world made their slate available/made programs available, often for free, to everyone, and 99% of people on here did zero exploring and no publications covered them.
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The Buster Keaton miniseries is gonna dedicate a fifth of its runtime to showing us how his childhood in vaudeville traumatized him and situate his films as a kind of art therapy that helps him process it and it’s gonna suck so bad.
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People on this website become completely unhinged when you suggest that maybe it isn’t good when adults have the same tastes, preferences, hobbies, moral outlook or whatever else as literal children.
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@CarmanTse @salobonavia I once heard a Brit call it “the American festival of feasting,” and that’s about right, and that’s also why it’s the best.
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It’s honestly kind of incredible that Film Forum is showing *every extant Ozu film* on 35mm this month. I didn’t think any institutions still had the money or the chutzpah to do this for a filmmaker whose work is basically entirely available on DCP.
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Spending $15 for a movie and popcorn is for rich people; spending $10000 on a good home theater setup in your bonus room is for salt-of-the-earth folks.
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Oh hey, the guy who tried to kill Nancy Pelosi spent his last day as a free man complaining about how movie critics are "commie gate keepers" who "love the shittiest movies ever" and "hate movies the public loves and love movies that are absolute trash.".
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@Nick_Newman @fivepoisonskid Lends credence to my belief that casting David Lynch as “the greatest director who ever lived” was not primarily about the physical resemblance.
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@headfallsoff The actual answer is that in car culture they need to give parents time to drop kids off at school before work, and sometimes you have a kid in high school, a kid in middle school, and maybe even a kid in elementary school, so those are often staggered with HS earliest.
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One of the worst trends of recent cultural criticism is the defense that letting people write about things they know nothing about and revel in knowing nothing about is actually opening up criticism to anti-elitist and feminine perspectives.
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I think TP:TR being 18 hours has made people overlook this, but: Lynch spent most of the 21st c. unable to get funding. At a certain point he seemed to give up entirely on getting a feature funded. Lynch! The best US filmmaker of the last 50 years! What is the industry good for?.
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Movies that recently got restored all sharply rose and movies that aren’t on blu ray in the US all tumbled, what if opening up the poll this way was bad.
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Tired: Tarantino, 57, saying he’ll retire after his tenth film. Wired: Godard, 90, saying he’ll retire after making his 111th and 112th films.
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Every game critic has read 3 books and watched a bunch of Hollywood films made after 1970 but none made before that and no foreign films except Pan’s Labyrinth and Parasite, and are, as a whole, ill-equipped to productively critique and further their chosen field.
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@adamrocketblack Quite the opposite. She sounds like someone who will pay attention to the artistry of the poem and nurture that rather than hyping up poets with the ridiculous idea that one day they'll write something that will eliminate poverty or war.
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There are perhaps 0 movies in existence that have more to say about capitalism—that system we all live under—than Citizen Kane. Quite frankly anyone entirely uninterested in it has no place discussing movies. Sorry if this is “gatekeeping” but sometimes the truth hurts.
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David Lynch was probably the greatest, most inventive Hollywood(ish) filmmaker since the Golden Age. His films were infused with an enormous belief in the unique emotional truths sound & image could access but a keen awareness of the dark side of all forms of escapism. RIP, king.
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Vasgersian says it’s a problem Lindor has more walks than Ks. Then A-Rod said he’d penalize him for hitting more than 25 homers. So together they turned a guy with MVP upside into a .300/.330/.400 hitter. I love this commentary. I understand baseball so much better now.
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Cutting an Oscar-winning technician’s mic before he gets a chance to talk is so fucked up.
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The people who spent November saying "actually, Straub-Huillet films are very easy to understand, anyone could like them if they are smart like me" and have moved onto "Jeanne Dielman is an easy watch" should be forced to, IDK, get a job in a kitchen and talk to their coworkers.
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One of the big problems with the amount of phone use in theaters is that if you tell someone to turn off their fucking phone and shut the fuck up and watch the fucking movie they might act like you’re the crazy one.
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Anyway, that’s what your world without curation looks like. Everything is available, except nobody knows about it or has a friend who can recommend anything to them so they all just default to whatever is being most heavily marketed. This is the same reason lists are good btw.
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Hollywood hasn't funded a David Lynch work in TWENTY YEARS and now they are giving him an Honorary Oscar.
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R.I.P. to Terence Davies. That he only made 9 feature films exposes how absurd it is to expect market forces to identify and support great filmmaking. Many of those films are better than most directors could accomplish with far more tries.
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So how exactly did a new consensus emerge around 1999 as the “best movie year” over, say, 1974 or 1960 or (yes) 1939?.
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@GarrenShipley @carterforva Interesting that you describe yourself as a capitalist but still enjoy the weekend. .
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@carolaverygrant Jesus Christ I spent 1500 words trying to get here and you just. tweeted it out.
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Being a film critic is all about flying across the Atlantic Ocean so you can be half an hour from Amsterdam and three hours from Paris, but instead watching a six hour film so you can give it 3 stars on Letterboxd before anyone else gets a chance to see it.
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A huge problem in Barbie is that the same people who are mansplaining Stephen Malkmus are playing Matchbox Twenty on guitar and I’m not sure anyone on earth has ever done both of those things.
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This WONDER WOMAN controversy is stupid. There are men-only screenings in NYC all the time. Michael Mann films screen at least once a month.
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@DavidKlion I can't remember who first said it, but I agree w/ the idea that the Squad knows that speaking against Biden will result in:. 1. the entire party turning against them.2. calls for Biden to step aside being painted as a "far left" thing.3. Effectively handing the election to Trump.
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Everyone who is currently ~12-23 years old who is into movies will, in about ten years time, take it for granted that The Killer is a better movie then Zodiac. They’ll look at the Zodiac lovers like Mulholland Dr lovers look at people whose favorite Lynch is Blue Velvet.
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I've enjoyed Sean Baker's films since catching Starlet back in 2012, but Anora is a real step up. His command of overlapping dialogue, his instincts on when to cut into action vs. away from it, his structure & the narrative propulsion are all at another level. It's his best film.
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Albums to win both Grammy for Album of the Year and the Pazz & Jop poll:. Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life.Michael Jackson - Thriller.Paul Simon - Graceland.Bob Dylan - Time Out of Mind.OutKast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.Kacey Musgraves - Golden Hour.
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@lguapp0 @SJGArchive @bariweiss @ggreenwald You two should check out the videos that are now the first replies to Weiss' thread.
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I had heard a lot of people describe Armageddon Time as nostalgic, and now that I have seen it, I can only imagine these folks had recently been hit in the head by a massive blunt object.
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The Democratic message for more than five years has been “The Republican Party isn’t all awful, it’s just that Trump is” and the result is they are getting absolutely torched by ticket-splitters. Idiots.
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We now have 2 Emilia Pérez wins and 0 mentions of actual trans people or the harms they’re facing in the country the ceremony takes place in.
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David Bordwell was a titan. One of the most important figures in the entire discipline of film studies. The clarity of his method and writing is an example to us all, even where our own diverge. R.I.P.
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Bob Dylan would like us all to know that New York City is the birthplace of “Herman Melville, all the greats, you know, Sylvester Stallone,” whose latest movie, “Last…what’s it called…Last Blood! is really great. It should’ve won an Academy Award, but of course it didn’t.”.
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My KotFM theater was right next to an Eras Tour theater and it genuinely was a problem. Whoever made that tweet telling people to check in advance if that would be the case should be thanked rather than mocked.
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DARK WATERS is the movie that makes you think “it sure would be nice if literally every single person alive saw this.”.
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@intothecrevasse Hard to fault an American actor these days if they don’t manage to land a role in one of the two good films Hollywood produces each year.
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Oppenheimer is, in terms of the ability to arrange a scene, block a shot, maintain spatial coherence, almost certainly Nolan's best made film. It felt a bit script reliant but I'm mostly happy to see him improve at directing a movie in the most fundamental sense of the word.
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A whole lot of bullshit here but this part is probably the most galling. If some winners had said apartheid and genocide are good it would’ve been appropriate for others to say they are bad, but because everyone said they are bad, it was inappropriate to say so.
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Manny Farber in ArtForum, October 1968: "At the end of [Godard's] career, there will probably be a hundred films, each one a bizarrely different species, with its own excruciatingly singular skeleton, tendons, plumage.".
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@elazic At the risk of overthinking stupid trendy bullshit, I can’t help but connect cinephilia becoming an increasingly niche, specialized thing for weirdos and the love of these no-title screenshot tweets that are by their nature exclusively for people who already like the chosen films.
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For the cinephiles: what’s the movie that you have in your back pocket for when a normie asks you what your favorite film is?. Mine is Mulholland Drive.
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You’d have to a fucking piece of shit asshole to find any of this “surprising.”
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Not listed: .Perfumed Nightmare.Turumba.The Time To Live and The Time To Die.Transit.Peppermint Candy.The Way I Spent the End of the World.The Lady Without Camelias.The Terrorizers.The River.Duelle.In a Year with 13 Moons.Spring in a Small Town (GOAT).Dziga Vertov Group films.
These are the 100 best movies to stream on Amazon Prime
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All-time L.
They talk about the golden age of cinema as if it took place in the late '30s or in the '40s. But except for Preston Sturges and a few fluky individualists, they just didn't have the personal voice of the movies of the '70s. (1989).
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If you want to see movies w/o distribution before they get an official release, do what I did: Spend countless hours writing criticism on a blog, parlay that into unpaid gigs that help get you accredited for a film festival, and rack up credit card debt to attend.
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@GraceRandolph Should have Googled “Film Foundation” and “World Cinema Project” and checked his executive producer credits before you made this tweet :/.
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NYC rep theaters ranked by the food options* around them:. 8. Film Society.7. Metrograph.6. MoMI.5. Film Forum.4. Anthology.3. Nitehawk/Spectacle.2. MoMA.1. Quad. Criteria: Variety, price, speed, and quality. Hard to overstate just how bad FSLC is compared to everyone else.
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Anthology, MoMA, Lincoln Center, Rooftop Films.
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It is astonishing to think about film students not having interest in old movies but *especially* 1930s movies. Almost every Hollywood film from the 1930s kicks ass. (It’s the exact opposite of Hollywood today in that respect).
speaking of film schools and old movies, im taking a history of cinematography course, and the prof has already said he’s cut out the 1910’s-1930’s units due to lack of student interest. Like, if anything, I wish my experience w/ film school introduced me to more older movies.
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@c0mmunicants Everyone responding to this with "it's because they're really good" is weird to me, as if these are the only good foreign movies and the all the other, less successful ones are simply bad.
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Imagine deciding to watch a movie at home and choosing to watch a new Hollywood film when you have the choice of every single movie on MUBI, the Criterion Channel, OVID, various pirate networks, etc etc.
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So JRo likes Barbie but not Oppenheimer, Taubin likes Oppenheimer but not Barbie, Brody likes Oppenheimer and loves Barbie, Schrader likes Barbie and loves Oppenheimer. Anyone have a line on what Nicole Brenez thinks?.
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Promising Young Woman is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.
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A lot of people shy away from this. They are intimidated or impatient or lack the intellectual humility to believe that the virtues of the film might exist beyond their immediate perception or whatever else. But comprehension of Godard is an almost asymptotic struggle.
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For 60 years and with over 100 films, Jean-Luc Godard expanded the boundaries of cinema and what is possible within them. He was probably the important person in the history of the art form. His ‘60s work changed it forever; after that, his films got better. R.I.P.
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You must not only watch but read about them, their production and the political ideologies that inform them. But that means each watch can reveal something new! I have been rethinking Godard for as long as I have been watching movies. His work grows richer where others' fades.
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This is like when you work really hard on an essay but have no idea if it’s horrible or brilliant and then your teacher asks you to stay after class to discuss it.
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Someone should check the percentage of films in the 2012 and 2022 polls for how many were available on Criterion at the time ballots were due.
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Not that I want a 5 hour Oscar show, but if we’re going to have the presenters of the acting awards do little speeches about how great the nominees are, there is no reason the craftspeople and technicians don’t deserve the same respect.
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This is honestly most optimistic thing I’ve read in years. So many people have given up on life and in finding new things in it by that age and Scorsese is still learning, still motivated, still has more to say, finds it so exhilarating and worthwhile. We should all be so lucky.
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Summer of Twin Peaks The Return has the same glow as childhood. Spent forever waiting for that first episode and thereafter spent each week fervently discussing the latest episode with all my friends as we anxiously awaited Sunday night. Group chats, emails, DMs all popped off.
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