Ask Jamie: Situation Non-critical

I’m addicted to writing Letterboxd reviews! When I’m watching a film, I feel like I’m spending 50% of my time listening out for witty quips rather than even watching the film. Why do I care? I only have about eight followers. Please help!

Before I give my two cents, I feel I should mention that my sitting in for Anahit while she’s away is essentially an office joke. I’m the kind of person who bristles at the suggestion of therapy. My idea of self-help is to swallow down my anxieties into the pit of my stomach and ignore them until the inevitable mental breakdown. If it’s not clear, I’m completely unqualified to be giving out life advice, so I was relieved, to say the least, when I discovered this month's question was about your silly little Letterboxd reviews.

Let’s start with the addiction part. As far as all-consuming preoccupations go, this is a pretty benign one. It sounds like there is no real issue, save the fact that the pressure you’ve put on yourself to be the Oscar Wilde of Letterboxd means you’re no longer enraptured while watching films. This gets to the fundamental issue with Letterboxd reviews: they're all arch wit and no analysis. No one is going to read your 5000-word treatise on Andrei Rublev, but if you call 70s animation The Aristocats “an a-meow-zing movie,” watch those hearts roll in.

Conjuring up a pithy epigram for the latest release is not cinephilia, though. Have you considered dropping the comedy routine and simply using Letterboxd as God initially intended? Namely, as a handy tracking tool to remind you that, yes, you have rewatched The Devil Wears Prada nine times in the last 18 months; yes, you did watch Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom back in April 2020, that was not a COVID-induced fever dream; and yes, you did give Everything Everywhere All At Once five stars when it came out, what were you thinking?

It's a radical idea, but try to engage with the films you watch earnestly. Rather than draft gags in your head, get lost in the filmmaking. Call it the Charli xcx approach, to name one prolific Letterboxd user who seems to genuinely love cinema, not just having opinions about cinema. And who’s to say these more thoughtful takes can’t also be funny? Canadian critic Adam Nayman's single sentence review of The Holdovers – “like being beaten to death by a Cat Stevens album” – is both hilariously accurate and as astute as anything he's written in Sight & Sound.

Basically, what I’m saying is, next time you’re down at your local kino, try to give yourself over to the movie and forgo the zingers. Those eight followers of yours will survive.

---

Do you have a problem Anahit could help with? Get in touch by email on pettyshit@theskinny.co.uk, send us your quandaries with an almost-unhelpful level of anonymity via NGL, or look out for Ask Anahit callouts on our Instagram stories