Image: Canva.
Two months before the Melbourne International Film Festival 2024, I decided to create an archive of all my entries on Letterboxd, a social media platform for reviewing and cataloguing films (like ‘Goodreads for movies’, as I once heard it described). I’d used the movie-rating site almost religiously for years. Once I’d pasted my latest film log onto the final page of the Google Doc, I recoiled.
My eyes were fixated on a six-figure number: 196,330 words.
I was embarrassed to have written nearly as many words as The Iliad in an online film diary. At least half of these logs were published in 2021, during the notorious second wave of Covid lockdowns. That same year, I pursued a film studies honours degree in Philippine cinema. In the interim of thesis revisions, I frequented online communities as my release from academia, finding company and solace in many Facebook film groups that helped expand my cinema palate.
I’d lie if I said I didn’t write to impress people sometimes. My writing was partly motivated by an online crush: a film student my age who proudly owned the label I gave him of ‘conservative communist’. This person shared my passion for arthouse cinema, inspiring me to continue writing as we harboured conversations about neo-liberalism and Slavoj Žižek. (We’re no longer friends.)
I was embarrassed to have written nearly as many words as The Iliad in an online film diary.
Publishing Letterboxd essays became a dedicated art. For over two years, I developed a routine of writing between my retail shifts. Part of this involved a curated watchlist of films on MUBI, Criterion and YouTube. I stored these drafts in my Notes app and kept an internal schedule to publish within a twelve-hour window. I’d even write reviews during my shift, either handwriting opinions or frantically typing up my revisions over the sales counter.
Through these writings, I discovered my niche in critiquing Asian diaspora films—unsurprisingly, they became my most popular write-ups on Letterboxd. Many reviews were charged with heated, juvenile call-outs on directors who made films featuring boba liberal politics, a framework that engages with Asian culture through surface-level ideas (think Marvel’s Shang-Chi). I’m shaken at how ruthless I was in these reviews, unafraid to mark my reproach by rating these films with boba tea emojis.
Domee Shi’s Turning Red? That’s a 🧋🧋🧋/10.
Jay Chandrasekhar’s Easter Sunday? A hard 🧋/10.
I cringe now at the thought of acting this way in real-life scenarios. I can’t imagine rocking up to a panel of Asian Australian filmmakers, only to jump out and yell J’accuse! at them for promoting simplistic and tokenistic celebrations of Asian culture. Whether or not I was correct in my judgements, there’s no joy in cornering people into a chokehold of accusation. I had yet to witness how confronting it can be when a filmmaker—or a fan—speaks back.
I’m shaken at how ruthless I was in these reviews, unafraid to mark my reproach.
One Letterboxd reviewer, SupremeLemon, has faced intense scrutiny in online comments. His pieces reveal a commitment to critiquing popular cinema—from the commodified feminism of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie to the subtext of interracial coupling in Pixar’s Elemental. His takedown of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s (aka the Daniels) 2022 smash hit Everything Everywhere All At Once (🧋🧋🧋🧋🧋/10) confronts the director duo’s use of Asian trauma tropes and cultural stereotypes. It currently holds a thread of two hundred and fifteen comments, many of which have been left by users pursuing the thrill of pointless provocation. One commenter calls SupremeLemon a ‘race traitor’. Another rebuffs him to ‘take [his] garbage politics elsewhere,’ arguing that Letterboxd is ‘an app for discussion’.
These comments reveal an irony: fans who love a film that promotes kindness, diversity and tolerance will comfortably defend it by harassing its detractors. Observing this, however, was like scrying into my future. How much criticism was I prepared for as an Asian film critic?
My most pointed Letterboxd review is a two-thousand-word piece of Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning Triangle of Sadness. It fuelled me with enough frustration to keep me awake until four in the morning. I was annoyed at Östlund for directing another trite eat-the-rich satire. But I was more uncomfortable about the praise for Dolly De Leon’s character Abigail, the toilet-cleaning Overseas Filipino Worker who embraces a rise to authority after the luxury cruise she works on is shipwrecked. Later on the island, she orders one of the male cruise guests to fulfil sexual favours in exchange for rations.
Image: Dolly De Leon (centre) in Triangle of Sadness (2022). Source: Imdb.com.
I’m side-eyeing Östlund. It’s affirming to see more working-class Filipinas represented in Western cinema, and even more exciting for kayumanggi actresses like De Leon taking centre stage, who dedicated her performance to OFWs across the globe. But beneath these signifiers, there’s something discomforting about a Swedish filmmaker achieving Pinoy pride on behalf of migrant women—especially when it manifests through a Filipina maid replicating the exploitation enacted by men in positions of power.
How much criticism was I prepared for as an Asian film critic?
Nobody should invalidate Filipinos who connect with Abigail. Many Pinoys on Letterboxd praise her as a subversion of the meek Asian stereotype and a national emblem for Filipina women across the globe, made to uplift rather than regress. I thought otherwise. Abigail’s arc reminded me of a trope I’d grown tired of seeing in Australian media: Asian women pursuing (or pursued by) affluent white men. Narratives like that in the film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the TV show House of Hancock and the short story ‘About Lin’ reduce Filipina women as promiscuous gold-diggers who can only exist within transactional relationships.
I later drafted an essay that reflected more organised and nuanced thoughts on the film, acknowledging De Leon’s autonomy as an actress while questioning Östlund’s co-opting of migrant voices. I reserved this essay for publication—it’s still in my backlog today. I hope this review one day finds a home. Even if the hundreds of likes affirmed my readership, I desired more legitimacy: a space for advocacy, similar to Gloria Demillo’s article on community engagement with Filipino stories. And to me, Letterboxd was far from ‘legitimate’.
In Senses of Cinema, Tyler Thier describes Letterboxd reviews as a unique form of ‘reactionary criticism’. Filmgoers can write a concise argument about a film with candidness and immediacy but without the polish of professional writing. My Letterboxd diary embodied this—a collection of awkward, fleeting micro-essays that talk through my interests and dislikes.
No editor would ever bat an eye at my Letterboxd Triangle of Sadness review—raging, rhetorical and filled with furious litanies—and probably for the better.
*
Every day, I pray for atonement for my unending laundry list of Letterboxd sins. I regret the time I called a vegan commenter ‘Joey Carbstrong clickbait’ for misconstruing my critique on an animal rights documentary. I’m still mortified at my Friends and Strangers review, where I described James Vaughan’s comedy-drama as a ‘feature-length Frankie Magazine article’.
I pray for atonement for my unending laundry list of Letterboxd sins.
Nowadays, I use the site intermittently. I’ve deleted half of my backlist of reviews from the site. I’m severely behind on logging films I’ve watched. Instead, I expend my energy on arts work and freelance writing—creative ventures that don’t require an exhaustion of internal anger and bloated syntax. However, I fear the day my account will be ‘found out’ by a workplace. Each milestone in my career feels like a step closer to my Shiva Baby nightmare. If every festival worker and film critic I met was a long-lost family member, then my secret life on Letterboxd was the sugar daddy I’d hidden under the rug at family socials.
What crime is there to being a Letterboxd critic? Are film festivals agnostic to chronically online film writers? Or can they make room for the amateurs? In the lead-up to my participation in MIFF’s Critics Campus, a week-long mentorship program for emerging Australian screen critics, I joked about how yapping on Letterboxd finally paid off. Perhaps there was some truth to this. Letterboxd was my precursor to paid writing, my playground for publishing without the hurdles of pitching, filing and proofing. It was a platform that helped me explore my passion for film criticism. It’s charming to read back at my archive now—how it maps out my maturity in an authorial voice, each review recording different spectres of my past selves.
Filmmaking is taxing and arduous. I grapple with this today as I develop my debut short film and receive advice from independent filmmakers—needless to say, it humbled my inner Letterboxd critic. While the title is hardly one to boast at a schmoozy cocktail event, I cannot divorce it from my past either. Alongside my professional endeavours, there will always be room for publishing Letterboxd reviews, however rough or candid—anything to keep my love of cinema well fed.
