Every edit to the writing here is kept. Open one to see what moved.
About · revision 3 · 7 rewritten, 5 cut
Why link a whole thread instead of quoting one person?Why link a whole conversation instead of quoting one person?I link the thread and never a person in it. No usernames, nothing held up with somebody's name attached, no screenshots. One named stranger can be piled on and a conversation cannot, and the difference is the whole reason we do it that way.The credit says what the thread worked out, specifically, or I do not write one. Nobody has ever been helped by the words great discussion.Reddit now. Lemmy next, which is threads all the way down. Mastodon where the film tags run. The long forums, still the best unpaid writing about film that exists. YouTube channels I treat as papers, because that is what they are: somebody made a thing and would like it seen.Not X. Nothing behind a login. Nothing private. Posted in something I linked and want it gone? Write to me and it is gone, and I will not ask you why.I link the conversation and never a person in it. No usernames, nothing held up with somebody's name attached, no screenshots. One named stranger can be piled on and a room cannot, and the difference is the whole reason we do it that way.Four places, and each one is read at the level of the room rather than the person. Reddit, the thread. Lemmy, the post and its replies. Mastodon, the hashtag, because a tag is a room and a single post is a person standing in it. Hacker News, the story's comments. Everything is read through the public feeds those networks publish for the purpose: no app, no key, no account, no scraping around anything.Bluesky answers no without an app password, so it is not here. A refusal is a refusal and we are not going to get clever about it. Nothing behind a login, nothing private, and not X.The credit says what the conversation actually worked out, specifically, or I do not write one. Nobody has ever been helped by the words great discussion.YouTube channels I treat as papers, because that is what they are: somebody made a thing and would like it seen.Posted in something I linked and want it gone? Write to me and it is gone, and I will not ask you why.
About · revision 2 · 42 rewritten, 11 cut
I do not watch the films. I read the critics, which is a different job and a worse one. Four hundred sentences a week about pictures I will never see, and after enough of them you stop reading for the verdict and start reading for the tell.What is French Press?A film score built out of what critics actually wrote. Not stars converted to a percentage, not a thumbs up counted as a hundred. Somebody reads the sentence, decides what it says, gives it a number, and prints the sentence beside the number so you can check the work.Every review we threw out is on the page too, with the reason. A score you cannot audit is a rumour with a decimal point.French Press is a Caelivon Studios property. Nothing on it is paid for by anyone with a film in it.How is the score worked out?If a critic published a score I use theirs. I am not in the business of correcting a person who was in the room. Peter Bradshaw gave The President's Cake four out of five and that is eighty on this site, and my opinion of it does not enter into it.If they published no score I read the sentence and give it one, and then I print the sentence I gave it on, which is the only part of this that matters. You are not meant to trust my number. You are meant to look at what I read it off and tell me I was wrong.The number is the average of what is left. Nothing is weighted. A masthead does not buy a bigger one.It is out of a hundred, and it is an average of that film's reviews only. A sixty here is not a sixty anywhere else and is not meant to be.What does the colour on a film's mark mean?It is the distance between the kindest review and the harshest one, and it is the second number on this site because a seventy that everybody agreed on and a seventy nobody agreed on are not the same film.Within 10 points, they all agreed. Within 25, they split. Within 45, they argued. More than 45, they fought about it. Teal, ochre, vermilion, violet, in that order, and the words are printed next to the colour every time so nothing here depends on seeing colour.When does a review get thrown out?Three reasons. It arrived in a pile-on. There is no sentence under it. The writer has a stake in the film.Never for what it concluded. Nabil Salih took The President's Cake apart in Jacobin and he is from Baghdad and the film is about Baghdad, and he counts at full weight, and the score is thirty-two points lower than the score sites say because of it.A thrown-out review stays on the film's page with the ground written out. Deleting it would leave a cleaner page and a worse one.What is the content guide on each film?Seven fixed rows on every film: violence, sex and nudity, swearing, drink and drugs, upsetting, offensive, hard to sit through. The same seven, in the same order, so you learn the shape once and then read any film in seconds.Every line under a row is a critic's own sentence, quoted and credited. We do not summarise what a film contains, because a summary is somebody's judgement wearing a fact's clothes. If no critic mentioned it, the row says nobody mentioned it, and that is a real answer rather than a blank.This is not an age rating and it does not replace one. It is what the people who watched it said out loud.Who is Marlow Vance?I do not watch the films. I read the critics, which is a different job and a worse one. Four hundred sentences a week about pictures I will never see, and after enough of them you stop reading for the call and start reading for the tell.[email protected].The others who read here are Readers. Same job, same rules, same name printed on what they read.What are you looking for in a review?If a critic published a score I use theirs. I am not in the business of correcting a person who was in the room. Peter Bradshaw gave The President's Cake four out of five and that is eighty on this site, and my opinion of it does not enter into it.If they published no score I read the sentence and give it one, and then I print the sentence I gave it on, which is the only part of this that matters. You are not meant to trust my number. You are meant to look at what I read it off and tell me I was wrong.I drop a review for three things: it arrived in a pile-on, there is no sentence under it, the writer has a stake. Not for what it concluded. Nabil Salih took The President's Cake apart in Jacobin and he is from Baghdad and the film is about Baghdad, and he counts at full weight, and the score is thirty-two points lower than the aggregators say because of it.The number is the average. Nothing is weighted. A masthead does not buy a bigger one.Most of these sentences I read where an encyclopedia had already collected them and not where they were published. That is a real difference and I am not going to smooth it over: a quote lifted from a summary has lost its paragraph, and a paragraph is where a critic keeps the qualifier. Every line on every film page says which is which.Six films have no poster I can lawfully show. They get a mark I drew. One poster had no owner recorded anywhere I looked, and its line says exactly that rather than a name I made up.Where do the reviews come from?Most of these sentences I read where an encyclopedia had already collected them and not where they were published. That is a real difference and I am not going to smooth it over: a quote lifted from a summary has lost its paragraph, and a paragraph is where a critic keeps the qualifier. Every line on every film page says which it is.Nothing here is scraped at volume, and no site is hammered to build this. One page at a time, at the speed a person reads, from what is public.Every critic on the site has a page listing what they wrote and how it landed, so you can see whether a reader has been consistently kind or consistently hard on one writer.Why link a whole thread instead of quoting one person?Reddit now. Lemmy next, which is threads all the way down. Mastodon where the film tags run. The long forums, still the best unpaid writing about film that exists.YouTube channels I treat as papers, because that is what they are: somebody made a thing and would like it seen.Reddit now. Lemmy next, which is threads all the way down. Mastodon where the film tags run. The long forums, still the best unpaid writing about film that exists. YouTube channels I treat as papers, because that is what they are: somebody made a thing and would like it seen.Licences, one at a time, which is slow and cannot be hurried by anybody being clever. Critics willing to confirm what they wrote. One film scored in public that survives the argument. Then somebody who pays for it. None of that has started.Why can you show the posters?A poster is shown small, next to criticism of that film, to show which film it is. That is what fair use is for, and it is the only thing we use them for. The owner is named under every one.Where no owner is recorded in the source we looked at, the line says exactly that instead of a name we invented. Where there is no poster we can lawfully show, the film gets a mark drawn from its own reviews.Why does the writing here sound like that?There is a list of words this site will not use, and the build stops if one of them reaches a page. Office words, report words, the wording a machine reaches for when it is trying to sound serious. The whole list is on the desk, each entry beside the word we use instead.Every entry on that list came from a numbered ruling, and every ruling is published on the desk with the wording before and after and the reason. When a ruling turns out to be wrong it is replaced by a later one and both stay up.How does French Press make money?It does not, yet. Licences, one at a time, which is slow and cannot be hurried by anybody being clever. Critics willing to confirm what they wrote. One film scored in public that survives the argument. Then somebody who pays for it. None of that has started.How do I get something corrected?Write to [email protected]. A misquote, a misattributed line, a score read off a sentence that does not say what I said it says, a thread you would rather we did not link.Corrections are made on the page and recorded in the changes log with what the page said before, because a correction nobody can see is a quiet edit.Critics: if you would rather not be read here at all, say so and you are out, and I will not argue with you about it.