Fin: Down with tiny movie clips, defending Dakota and… Cervasa!

This week’s notes column

A video clip went viral on Twitter/X earlier this week of a scene from the recent movie Argylle, featuring Bryce Dallas Howard’s character in a gold dress, ice-skating around a room covered in oil and hitting bad guys with a weapon. The scene was shared with the vulgar caption, “the fuck is this shit?” The clip has over 10 million views if Elon-era metrics can be trusted. 

I come not to defend Argylle, a movie I disliked very much. But this is a tendency that I’ve grown to dislike, of snarky movie people sharing a clip, entirely out of context, within a one-inch window on Twitter. And such sharing, nearly always, is done with the stated or unstated implication that this clip looks awful and is symbolic of how terrible movies are these days. 

This is not a fair way to judge movies! It’s one thing to conclude based on a teaser or trailer. But based on a 30-second clip in a very small window on your phone, presented by someone telling you that, on the strength of that one clip, the movie represents the death of the medium? That’s way worse. 

And besides, that scene was the one action sequence in Argylle that I liked. The film has established that the character knows how to ice skate, and that scene is at least presented coherently, which is more than I can say for most of the action setpieces in that film. 

And speaking of early 2024 movie flops…