{"id":51104,"date":"2020-08-21T07:20:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-21T04:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-columnist-bites-back\/"},"modified":"2020-08-21T07:20:00","modified_gmt":"2020-08-21T04:20:00","slug":"the-columnist-bites-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-columnist-bites-back\/","title":{"rendered":"#\u2018The Columnist\u2019 Bites Back"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#\u2018The Columnist\u2019 Bites Back<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

Fantasia International Film Festival runs August 20th through September 2nd as a completely online event. We\u2019re used to attending in person in beautiful Montreal, Canada, but we\u2019re excited to cover this fantastic festival virtually too. Our coverage of this year\u2019s Fantasia Festival continues with our review of The Columnist.<\/em><\/p>\n
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Anyone who\u2019s spent any amount of time on social media<\/a> knows that it\u2019s a hellscape of verbal violence, insults, and wholly inapp<\/a>ropriate behaviors \u2014 and that\u2019s just your interactions with family members. Bring faceless strangers into the mix, and it becomes the new wild West as death threats, vile terms, and worse fly fast and loose across the web. But inexplicably, again and again, those on the receiving end keep returning for more.<\/p>\n

Femke Boot (Katja Herbers, Westworld<\/em>) is no stranger to the attacks, but while both common sense and her writer boyfriend advise her to never read the comments, she can\u2019t help herself. A popular columnist, she\u2019s used to commenters disagreeing with her posts, but as the attacks step up in volume and seriousness \u2014 the latest wave is accusing her of being a pedophile \u2014 she grows increasingly bothered. Most are from strangers, but when she discovers her otherwise friendly neighbor is one of the brutally foul horde something within her snaps. And it\u2019s soon followed by the snapping of the neighbor\u2019s neck after she pushes him off the roof.<\/p>\n

The Columnist<\/em><\/strong> is a sharp commentary on the darkest, but all too common aspect of our collective online behavior. Far too many of us find it far too easy to \u201csay\u201d something about or even to someone on social media that we almost certainly wouldn\u2019t say in person. For all the positive aspects of the online world, it makes for an ugly place when abusive language, threats, and worse are tossed about so frequently and with abandon. Director Ivo van Aart and writer Daan Windhorst have created a darkly entertaining response to it all, and the result is a film that\u2019s as cathartic as it is damning.<\/p>\n

Femke is the clear protagonist here as most of us have experienced some manner of the treatment she\u2019s receiving, and as she herself argues to her tormenters, why can\u2019t these people just be nice? Disagree if you must, but do it calmly, nicely, and without death threats \u2014 is that really so difficult? The answer is yes, apparently, but while Femke tries to step away by literally cutting her router\u2019s power cord and swapping out her smartphone for an old-school model without internet access, she can\u2019t help but be pulled back in. Herbers nails the conflicting motivations of her character, and her feelings, if not her actions, are relatable to anyone who\u2019s spent any amount of time on Twitter.<\/p>\n

Windhorst\u2019s script feels at times like a more modern riff on Joel Schumacher\u2019s fantastic Falling Down<\/em>. The caustic, frustrating human interactions remain, but now they\u2019re all done virtually. Well, the in-person acts of violence and revenge remain, of course, as Femke begins tracking her most vocal and virulent commenters down to deliver her bloody reply, and that\u2019s where The Columnist<\/em> finds its most interesting angle.<\/p>\n

Running counter to Femke\u2019s own narrative is that of her daughter Anna (Claire Porro) who\u2019s taken up a mission at her high school to highlight the importance of free speech. People are killed in some countries simply for saying things critical of others or of their government, and both mother and daughter firmly believe that the freedom to speak your mind is a right to be cherished and fought for. But even as Femke agrees with her daughter\u2019s crusade, she can\u2019t help but take the opposing tact in her own life \u2014 people who\u2019ve harmed her only with words must pay with their lives.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s too caught up in the cycle of online rage to even note the hypocrisy, and that in turn works to challenge the viewers as well. It\u2019s hard to ignore the satisfying thrills that come from her various acts of revenge towards some vile people, but the film is always there to remind us that while their violence was merely done with language, hers is built on permanent acts of life-ending carnage. We\u2019re still cheering her on, of course, but we\u2019ll most likely feel bad about it a few minutes later.<\/p>\n

Additional threads run through The Columnist<\/em> including a reminder for us all that people, like books, shouldn\u2019t be judged merely by their \u201ccover.\u201d The friendly neighbor is actually an asshole. Steven Dood (Bram van der Kalen), a horror writer who dresses in black and critiques Femke\u2019s \u201cbe nice\u201d argument, is actually the most pleasant character in the film as he takes up domestic duties as her caring boyfriend. It carries over to more of her targets leading to a third act that sees her forced to make one last call regarding how she should react when her enemy fails to live up to her imagination.<\/p>\n

The Columnist<\/em> is simple on its face, perhaps too much so for a topic this timely and caustic, but it remains a sharp response to the reality that is social media as people will always be cruel, insensitive pricks behind the anonymous protection of the online world. So the question becomes a simple one. How will we respond? The answer is complicated, but the best advice remains the simplest \u2014 never read the comments.<\/p>\n

Follow our coverage of Fantasia 2020 here.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#\u2018The Columnist\u2019 Bites Back” Fantasia International Film Festival runs August 20th through September 2nd as a completely online event. We\u2019re used to attending in person in beautiful Montreal, Canada, but we\u2019re excited to cover this fantastic festival virtually too. Our coverage of this year\u2019s Fantasia Festival continues with our review of The Columnist. Anyone who\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51105,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[56626,9480,1361,1948,56211],"class_list":["post-51104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-the-columnist-bites-back","tag-fantasia","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-the-columnist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}