I wasn't going to review 'Swiped'. I hadn't
even heard of this movie before last week and they were already a few good
reviews of it out on YouTube, so I felt comfortable just letting it pass me by. But then the creator of 'Swiped' did an oopsie. She did a BIG oopsie. She started threatening people for criticizing her movie.
[Had to blur the emails due to a privacy complaint. Guess who from.] I'm going to enjoy this. 'Swiped' is a teen comedy that was first released back in 2018 on iTunes and Amazon, and has more recently made its way to Netflix, where it began to
receive a lot more attention. Almost all of which, was negative.
Wherever you look, this movie is getting panned both by critics and by the
general audience. And rightly so, because it's really, really bad. But I'm not gonna
be doing what I usually do, which is go through the whole film tearing it apart
in detail. If you want something more detailed, go check out Elvis the Alien's
video. He does a great job highlighting just how much of a dumpster fire this
movie is. The focus of this video is not so much on how bad the film is, but on
how its creator has responded to all of this criticism. Which is where things get
really spicy. It turns out that Swiped's creator is extremely butthurt about criticism and very trigger-happy about copyright, which is why I won't be
showing much footage from the film itself except, where I can definitely say
it qualifies as fair use. To put it simply, the film is awful. It's definitely
the worst of these teen movies that I've seen, especially on Netflix, and that is
saying a lot. The whole production feels very amateurish, not so much a daytime TV
movie and more on the level of a first-year film student project. There
are many many inexcusable technical mistakes. There's a lot of bad blocking,
for example, like characters are still at the edge of the shot so you just get this
blur in the corner of the frame. Or the characters just move in front of the
camera blocking the shot, both of which are really sloppy. The mic placement is
sometimes off, so characters can sometimes sound louder than others. And there's an echo in a few scenes because they didn't bother to compensate for it. "If you make us an app, like Jungle for girls, I just might let you stay here." [Very echoey] "That's a good idea. Jungle really messed me up. Speaking of sound, a lot of the
soundtrack just doesn't go with what's happening in the scene, to the point
where it's really weird and inappropriate. And sometimes it's too
loud while characters are still speaking. Not that you're missing out, because the
acting is on par with the amateurish production. Believe it or not, Noah
Centineo is the best thing about this movie, because at least he has some
talent to be able to work with what he's given. But with everyone else, it feels
like they've rounded up people from the local university and just said: THERE YOU GO! ACT! A lot of the dialogue is stilted and
poorly written, and this combined with the cast's inability to sculpt this s-t into
something interesting, means that it's very hard to care about these characters
or what happens to them. None of this alleviates the fact that this film is
really boring. There are a few moments when it veers into so-bad-it's-good
territory, like when we first see the nerd character's workstation and this
epic hacker music starts playing, but then it turns out to be just a bunch of
whiteboards and post-it notes. And some of the lines would feel right at home in
a Tommy Wiseau production. "Yeah, I mean... you can tell so much about a person by their name." WHAT?! Overall though, it's tedious, and for a film that's only 90
minutes long, that's quite an achievement. The writing and acting are just not
engaging enough to justify sitting through it. And even when it's
unintentionally funny, it's still the least funny out of all of these teen
movies, so it doesn't even have that going for it. I was on tinder for about
half of the film, and even though I didn't get any matches, I still feel it
was a more productive use of my time. Which is somewhat amusing to me, because
the story revolves around hookup apps. The story is as bad as everything else
I've mentioned so far. It's poorly written, and again, it's boring, partly
because it's so cliched and predictable that I didn't feel like I was watching
anything new. It follows your typical nerd who struggles to make friends at
college. These three hyper sexed frat boys are in the same computer science
class as him, and they want to pass it for some unspecified reason, even though
none of them show any aptitude for it. So they commission the nerd to design a
hookup app for them. Not a dating app. A hookup app.
In order to be on the app, called Jungle, girls are required to not ask for the
boys names, or give any personal details or ask to see them again. They assume
that all the guys are gonna want to be on this app, so yeah, thanks for assuming
that we're all pigs. They also assume that all the women will want to be on
the app if they want to be with anybody, because that's where all the men will be.
Whereas, in reality, a lot of women would just... not do that. And we all know that
it's the men that go wherever the women are. That's why they have Ladies Nights
at clubs. It's not for equality! The film is intended to be a satire of dating
apps and hookup culture, especially among the youth of today, but the message falls
flat because of how out of touch, heavy-handed and ridiculous it is.
It's a giant swing and miss. The three boys that want to create the app are
utterly loathsome. They're complete misogynists who basically see every hole
as a goal, and the film implies that the men who create and use these apps are -
with few exceptions - this callous and objectifying. And the women, especially
the young women, who want to hook up and use these apps, are portrayed as being
idiots or sluts, in the worst possible sense of that word, and are treated as
such by the other characters in the film. In fact, the whole film is an exercise in
slut-shaming. It implies that there's something psychologically, morally, or
intellectually wrong with the people who just want to hook up, no strings attached.
Sure, it's not for everybody, but why do you have to bash the people that want to
do it? It's exactly the kind of attitude towards dating apps and hookup culture
that you'd expect from somebody that hasn't had sex since Reagan's second
term. The satire fails because it comes across as so implausible, dated, condescending,
and insulting, especially towards women. The writer seems completely ignorant of the way dating apps work and of the people that use them, taking a very judgemental view of both. And there's some jabs at "The Youth", the sort of thing Boomers enjoy and share on Facebook. And that's just the tip of this iceberg. In sum, it's terrible, and not even worth an
ironic watch. And since its creator seems to take particular issue with spoilers
in reviews... here they are. When something that you've
poured your heart and soul into and put out there for all the world to see it
starts to receive a lot of justified negative feedback, there are three ways
you can react. You can accept the constructive criticism gracefully and
use it to improve your future projects. You can just ignore it and get on with
your life. Or... you can do the third thing. The thing that you should definitely NOT do. Deny the criticism and lash out at your critics. You've heard of daddy Derek? Well, say hello to Mama Fishman. Ann Deborah Fishman is the writer, producer, and director of Swiped, and the owner of Night Dove Pictures.
And she responded to the people who rightfully called her
film the pile of steaming batts-t that it is, by threatening and insulting her critics,
and in at least one case, threatening to sue and then copystriking a Youtuber
who made a bad review of her film. And considering what I now do for a living,
that last one hit me a little bit close to home. Before we go any further, I just
have to say this very clearly: regardless of all the s-ty behaviour that I'm
about to outline, DO. NOT. HARASS. THIS. PERSON. DON'T. DO. IT. It will not help the situation and it will
just give her more ammunition. When Anna Menta spent two
paragraphs of her article on decider.com, talking about the characters of the film Swiped, discussing how bad the film was, and not in a particularly scathing
way, Fishman sent her an email. Which she then proudly posted on the official
Night Dog Pictures and Swiped Facebook pages. Now, I can't prove for a certainty that
she is the one that owns those pages, or the official Twitter page, or
the official Swiped Instagram page. But considering that she signs off emails
from the official Night Dove Pictures Gmail account using her own name, and
given the similarity in the language used in those emails and in these public
posts, I'm 99% confident that it is her. She first incorrectly attributes Menta's
article to divider.com - which doesn't exist - And then goes on to accuse Menta
of not understanding satire and then... F-k me, it's so bad! I'm just gonna read this. "If
the message of Swiped continued the propagation of the absurd and false
narrative constantly being promoted in the media - that all women enjoy and
benefit from anonymous and casual sex - no doubt you would have liked the movie better." Wow! F-king wow! That is not how you respond to a negative review. Using a moral cause as a shield against criticism is a scummy thing to do, and Fishman sees herself as a crusader against hookup culture which she believes objectifies women, and
gets them to treat themselves like they're nothing more than a sofa
being traded on Craigslist. She even claims that hookup apps are inherently degrading and dangerous to women, ignoring, of course, that men are objectified on these apps in more or less the same way, that many women enjoy hooking up - God bless em! - and some even see it as empowering. Fishman is hardly the first person to take this
perspective on hookup culture, or to present traditional courting as more
ideal. And it's funny that she claims to be standing up for women, when she treats
the women in her films so poorly. This is something that women have noticed, and
it's why most of the people that I saw publicly s-ting on the movie were women.
When so many women are criticizing your supposedly feminist movie as being misogynistic and misguided, you know you f-ked up. But Fishman couldn't accept her
feminist credentials being questioned. She claimed that women who
hated the movie didn't understand its message and that they need to be more
enlightened. And why would she refer to them as "females"?
That's what neckbeards and incels do. Is it because she has as low an opinion
of women as they do? It's an interesting question, because in responding to her
critics, Fishman does seem to be more rude and aggressive towards women when
compared with men. When she's addressing women - especially younger women - her
comments come across as extremely condescending. This isn't universal, of course, but it is a noticeable trend. When I worked in hospitality, there were
certain women, usually over the age of 40, who would be far more deferential towards me than
they would be towards my younger female colleagues, who they would treat with an air of
snootiness and superiority. And I'm getting very similar
vibes from Fishman. This attitude may explain why she feels
more comfortable taking such a dismissive tone towards the younger
women who criticize her and her movie. Even going so far as to slut-shame them
on Instagram. It might also help explain the difference in her reactions to Youtubers who criticized her movie, which I'll get to in a bit. On Facebook, she switched between
her personal account and the official Swiped account, using
the latter when she wanted to be more aggressive and condescending, thinking
that people would be too stupid to notice. And like your typical Lolcow who
just can't let anything go, she resorted to the usual worthless
responses such as: "That's just your opinion." No, it's the opinion of the vast majority of people. "You can just turn it off and watch something else."
Oh, I wanted to. Believe me! That because the movie is on Netflix,
it therefore must be good. Wow, your film beat that benchmark set by Holmes & Watson. You must be so proud. Questioning why people are so focused on
her and her movie. Because it's s-t, you're trying to preach to people,
and your behaviour is contemptible. Claiming her critics are too stupid
to understand her movie. No, you're just too stupid to write it properly. Assuming that the people that criticise
her movie are being paid, or that they have some relationship to the Youtuber she threatened. Neither is true in my case. Insisting that she receives many messages from
women saying that they liked the film. [Laughs] Yeah, whatever. And claiming that most people are loving the film, which, judging by review aggregating
websites, is total bulls-t. But we can look a bit deeper into this last claim.
On IMDB, Swiped's got a 3.5 out of 10, which, is already pretty bad. But if we look at
the user ratings, we see a lot of 1-star ratings and a lot of 10-star ratings.
Okay, so maybe the film was polarizing. But if we then look at the user reviews,
out of 214, 160 of them are 1-star. That's roughly 75% of all user reviews being
one-star and one review for every 8.8 user ratings. Compare this to 10-star reviews. Can you guess
how many of them there are? Four. Yeah, only four! That's less than 2% of the total number of user reviews and about 253 ratings per review Hmm. Compare this with The Room, which has a
similar IMDB score and a lot of 10-star ratings, because The Room is amazing, but
those ratings are all pretty much ironic. Out of 551 user reviews, 197 of them -
which is around about 36% - give 10 stars. And these reviews are detailed and
hilarious. While the few 10-star reviews for Swiped are much shorter and I'm
pretty sure two of them are ironic. Hmmmmmmmm. It's the same thing on Rotten Tomatoes.
It shows an audience score of 61%, which is not bad, but then if you look at the
audience reviews, it's pages and pages of one- to two-star reviews and a few
positive reviews at the end. HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM Even allowing for the fact that
people are more likely to leave a review of something if they didn't like it,
this level of discrepancy between the ratings and the reviews seems off. I'm
not saying these ratings and reviews are fake because I can't prove that
definitively, but this looks really dodgy. And it's what I'd expect of someone who
tried to beg for reviews on Twitter. But if you think the stuff I've talked about
so far is bad, fasten your seat belts! Because it's about to take a f-king nosedive.
It's time to talk about Trin Lovell. Trin is a youtuber who reviews pieces of
media by giving her thoughts on them as she watches them. She reviewed Swiped, and
as you can imagine, she was pretty negative about the film. The video was
made in her usual style of showing clips on screen and then giving commentary off-camera, and employing more reaction-channel style commentary. There's a lot of gey area when it comes to fair use, and it's not entirely clear how much footage would disqualify your video from
counting as fair use, even when there is a transformative purpose behind the use
of the copyrighted material, as is the case in Trin's video. It's ambiguous at best. But Fishman very clearly believes that it isn't, stating both publicly and
in emails to Trin that because Trin used over 20% of Swiped, and because that
footage made up most of Trin's video, that her usage was excessive and therefore not fair. Now of course, I'm not a copyright lawyer,
but I couldn't find any legal basis for this 20% claim, and Fishman doesn't offer
any, which you'd think she'd be able to do, because she's a lawyer who used to
specialize in intellectual property protection. Oh yeah, she's a lawyer, by the
way. That would explain a lot. That always-reliable source called Wikipedia lists
two cases where the use of the entirety of a work was found not to bar a finding
of fair use, at least in the US. So as far as I know, she's just pulled this number
out of her arse. But if you breakdown Trin's video, she only uses roughly 10
minutes of footage from Swiped, which amounts to less than half of her video
and under 11% of the film. So both of Fishman's claims are bulls-t, and
she's exaggerating to justify her subsequent behaviour. Because if she was truly concerned about
this being copyright infringement, she would have just put a Content ID claim
on the video, or taken it down. This would have still been s-ty, but it would
have been far more professional than what she actually did.
Which was to insult Trin on multiple public forums, calling her an idiot, a moron,
talentless - which is somewhat ironic - And a thieving thief. As opposed
to a non-thieving thief... She then both publicly and in an e-mail
threatened to sue Trin for damages for copyright infringement, claiming that
Trin's review was harming both Fishman's and the film's distributors economic
interests, and said that she was contacting Audible - who sponsored the
video - to get them to stop sponsoring her, and YouTube, to try to get Trin off the
platform entirely. Even if she's within her legal rights to say that this is copyright
infringement, that is an insane overreaction. I've seen the emails that she sent to Trin,
and it's honestly pathetic. She admits that Trin's video passes
the transformative test of fair use, but says that it doesn't pass "the
amount test", insisting on this 20% thing, that we've already proven is wrong.
She then insists that Trin's video is harming her economically and also
harming Netflix. She doesn't provide any evidence or reasoning to support this,
and it reads like a blatant attempt to intimidate Trin into compliance by
threatening to bring this massive corporation into the matter.
She gave Trin two options: recut her video and only used trailer footage,
which has nothing to do with fair use, so she shouldn't have to do that. If you are
reviewing a movie, you are allowed to use clips from that movie. That is literally
what fair use means! Fishman also offered to have a public conversation with Trin, so they can have a dialogue about the movie. But again, there's nothing legal
about that. Trin is under no obligation to do that, and Fishman cannot force her
to do it. And it smacks of an attempt to get some more free publicity for her
film. And it's possible that Fishman thought that if she were in a
conversation with Trin, she could bully her into accepting her point of view. But
when Trin rightly said no to both of those options, Fishman took Trin's video
down and gave her channel a copyright strike. And by the way, Trin is 17. So Fishman - a
grown woman - has been acting this way towards a 17 year old girl.
Maybe I should contact Netflix and tell them that one of their business partners
is behaving this way towards someone who is legally a child?
I wonder how they'd react. Fishman then emailed Elvis the Alien and Danny
Gonzales, telling them to alter their videos on Swiped, or else! Elvis made his
email public, and in it she wants him to remove clips from the last half / third
of the movie, because they are spoilers. She doesn't bring up the 20% rule from
earlier, even though Elvis does employ a lot of clips from Swiped in his video.
Now her contention about fair use seems to revolve around the fact that the
clips used are spoilers, which has little direct bearing on fair use, if any at all.
She doesn't mention spoilers in her emails to Trin, which makes me somewhat
suspicious that she actually cares about that. And look at the difference in the
language she uses and the way that she addresses Elvis. She doesn't call him a
thief. She doesn't insult him. She tones down her threats, and she
doesn't offer him the trailer footage and discussion options that she offered
to Trin. Nor did she take down Elvis's video when he rightfully just ignored
her, or Danny's when he removed a few clips but he claimed that it didn't seem
to be enough for her. The difference is that Elvis and Danny have over 900,000
and 2.7 million subscribers respectively, so maybe she thought that they were too
big to risk f-king with. The other glaring difference is that Trin is - once again - a 17 year old girl, who, with her relatively smaller channel size, looks like a much
easier target to intimidate. And we've already seen how Fishman takes a harsher
attitude towards her female critics. I also believe that because Trin is a
member of the demographic that Fishman is trying to target with her message, to
have her reject that message in this way, must have struck a nerve.
Yeah! Really... fighting that patriarchy, aren't you? Urgh! What a f-king rabbit hole, Jesus Christ! You guys might be tempted to go and watch Swiped just to see how bad it is, but I would urge you not to do that, because I don't want to support this kind of s-ty behaviour. And Fishman, if you're watching this, I highly
suggest you look into the cases of Derek Savage vs. I Hate Everything, Digital Homicide Studios vs. Jim Sterling, and Matt Hoss vs. H3H3 Productions. All
three belligerents in those cases tried to abuse copyright law to punish or
silence their critics, and they all lost. They are all textbook examples of how to
not react to criticism, and of how to destroy your reputation online. And
that's the path that you're treading. When I Hate Everything made a video
tearing apart The Amazing Bulk - another terrible movie - do you want to know
how its creator responded? "Lewis Schoenbrun. I hope I said your name, right
Lewis, or Louis, I don't fucking know, Lewis?" "The director of The Amazing Bulk"
"Well, it ain't Barnie the purple dinosaur!" "Or Not-So-Amazing Bulk, in this case." "Sent me a paragraph in a private message
explaining how he enjoyed my video. I do urge you to pause this and read the
entire thing it's quite good, but I thought this was the fucking coolest
thing that could have happened. I have so much respect for Mr. Schoenbrun for this.
He sums it up absolutely perfectly when he says 'I welcome all comments good and
bad.'" That is how you respond to criticism! That is how you endear yourself to the
online community, and build up good will for yourself and your film. You
could learn a lot from this! Instead, you're choosing to act like a petulant child.
You're supposedly a professional and a grown woman. So f-king act like it!
Give Trin her video back, learn how to take criticism, and while you're at it, learn
how to make good movies! Well that one was a bit different, wasn't
it? But I do hope you enjoyed it. Big shout out to all my lovely supporters on
Patreon. If you do like my stuff, consider becoming a patron yourself. Feel free to
follow me on stuff to stay up to date, and join my public Discord server. Links
to all that stuff are down below. I'm planning on going to some conventions in
the UK this month, so I'll be posting details about potential meetups over on
those forums. Thanks for watching folks,
