Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Me ‘the French Dispatch’ Sucks So Much Shit?

Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch is the worst movie that has ever been made. I’m telling you this because I consider us quite close.

The film is interminable. It is as if a pop-up book about building façades were optioned by a studio whose only note was that the pop-up book had too much plot. It is as if Wes Anderson correctly decided each of the film’s inchoate vignettes were not enough to sustain an entire feature film, and then incorrectly decided that smooshing them together was enough to sustain an entire feature film as long as they were all set in France for no reason. It is available to stream on HBO Max and I urge you in the strongest terms to not watch it. Please, do not even seek out confirmation that it exists.

I watched The French Dispatch on a recent Friday night. It was released in theaters in October 2021, but I’m only enough of a Wes Anderson fan to have decided to watch it after scrolling through other streamable options and deciding it was the least unappetizing. Then, because I have been taught by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority to say something if I see something, I posted immediately to Instagram that I hated this movie more than any movie I had ever seen and that I was feeling alive with the fire of fierce disdain. (I hated the cartoon part in particular. I hope for your sake you do not know what that means.)

Surely, I thought, my Instagram community would benefit from this warning. Surely, I thought, if they had already gone through this experience themselves, they would have taken great pains to ensure no acquaintance of theirs would have to suffer under the same circumstances. They would have attempted to warn me. They would have attempted to warn everyone.

And yet.

“It’s so bad,” responded someone I at one point called a friend, mere seconds after I posted the Instagram. Yes, it’s so bad ... and yet, though you apparently know this firsthand, I have not seen you spread word of the film’s evil even once? I have not, in the countless Instagram stories of yours I’ve lovingly partaken in viewing, seen even a sliver of warning? A note of compassion-based admonition vis-à-vis how The French Dispatch sucks so much shit?

And what do we have here. “It’s dreadful. Stopped watching 30 minutes in. I couldn’t even get a good hate watch going!,” said someone formerly known as a person I know. You stopped 30 minutes in, huh? Seems like you had an awful lot of time, then, to save your Instagram community from the dangerous act of nobly watching this movie on a Friday night instead of indulging in several hours of Real Housewives, which is what they actually wanted to do. I advise you to think about the company in which this inaction puts you, in a historic sense.

“Oh yeah same lol.” I’m not laughing.

This person only said “thumbs up emoji.” Now, I’ll allow for the possibility that they are saying to me, thumbs up, got it boss, will not be watching this one. However if they’re instead saying thumbs up, I knew it was bad this whole time but I was keeping it to myself in what essentially amounted to an exceedingly cruel prank against someone who formerly considered me an innocuous Instagram acquaintance, well … that’s a different story.

“Same. And I am french.” Oh, I’m sorry — did my warning from you about how this movie was the most aggravatingly soulless piece of stylized garbage ever made get lost on its way across the Atlantic? Did your note warning me in the gravest of terms not to waste two of my precious few hours (presumably) left on Earth get stuck in the belly of a sunken ship? Or are you just un traître français? Un ancien ami français d'Instagram que je vais désormais mépriser pour toujours??

“Lasted 20 min…,” you say? Oh, me? I only lasted FOR THE ENTIRE MOVIE BECAUSE NO ONE CARED ENOUGH TO TELL ME IT WAS GOING TO BE REALLY BAD.

(AND THE PERSON I WAS WATCHING IT WITH WOULDN’T TURN IT OFF OUT OF A MORBID CURIOSITY THAT I DID NOT SHARE.)

“Oh god same same same.” Same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same same old bullshit from people I know on Instagram who watched The French Dispatch, discerned that it was the worst movie that has ever been made, and kept this knowledge to themselves, thus unleashing a wholly avoidable wave of pain and frustration across countless members of their Instagram community.

“I couldn’t even finish it,” says this person I have known for quite some time. “Unwatchable.” Unwatchable? If only it were unwatchable. Your hands, in that scenario, would be clean. And yet they here they are, filthy. You have committed a sin of omission for which you will be punished, if not in this life than in the next.

“We watched about

90 minutes

It was horrible”

This one is

A text from MY OWN FATHER

Who heard about my Instagram

From my mother

Both of whom

Kept the knowledge that The French Dispatch is excruciatingly horrible

(Bad enough that they would cut out on the final 18 minutes of its 108-minute runtime)

From their only daughter

Forcing her to learn it herself

In agony

This is actually just a screenshot of John Ganz’s negative review of The French Dispatch, which was published here at Gawker.com shortly after the film’s release and which I now remember seeing, but which I did not, at the time, read. So I guess this might be on me actually, ha-ha, whoops. :)