letterboxd, the vexing and sometimes OK film logging website

I've been using letterboxd again after chatting with some younger cinephiles...if the whole thing were just the Activity page and your friend's ratings/reviews I would unabashedly love it. unfortunately ppl who are not my smart friends exist

anyway, do you use it? or read anyone on it? or? etc

i think i started referring to letterboxd as the new tumblr five years ago, so now that it has been written about in the nyt and has an ilx thread it is no longer cool, sorry

was the NYT thing recent? my acct is like.....five years old and has been dormant almost as long, lol

yeah it was like last month?

This was all very recent on the Last (x) Movies thread, so I'll cut-and-paste it into here.

Have people shared Letterboxd accounts on ILX anywhere? Mine is https://boxd.it/ENrV. I used it sparingly in the past but am logging every movie i watch in 2021.
― na (NA), Wednesday, January 20, 2021 7:07 PM (two weeks ago)

I think I've shared mine before, but here it is again: https://letterboxd.com/jer_fairall/
― edited for dog profanity (cryptosicko), Wednesday, January 20, 2021 7:27 PM (two weeks ago)

Have shared mine before: https://letterboxd.com/PollyPrecoder/
― Infanta Terrible (j.lu), Wednesday, January 20, 2021 7:43 PM (two weeks ago)

https://letterboxd.com/souleraser/
― flappy bird, Thursday, January 21, 2021 3:25 AM (two weeks ago)

Mine's just two lists of favourite movies; this thread is actually my Letterbox for what I watch.
https://letterboxd.com/hunsecker/lists/
― clemenza, Thursday, January 21, 2021 3:30 AM (two weeks ago)

I like looking at those lists.
― Dan S, Thursday, January 21, 2021 9:26 PM (two weeks ago)

i generally like it. though the excessive listing and gag reviews can get tiresome, it's a great way to know what my friends/people with opinions I respect are seeing, and general attitudes. though of course, this is the internet, so you're gonna get a lot of challops all the time

i was very upset i could not find the original breakfast at tiffany's list today

I mainly only use it for 1. writing gag reviews and 2. 'liking' actually good reviews / getting movie recs from ppl I trust for whatever reason

my favorite letterboxd writer, bar none, is nathaxnne: https://letterboxd.com/unawarewolf/

Mainstream or not it remains one of the only good websites because it doesn’t have Sharing, any activity from people you don’t follow is below the fold and optional, and the most genius design choice is you can use it however you want: star ratings, likes, reviews, diary entries, and lists all sort of slot together nicely and each aspect is optional. Just don’t tell yourself it’s “a community” or any of that garbage, it’s just a good website.

The other good websites are Bandcamp and Lichess. This is my theory of websites.

post feels kinda otm to me. it is def one of the few places on the internet where i feel very little stress

I feel some stress when I read certain types of exceptionally dumb or bad faith shit that gets a lot of shares/likes tbh

but yknow I should really just get tf over it

a few things I don't like about letterboxd

- we all know this, the TV non inclusion or semi sometimes inclusion is bad and silly and completely arbitrary
- certain types of bad takes rewarded
- a minor thing, but as with RYM, odd preferences/fetishes for certain types of content or certain stylistic or formal features. sometimes it's interesting other times it's just annoying

definitely wish that they allowed TV and episode reviews. or hell, spin off another site for that and video games. the personal logging is what i most like about it, i guess

i use it mostly as a tracker of stuff i've watched and don't really "engage with the community" but it's a really well-designed site that is a pleasure to use if you just want to track some films and make or read a watchlist.

I would be fine with one entry per series, only added once it's finished airing / being released. that also means no MCU reviews :)

i am furious that i cannot write a review of true detective season 2 on letterboxd but someone can write about the queen or the queen's gambit or twin queens the return

it's so silly

one other thing that's dumb: apparently if you log a movie without rating it, you drag down its rating

what? that's stupid. no rating should not = 0 rating.

I can't personally prove that but I have heard it alleged

The other good websites are Bandcamp and Lichess. This is my theory of websites.

what about ilx i can has cheezburger

A friend of mine worked there and it was a train wreck as you might imagine

1. !!

2. "A group of investors acquired the website in September 2007 for US$2 million"

3. oh

looool

having worked at some sketchy ass train wrecks, I salute silby's friend

brad thank you for the nathaxnne tip, anyone else have accts they like?

I've been using Letterboxd for years, but literally the only thing I use it for is to maintain the film diary I've been keeping since 1992. So I just go on and log a movie and leave. I don't do ratings or write reviews. I do follow a handful of people, but I honestly don't spend much time there. I do like being able to look up when in 1997 I saw The Ice Storm or whatever.

we all know this, the TV non inclusion or semi sometimes inclusion is bad and silly and completely arbitrary

The rule I made in 1992 (when I was 12 lol) was that I only logged movies that had, at some point, been released theatrically (regardless of where I personally saw them). So no TV movies, no straight-to-video, no Netflix-only. (But film festival releases are OK.) The last year has made me rethink that, though. Esp. since there's lots of stuff in the Letterboxd database that would be easy enough to log, if I wanted to.

here's mine: https://letterboxd.com/adamt/

Oh hey, look at that. I just assumed this thing was already passe and that's why no one ever talked about it. I use it pretty regularly, mostly to keep track of what I've watched/intend to watch (because my brain is sieve-like with respect to keeping track of such things), partly to read what others think of what I've watched (I follow some of y'all, I'm PlooplePop). I guess there's a social media aspect to it but I don't really engage with that as such.

Oh right, the polite way of doing this: https://letterboxd.com/plooplepop/

xp i would definitely rethink the TV/STV/streaming exceptions. i mean, even decades past, there were notable TV movies, sadly never to be seen or heard from again!

i don't find Letterboxd vexing at all! it's fun! my movie watching habits got way better since i started using it. i like the challenge of trying to write funny blurbs, which has kinda gamified movie-watching

My frustration is actually less about the hot takes and more the dudes who seem to watch only hyper-canonical stuff and dutifully give everything five stars. Then I remember I was 18 once, too.

I think the site is best for finding out about off-the-beaten-path films rather than engaging with long reviews that could be blog entries - I'm sure there's ppl out there who do that well but I've not found much so I stick with Xgau-style capsule reviews in both reading and writing.

The stats are super fun tho my regular viewing of shorts means my most watched actors always end up being Mel Blanc or Buster Keaton.

100% would not want TV to be included, far too many places online to talk about that shit. I do agree the currently available TV should be removed tho.

Anyway: https://letterboxd.com/Reifferschizzle/

The lists (+ the presence of hyper-obsessive users) are one of the best features imo. Would you like to see all of the hard sci-fi films written by first-generation Italian Americans between '75 and '80? There's probably a list for that.

https://letterboxd.com/glumdalclitch/

If Letterbox had a recommendation engine I'd be all in, but outside of meme lists and pithy gag reviews I'm not sure I've much use for it. I've been using Movielens for the last decade for movie discovery and it hasn't done wrong by me so far.

I use the Activity feed as my de facto recommendations guide

i’m like nearly on the verge of paying for a subscription just for those sweet sweet activity feed filters

The fav streaming services feature is also good, and they’ve started sending notifications when something on your watchlist appears on one of your services.

I'm really unclear on what the actual benefits of a paid membership are. Like, if it included the ability to get really fiddly with the filters or, say, compare the content of different lists, I'd pony up in a heartbeat.

doc casino is an excellent letterboxd follow btw

As are you! ILXors unsurprisingly showing the other users of that site how it's done.

I would go "pro" just to check it out but I don't want it to say "pro" next to my name, that's nerd shit

some of my other favorite writers:

- claire diane: https://letterboxd.com/fieldmouse/ (doesn't update often, but when she does, watch out. responsible for the most beautiful film criticism i've ever read, this review of nightmare on elm street 3: https://letterboxd.com/fieldmouse/film/a-nightmare-on-elm-street-3-dream-warriors/ )

- scumbalina: https://letterboxd.com/scumbalina/ (if you want earnest well-written discursive five star reviews about shot-on-video horror, look no further)

- sydney: https://letterboxd.com/campbart/ (a lot of the writers i love on letterboxd have an almost stream-of-consciousness thing going on, but sydney's reviews are all precision, and she has the best taste on earth. currently going through a bollywood thing, very cool to keep up with)

- j0siah m0rgan: https://letterboxd.com/josiahmorgan11/

j@ke c0le and j0sh l3wis are also very good but are very popular on the site. m@tt lynch ostensibly shares a lot of my taste and priorities but i think he's just terrible. i don't exactly know why i'm google-proofing but simon did it earlier and it seems like a good practice lol

one of the appeals of letterboxd when i joined was finding all of these trans writers writing these beautiful reviews that explore both their own identity and the hidden or not-so-hidden depths of trashy horror films. i assume that is not covered in the nyt piece but that's the no. 1 reason the website is so so valuable to me

My updates have gotten extremely sporadic, but here's me: https://letterboxd.com/ephender/

brad thank you for those, most of the ppl I'm encountering online who use it are like 19 which is.....cool but not all the time lol

https://letterboxd.com/1000TimesYes/

other than twitter, the best "Social media" platform

lol I was wondering why so many people were following me

I just started using it and haven't figured out how I want to use the "like" and rating features.

Anyway, I'm https://letterboxd.com/Anniella/

when I started using it (2014) I enjoyed rating movies, but now all I do is "like" if I like a movie even a little bit, and occasionally write a lil blurb

The Pro sub is like, $12 during Thanksgiving, easily worth it for me

https://letterboxd.com/jaymc/

http://letterboxd.com/unbornwhiskey

way too self-conscious to actually review things these days but sometimes i try

https://letterboxd.com/junkzone/film/the-box-2009/

this review should be more popular

I like looking at other people's favorite films. I've watched enough meh films for a second time that I like being able to check whether or not I've already seen something. And I live in hope that my pithy comments--when I feel sufficiently moved to write them--will one of these days catch the attention of someone who is intrigued, rather than alienated, by my sense of humor. But you'd think by now I'd know better about getting the things that I want.

I do like being able to look up when in 1997 I saw The Ice Storm or whatever.

― jaymc, Tuesday, February 9, 2021 10:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I have scattered movie logs back to 2001 I've been wanting to do this with! Someday...

https://letterboxd.com/geoffreyess/

https://letterboxd.com/SimonFerocious/

i enjoy whiney's letterboxd, his dedication to only watching hyper current movies is impressive. i basically only watch stuff from 20th century

they should let tv shows on letterboxd not because reviewing tv shows is cool (it's not) but because they should just totally relax their uptight standards about can get reviewed and posted about. a lot of cool underground stuff uploaded directly by creators to youtube like gothic king gobra by trapped constantly gets taken down by the site because it's not official by some weird standard

https://letterboxd.com/JackUzi77/

https://letterboxd.com/cajunsunday/

I did a lot of reviews in 2013 and 2014 when I was determined to become a world renowned critic of European and silent cinema lol.

been re-watching a bunch of canonical stuff lately, plz don't judge harshly. i rlly appreciate this app. it's beautifully designed, and it feels good to finally have a film diary.

https://letterboxd.com/daveyshindig/

imo letterb*xd is the only social media app that doesn't feel gross. my partner introduced me to it last year and it's been a li'l bright spot thru quar.

they should let tv shows on letterboxd not because reviewing tv shows is cool (it's not) but because they should just totally relax their uptight standards about can get reviewed and posted about

this is my stance as well

imo letterb*xd is the only social media app that doesn't feel gross.

Yes. I've undergone a fairly complete socialmediadectomy in recent years and Letterboxd is as comfortable as I am at dipping my toe back into that fetid water.

i pray they will never be acquired by a FAANG company.

brb, following everybody ITT.

It’s nice to have a place on the internet where people aren’t constantly talking about fucking TV shows

brb, following everybody ITT.

letterbilxd

doc casino is an excellent letterboxd follow btw

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Wednesday, February 10, 2021 12:12 PM bookmarkflaglink

Awwww! Thank you BN! Your reviews are great, fyi. i worry that mine tend too much into the "i like this aspect. but, there's this other aspect." formula. not sure anyone out there really needs the 2,856th wannabe newspaper critic "review" of a movie. i wish i had the art that the youth have, of tweet-like zingy 'reviews.' but more than anything i think i'm writing them for myself, it's fun to go back later to a movie i think of as X and Y, and discover that at the time i responded more to Z, or whatever.

so yes, i am on there, https://letterboxd.com/doctorcasino/

i feel a little overwhelmed by the activity feed, so i don't always follow people back but i should just get over that i think. i also struggle to remember which ilxor is which on there when the usernames don't match, but i do love y'all!

my main problem with it is that i think having the star rating system at my disposal can become really distracting and strange. i've always been an I Log Everything kind of person but not as much an I Rate Everything one, and i can find myself actually thinking during the movie about whether it's three stars or three and a half, and that's a really pernicious mental habit or compulsion that can take me out of the enjoyment. maybe i should just stop with star ratings! although it's fun also to be able to filter and be like "i've watched 500 movies in the last couple years, what were the standouts?" BUT i also can do that with the lists, since i keep one each year for "best viewings." hmmm.

I leap the ratings hurdle by rating only those films I feel compelled to rate. If it's of average quality, an 'I viewed this from beginning to end' is sufficient for my needs. I mostly just wanna keep track of whether they're good, weird, or shitty.

(My favorite Leone film btw)

/silby, of course

I’ve only rated one movie

they should let tv shows on letterboxd not because reviewing tv shows is cool (it's not) but because they should just totally relax their uptight standards about can get reviewed and posted about
this is my stance as well

― stimmy stimmy yah (Simon H.), Thursday, February 11, 2021 9:46 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

On the same tip, their rules on what constitutes "hardcore pornography" is totally arbitrary-- for example, very good blue movie SexWorld (1977) is not listed (I tried to add it), but Andy Milligan's Fleshpot on 42nd St. and Radley Metzger's Score and Abel Ferrara's 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy all have pages. C'est la vie

i pretty much give every movie i care to review five stars lol

a lot of people have told me that the stars are useful for keeping track of things to rewatch etc, I get that....but goddamn do I hate rating movies

Rating anything is silly, to me, if you aren’t either super cereal or super goofy about it

The only ratings I really care about are “worthwhile” and “excellent”, I don’t care about different kinds of bad.

Needless to say I lack the enthusiasm to be super cereal about rating anything

Kinda use my Lettrboxed ratings in the same way I use my iTunes ratings. It's qualitative to an extent but it's more a method of categorization for me. Like my 3.5 star ratings are reserved for a very particular kind of movie experience whose actual quality may vary wildly from its companions.

also I wanted to mention that I actually really like the "trendng with ppl you follow" display on the home page, which has been great for alerting me to new (and new-to-me) stuff, also just neat when an older film one person raves about ripples through a community

agonizing over whether something is 3 stars or 3.5 does kind of suck (wish I'd adopted OL's approach but too late now), and I am familiar with Doc C's in-progress mental rating annoyance.

I only just signed up for this last month so my account is pretty worthless for anyone other than myself, but: https://letterboxd.com/roobric/

Yeah, almost everything I bother to rate falls in the 2.5 to 3.5 range. I figure 4 stars and above should be good enough for a yearly top 10. And everything 2 or below is basically different shades of awful.

I probably have an absurd proportion of 5 star ratings right now, because I logged all the best movies I could think of when I started my account and anything worth less than 3 I just marked as watched

I am now following everyone on this thread so I expect good things from my Activity now instead of just seeing Soul for weeks on end

I need to remember that it's just a film diary and get back to writing entries, however poorly written and pithy.

Yeah, taking this thing not-terribly-seriously is the only way I'm able to take it.

My gf was poking around on the site the other day and was like ' I had no idea you were reviewing all these movies, does anyone ever see these?' And I was like 'nope'. And even though my followers have tripled since this thread started (lol) I'll continue operating under the assumption that I'm just releasing blurbs about third-rate '50s sci-fi films into the void.

One day I thought "I'll just add every single film I've ever seen" and started with a genre, going through the list alphabetically, planning on going from genre to genre. I lasted one long afternoon session and didn't make it through the alphabet one time. Maybe I'll go back to that someday.

rating on Letterboxd is a lot easier if you think of it as a 10 point system (without the option for a zero, which is the site's only major flaw--for example, Soul Man and Zero Dark Thirty do not deserve even half a star). so a 3.5 star = 7/10. I find rating movies very easy, but that's probably from my (relatively brief) experience judging peer/student work. If you've ever had to do that, or even worse, watch film festival submissions, you realize how much truly unwatchable shit is out there, and it makes ANY movie that isn't completely dysfunctional in several crucial respects, at the very least, a 3 or 4 out of 10. Looking at my profile, I'm pretty generous with ratings I guess-- off the top of my head, I don't think I could name 10 movies I rated below a 5/10 I've watched in the last 3 months.

But I also know exactly what the rating will be about 10 minutes into whatever movie I'm watching. I can tell a 7/10 less than 15 minutes in, for example. Idk why but I feel it in my bones. That rating almost never changes, although it can move half a point in one direction or another (for example, Preminger's Angel Face -- really strong moments, a great performance by Jean Simmons, was hovering between an 8 and 9 for me until it got to that fucking courtroom sequence--nothing kills the momentum of a movie more than a surprise courtroom sequence-- and then there was another half hour left! That's an 8 or 9 that became a 7.

ANAL HOUR OVER!

but it felt like you were just opening up

I've always found https://letterboxd.com/punq/ a curious letterboxd follow. He watches between 1000-1500 films a year, 95% are from the 1920s-1940s and the rest are contemporary films

i look back with much regret on the countless hours i wasted doing pointless reviews and ratings on RYM in the 00s, and have always been wary of letterboxd lest i get pulled back down into that sinkhole. i keep reading this thread and getting convinced by every other post that i should or shouldnt join. i did love it back in the early days of netflix when the site had a social component and you could recommend movies and see your friends queues and stuff. and tbh i put a decent amount of effort into ratings on netflix, mostly because i found their recommendation engine super accurate and useful, but it was also useful to be able to sort 4 and 5-star movies with a click. i already keep a viewing diary, so i guess doing that on a site that also allows rating and sorting is a no brainer.

i've spent my whole adult life trying to deactivate the part of my brain that wants to rate & rank all the media i consume so these sorts of sites are dangerous since they encourage that impulse. but i do like using them as sortable/searchable logs of what i've seen/read/etc

but it felt like you were just opening up

― shivers me timber (sic), Thursday, February 11, 2021 4:11 PM (one hour ago)

omg

lol sic

But ratings are not the main purpose of Letterboxd, it's not even a factor in my using it, it's just there, what I love about it is just the ability to log films + read reviews/comments from other people a couple hours or a day after I watch a movie. I mean I already keep a written log of what I watch, but without Letterboxd, I would've never found this perfect description of Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore:

kind of about filmmaking but mostly about the decor in the hotel lobby, fassbinder’s leather jacket & bored, tortured bisexuals on a warpath

https://letterboxd.com/cinemafan3/film/beware-of-a-holy-whore/

Or this one LOL:

Leave it to Fassbinder to make the experience of being young and beautiful and idle, lazing around a mansion on the Spanish coast and drinking rum and cokes and fondling other svelte hotties, appear an utter hell on earth.

https://letterboxd.com/john209/film/beware-of-a-holy-whore/

FWIW I've also found two excellent film writers on Letterboxd and have since published work by them! If you're a writer you should write on Letterboxd!!!!!!!!!

boo the hustle

People need to take movies both less and more seriously

My star system:

5 Transcendental. They speak to your soul.
4.5 Masterpieces. Everything works. Examples of the genre.
4 A few moments of brilliance or sustained brilliant elements
3.5 Pretty good all round, or one thing really stood out.
3 I was enjoying myself more often than not
2.5 That one thing was egregious but it was okay I guess
2 Mostly bad but a few things worked
1.5 One thing worked, otherwise so bad
1 No redeemable features. A wholly bad movie
0.5 Actively dislike. Just a horrorshow.

seconding cajunsunday's recommendation of punq, dude just does endless work sifting through b movies and serials from the 30's. I think at one point he talked about this being some sort of chronological project, because he had hit the last film featuring a specific actor. This cannot in truth be a project of watching all cinema from the begining of the artform, but it sure looks like it sometimes - dude even has reviews for Portuguese silent films I assume no one outside the country would have much interest in.

another underrated use of this app: if you turn on the setting that slightly grays/fades out the posters for movies you've seen, it becomes pretty useful as a "wait, what all have i seen that person in...?" type of thing. much faster than scrolling through their entire IMDB or w/e. i just wish it did its seen/unseen count in real numbers rather than percentages - i don't really care that i've seen 2% of the filmography of some hardworking hollywood guy who was in 180 movies plus 47 retrospective clip-show documentaries.

It might not be on the phone app, but on the desktop version of the site, it does list it in numbers--like I could go to John Ford's page and it says how many of his movies I've seen, or Frederic March, or Michael Ballhaus, etc. I didn't have the app until a couple months ago, the desktop UI is much better.

didn't realize that, thanks! but yeah have def noticed other lacking areas on the Android version.

I don't really belong on there (or here) because, being generous to myself, my film knowledge is kind of patchy but I find it useful for logging stuff and getting recommendations.

https://letterboxd.com/MattPoacher/

TIL what letterboxd's word limit looks like

https://letterboxd.com/louferrigno/film/twin-peaks/1/

oh god fuck that shit

get a blog!

there's more than one website duder

In the 70's and 80's, Mark Frost was just one writer in an ocean of people trying to keep that same employment, with his earliest attempts vague towards his actual involvement and primarily eaten up by his involvement Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater as a literary assistant.

riveting, go on

are the rest of the sentences difficult to parse

I literally zoned out immediately so I have no idea

I really just linked it to note yet one more way people choose to use this particular webbed site

there are long boring incoherent reviews on every website

what are some good accounts flappy

https://letterboxd.com/bennash/
https://letterboxd.com/violasmoustache/
https://letterboxd.com/criterions/
https://letterboxd.com/eugeugeug/
https://letterboxd.com/lilfilm/

i like letterboxd a lot. my main gripe is that i wish more of my friends were on it and i wish there was an ability to find your friends or have recommendations for people to follow based on your connections like every other social media app. basically it's hard to find people you know to connect with. i'm also confused by the various ways to log movies, some of which lead to them showing up in your diary and some of which don't. but i enjoy going on there and seeing what people are watching and what they're saying about it. the core concept is good.

I think you have to enter the exact date you watched the movie for it to show up in your diary

Yeah, you have to actually log a movie for it to show up in your diary. It won't show up there if you just review or rate it.

This is super geeky but I kind of wish they'd bring back the YMDB functionality ... the style feature where you can compile a list and cross-index it against who else shares similar picks: http://web.archive.org/web/20060316065629/http://www.ymdb.com:80/ephender/l3984_frfr.html

Yeah, you have to actually log a movie for it to show up in your diary. It won't show up there if you just review or rate it.

― Chokeslamming A Memory (Old Lunch), Tuesday, March 2, 2021 3:03 PM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i understand, but ... why

In the 70's and 80's, Mark Frost was just one writer in an ocean of people trying to keep that same employment, with his earliest attempts vague towards his actual involvement and primarily eaten up by his involvement Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater as a literary assistant.

riveting, go on

hey, I only made it maybe 200 words in, but this led me to wiki Frost and learn that his nephew Lucas Giolito pitches for the White Sox and his father played the father of George's fiancée, Susan, on Seinfeld (and also was in Slaughterhouse-Five (& obv. Twin Peaks)).

and thanks, Flappy, for the good recommendations. I like finding people whose favorites include a couple of mine and the one film I absolutely hate.

xxp because a diary is useless without dates?

and his father played the father of George's fiancée, Susan, on Seinfeld

ha i'd never realized this, even tho i recently realized who played her mother.

i like letterboxd a lot. my main gripe is that i wish more of my friends were on it and i wish there was an ability to find your friends or have recommendations for people to follow based on your connections like every other social media app. basically it's hard to find people you know to connect with. i'm also confused by the various ways to log movies, some of which lead to them showing up in your diary and some of which don't. but i enjoy going on there and seeing what people are watching and what they're saying about it. the core concept is good.

― na (NA), Tuesday, March 2, 2021 3:08 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Otm

i like that letterboxd is fairly unaggressive about pushing you onto more "friends"!
it's bad enough that every other social network has to pull your real name/data to sell to our evil overlords

FYI for list dorks like me, they've updated the app sometime in the past week (for Apple, at least) with functionality to add a movie to multiple lists at once while greying out any lists that already include the movie in question. I tend to get stupidly granular with my lists (such that I can, for instance, see at a glance all of the post-apocalyptic movies I own) so this is a lifesaver. Literally, my life has been saved. It was almost over and done.

Feed clogged up with ppl logging fucking Wandavision, hope you include TV ppl are happy :(

man there's a lot of stuff that's not even vaguely edge-case-y:
https://letterboxd.com/eddiebergman/list/tv-shows-that-are-on-letterboxd-for-some/

they should definitely have the option to "hide" anything that's regular serial television!

every episode of Black Mirror is on there? individually? (with fan art for posters?!) look out if anyone ever tells them about Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Letterboxd Top 100 Documentary Miniseries

Letterboxd 50 Anime Miniseries

The Letterboxd Top 100 TV Narrative Miniseries, based on the average weighted rating of all Letterboxd users, excluding documentaries, and cutting everything with under 250 views logged

if the New York Post's youtube dis track about the Pussy Posse's improvised and suppressed movie Don's Plum is cinema, why not include every single "here's what's WRONG with The Last Jedi (PS it's women)" video

https://boxd.it/1Isi7p

I recommend nathaxnne's review of Transformers: The Movie, which I read the other day and which is very good.

ok, which ilxor is that

hell yeah

I enjoyed nathaxnne's takedown of richard stanley

very much appreciate the change from "no likes" to "no likes yet", let us down easy letterboxd

I've started compiling an 'Acid Horror' film list for my own amusement/reference. Any additional suggestions would be welcome - you'll see the kind of thing I'm after:

https://letterboxd.com/wardfowler/list/acid-horror/

Neat list!

Hausu feels like it should fit. I'm not well versed in psych-horror but House seems kind of ultimate

https://letterboxd.com/film/house/

xpost!

God Told Me To? Death Bed? Hausu? Feel like I need a bigger sample size to know what fits and what don't.

So clearly Hausu, then.

The Virgin Sacrifice (J.X. Williams)

would Alucarda count?

Don't know how strictly you're hewing to that particular early-to-mid-'70s era but Possession (1981), perhaps?

If we're allowing more modern, Mandy and Black Rainbow seem like good ones. Possessor from last year has a similar vibe.

Thank you for all your suggestion - I will update! Other contenders: El Topo (though that could fit on an Acid Western list), I Drink Your Blood. I don't especially want to set limits, but I guess I'm particularly looking for films where the overall vibe is that the cast and crew could well have been tripping while they made it.

It's still sitting in my ever-growing stack of unwatched movies but Simon King of the Witches seems like a contender:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fax1uhZxvEA

Do you have a copy of Nightmare USA, Ward? I'm sure that's filled to the brim with what you're looking for.

Thanks OL, I do indeed. Still waiting on the second volume!

A Field In England? Or is that aping the aesthetic too self-consciously?

there's only one scene that really qualifies but it's so good i gotta recommend house on sorority row for this list

I think Field in England is more folk-horror-revivalism, tho obviously there is crossover here - Blood on Satan's Claw in particular has some fairly trippy stuff near the end, though that feels more like the work of canny exploitation opportunists rather than mind-expanding tru believers.

Another one - Last House on Dead End Street

Field in England is Mushroom Horror obv.

Blue Sunshine! Even though it's kind of lousy imo

it really is lol

I recommend nathaxnne's review of Transformers: The Movie, which I read the other day and which is very good.

― Stefan Twerkelle (Old Lunch), Thursday, March 11, 2021 9:13 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

wow

As to Ward's query, perhaps these would qualify:

Messiah of Evil (1973)
A Name for Evil (1973
Eden and After (France, 1970)

Jean Rollin's entire oeuvre..?

xp to davey:
It Follows?
Happiness of the Katakuris?

hmm, It Follows is paranoid as heck but IDK if it's has the psychedelia quotient. Haven't seen Happiness of the Kakutanis but that looks like a fit. That one's going on the watch list. I'm wracking my brain for more titles but coming up blank. I'll ask Jasmine, she's more of a horror buff.

You've got a couple of Rollins' in there already but I'd definitely recommend The Iron Rose. What else are you gonna do after imbibing quantities than hang around a graveyard?

Also Luigi Bazzoni's Footprints on the Moon (Le Orme), 1978

altered states (and probably lair of the white worm too, though i haven't seen it)

Probably worth scouring 366 Weird Movies for nominees.

Lair of the White Worm is definitely trippy but also intentionally goofy and camped-up. I watched it not that long ago, don't remember most of it, and yet feel like I'd enjoy watching it again.

just saw a comedy so brilliant and ahead of its time i was moved to finally write more than a one-liner in a letterb*xd review.

pls like and subscribe.

https://letterboxd.com/daveyshindig/film/mystery-team/

h8 to self-promote but i think this movie broke my brain, it was on another level

i'm sincerely confused about whether you liked it or not

perfect ;p

(i did not)

fr i find it a little depressing to see how many people give 4- and 5-star ratings to so many movies that are objectively terrible

Eh, ratings are personal. There are lots of "objectively terrible" movies I will give high ratings because they're pinnacles of the form!

fair enough. i think some things are just bad period even if plenty of people like them. but my roommate likes that movie and i don't hold it against him

Spoken like a true ilxor

thank u silby, i like that ilk

I went through the two "last x movies" threads, copied everything I posted there since 2012--~1,000 films (there are duplicates)--and I'm making an effort to log them onto Letterboxd. As I think some people said above, I don't like the rating system. I have to go up or down on all the things I rated 6.5 or 7.5 on ILX, both very common ratings for me. Anyway, hope to have them logged in about two weeks. Then I'll start on the films I saw in the first 50 years of my life and never saw again.

Now that’s a retirement activity if I ever heard one!

Retirement + pandemic + move to small, isolated town: basically, I'm going crazy.

https://phildellio.tripod.com/letterboxd.jpg

lol

I only recently started using the rating system again after abandoning it about a year ago in favour of either "liking" a film or not. Most of this was motivated by discovering that I have a pretty bad memory even for things that I've watched in the fairly recent past--did I only sorta like The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry when I watched it a few months ago, or did I actually dislike it?--but I kind of like believing that history will care about what I vaguely thought about some second-tier noirs and 80s teen films, so I'll play along.

I think of the star ratings as snapshots of how I felt on a certain day and fully expect them to change with every watch.

Every movie I see is a five-bagger tbrr

yeah but six bags is the highest rating, we talked about this

1950s version, from Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country (which, truthfully, is boring me):

But even more than at the diary, Shimamura was surprised at her statement that she had carefully catalogued every novel and short story she had read since she was fifteen or sixteen. The record already filled ten notebooks.

"You write down your criticisms, do you?"

"I could never do anything like that. I just write down the author and the characters and how they are related to each other. That is about all."

"But what good does it do?"

"None at all."

stop yucking her yum, Kawabata

this is pretty self-indulgent but I'm enjoying the "how I letterboxd" profiles, this dude in particular has some great lists:

https://letterboxd.com/crew/story/how-i-letterboxd-justin-laliberty/

Blame me, not him--I cut the passage off before this:

He knew well enough for her that it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it was had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence.

There's a whole ad campaign right there. Letterboxd: distilling and purifying the existences of film lovers since 2011.

Justin's an interesting dude.

https://letterboxd.com/film/may-1-2020/

is this a real clusterfuck or a Kauffmanian bit?

have to admit I still haven't found the attention span to read a whole nathaxnne review

Last December, we followed each other on @letterboxd after posting five-star reviews of Mank. Five months later after 900 miles apart, we finally met up. Thank you Letterboxd and David Fincher! pic.twitter.com/xOuPUuPAa4

— Ben Crew - Muppets Great Gatsby (@BenjaminCrew1) May 3, 2021

it's nice that the only two Mank lovers found each other

I want to say that's better than coming together via their shared enthusiasm for Zodiac, but it's not.

If it was Zodiac that would be... ok, not awesome, but a lot better.

Everyone knows that true love can only bloom via a shared passion for Benjamin Button.

Love, forged through the fires of having endured The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo together.

I'd like to think I live in a world where nathaxnne is getting paid to write but I suspect that this world is not that world: https://letterboxd.com/unawarewolf/film/religulous/

good horror thesis here: https://letterboxd.com/mmmonty/film/friday-the-13th-the-final-chapter/

imo nathaxnne is low key doing her best work rn

https://letterboxd.com/unawarewolf/film/elvira-mistress-of-the-dark/
https://letterboxd.com/unawarewolf/film/desperately-seeking-susan/

I don't know that I've ever watched an 80s slasher and thought "these teens are cool"

I think the "paradox" in that Friday the 13th review is also just the hypocrisy at the heart of so much grindhouse entertainment, from slashers to gangster films to sexploitation: the viewer gets their vicarious kicks from characters breaking norms in ways they secretly would want to but also gets to see bourgeois morality win out in the end as the characters are punished for their infractions.

eh i personally do not think most of the villains in slasher films represent bourgeois morality

or that that’s even the dominating view of the filmmakers

eh i personally do not think most of the villains in slasher films represent bourgeois morality

No of course not, they represent the horrible forces of the id that bourgeois morality manages to oppress unleashed by the hedonistic behaviour of the sex crazed teens.

I don't think it's a "dominating view" in that I don't think most directors in the genre necessairly believe that, it's just a trope that's taken on a life of its own, which doesn't mean it doesn't reinforce that worldview.

more Acid Horror...

extremely deep (and short) cuts recommended as "acid horror" by the most dedicated (and intimidatingly knowledgeable) film nerd i know, V. Bercasi.

"It Has to Be Lived Once and Dreamed Twice," by Rainer Kohlberger, in the very new genre/movement of noise film:
info | interview | on ltrbxd

"Ms Hillsonga," by Arthur Jafa, a piece of 4 minutes' duration, soundtracked by Jeff Mills' "Medicine Man":
essay/critique | on ltrbxd | video

i tried to find any host for the first of those two. if someone more resourceful than i am could find a way to see it anywhere or how, i'd be thankful to know. Bercasi t*rrents them raw-dog via public trackers. also, because wow, here is his canon, the one accomplishment he's proud of on ltrbxd. i've seen 0% of it so far: baby's on fire.

i like LB but two things i find funny/annoying on there are

1. people who give a thorough breakdown of what their rating mean, like i know what five stars "means" dude
2. i would like it if there were some way to distinguish between between actually useful lists (if i see that a film is on a list called "acid horror" i know what that means and i can look at that list to find other films that have certain qualities in common with it) and ones that are entitled things like "makes u think" "films that just hit different" or whatever (which all seem to share about 80% of films in common). i also have a certain beef with the way that there are dozens of 'directed by women' lists, which just clogs up any film that is directed by a woman and can make it hard to wade through all that to find out more about it

the jafa film is on ubuweb

yeah as a new LB user, the proliferation of comprehensive lists like "every film that features a book" or "all european movies" or w/e has given me a pretty low appetite for spending time trawling through to find useful/interesting lists. would be nice if there was a way to filter lists by size, to avoid being shown lists w/more than 1000 entries or something

Has anyone made one of those lists along the lines of "movies with scenes inside a classroom"? And if so, can you drop a link here?

Some great short Acid Horror here, https://letterboxd.com/film/autoscopy/

well worth tracking down.

There's so many lists, there's really no need to hunt them down on your own. Just follow enough people and they'll show up organically in your feed.

clem: Movies Featuring Royal Dano as a Country Bumpkin Befuddled by an Invasion of Ridiculous Aliens

Yes, I'm just as obnoxious on other sites.

imo nathaxnne is low key doing her best work rn

https://letterboxd.com/unawarewolf/film/elvira-mistress-of-the-dark/
https://letterboxd.com/unawarewolf/film/desperately-seeking-susan/

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Friday, June 11, 2021 5:15 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

their review of ali: fear eats the soul made me tear up a little

https://letterboxd.com/adamt/list/movies-where-people-are-covered-in-molten/

xpost Oh sorry, maybe you specifically meant a list of movies featuring classroom scenes and not just any generic annoyingly hyperanal list that no one could possibly give two cares about.

The Lists function on mobile just keeps giving me the same six or five lists with v little turnover - and it's not like there aren't enough being published.

https://letterboxd.com/unawarewolf/film/celtic-frost-live-at-the-hammersmith-odeon-3389/

cold lake 4ever

The letterboxd top25 highest rated movies of the year so far list is interesting; combination of an international audience and the pandemic means there's lots of non-western fare on there.

https://letterboxd.com/crew/list/top-25-highest-rated-for-first-half-of-2021/

Enjoyed this review of The Great Indian Kitchen; more reviews should provide info as to whether the characters should be force-fed cow dung.

She is getting stuck in that filthy dirty fluid of expired beliefs, but the man too busy enjoying his sense of entitlement wouldn't bother to fix the sink. These patriarchal religious clowns really deserve to be forced to gulp fresh cow dungs down their throats in the name of old customs.

Shiva baby blows ass

that means it's great right?

I'll watch anything with Toronto & Reform Jews but Shiva Baby was pretty dire. Not much of Toronto (it's all indoors, moreorless, from ten minutes in) and the Jewishness was shticky and stereotyped. Reminded me of a bad fringe festival show that gets lucky with a good cast.

i liked Shiva Baby a lot!

in terms of (self-hating) Jewishness how does it rank compared to Uncut Gems

There’s nothing self-hating in Uncut Gems!!

Perfect Passover movie

There’s not enough insight about Jewishness in it to even begin self-hating

I didn't mind Shiva Baby, but I would have been just as happy watching Appropriate Behaviour again.

There’s nothing self-hating in Uncut Gems!!

Appropriate Behavior's a good one!

Unless you think sleeping with goyim is self-hating behavior which idk dude!

Appropriate Behavior is probably my favourite comedy of the previous decade.

well that's a high bar then! let's throw in tiny furniture too.

https://letterboxd.com/demiadejuyigbe/film/space-jam-a-new-legacy/

i was asked to do punch up on this movie and repeatedly pitched a bit in which lebron james goes through the sisterhood of the traveling pants franchise. “he and bugs could wear the pants” i said. “maybe they run into america ferrera and say something like ‘hey, nice pants’.” after an hour of interrupting pauses in the conversation by mentioning scenes from the franchise that lebron could travel through i was told to “cool it with the fucking pants shit.” they asked me to focus on rewriting porky’s rap and i wrote the bar “team is known around the world from seattle to france / we’re gonna pass you on the board like some traveling pants” and malcolm d. lee screamed at me. as an apology he agreed to put two characters from the sisterhood as extras in the crowd. look closely and you might see them. they just look like normal girls but they’re really excited about their pants. only you can decide how much of this anecdote is real

lol, yeah I saw that the other day. I'm often tempted to similarly 'review' movies. Maybe I need a second account.

wow https://letterboxd.com/estheronfilm/film/dear-evan-hansen/

Letterboxd is great imho

review is harsh. but come on, use some damn Capital Letters!

i looked up the trailer and yikes. how did they make a 26yo look like he's 35?

among the most misguided, disastrous decisions in cinema history, right around "john landis telling vic morrow and the kids to stand there".

old guy playing evan hansen comparable to manslaughter got it

that line is Problematic (tm) yes but also i laughed which probably makes me a bad person idc

All people are bad. All people deserve to laugh.

Esther Rosenfield is a terrible writer

who?

she did the olive garden story

the whatnow

I'm clubstoic on this if anyone wants to add me

i gave ya a follow. Lol your take on Joker is spot-on and super funny.

that sounds incredibly novel

I think I follow mostly discerning folks with quite specialized tastes on letterboxd and yet the "popular with friends" section always ends up being just a boring selection of mainstream releases that are in cinemas now.

Not really 'popular' - just if you're a letterboxd regular you're probably going to be watching recent new stuff a lot along with your obscure curios

Also why be discerning at all? Embrace everything

I'll be dead some day.

Also if I'm embracing a hugely popular mainstream release I don't really need letterboxd to tell me of its existence.

does imgur still work? let's find out
https://i.imgur.com/QYhILmH.png

yeah, i'm not sure how Popular With Friends works. but i have enough friends on there who watch enough mainstream movies in between all their arthouse releases and 80s direct-to-video genre exercises, that if the algorithm is looking for anything at all they had in common, 2 people who logged Eternals two weeks ago, even though it go totally buried in the feed, might be enough to push that to 'popular with friends.'

i see some ILXors at work there!

nun titty

Glad to see my William Powell marathon is having an impact somewhere.

abanana, that's more like it!

my "popular with friends" tab is currently Power Of The Dog, Benedetta, Last Duel, Spencer, House Of Gucci and The Beatles Get Back. again, really not stuff I need letterboxd to keep me posted on.

https://imgur.com/flzVqMx

https://i.imgur.com/flzVqMx.jpg

I don't know how useful (or accurate) the 'popular with friends' feature really is. Everyone I follow has pretty interesting and diverse tastes. Maybe that's just a representation of the rare points where everyone's tastes intersect, an exercise which (imo) will almost always take the form of a completely boring list.

yeah I think that's prob right

Because of her expertise in silent cinema, I can nearly always spot what j.lu has been watching in my Popular With Friends list.

Eric's review of The Red Shoes is a tearjerker: https://letterboxd.com/ephender/film/the-red-shoes/1/

I wish you could have some kind of control over the reviews. Half the time the most popular review is like this, really makes me want to delete my account:

dude did you notice the incest vibes? this bitch wanted to straight up fuck her uncle! dude, it was 1943! hitchcock was so ahead of his time, he literally invented cersei x jamie. if this was made today, they would have banged

you can, simply click "like" on my reviews and if enough of us do this they will become the most popular instead

I'm looking at Hanzo the Razor and it looks like you didn't review it :(

lol rob, great review there

The worst part about those kinds of reviews is that some irrepressible part of my brain wants to argue with what is basically a shitpost (yes, no work explored the concept of incest prior to Game of Thrones, etc). otoh I have no idea why you'd want to write shitpost reviews on letterboxd

There seems to be something about Hitchcock that makes people think they're being v clever pointing out the subtext people have been commenting on since the film's release, e.g.:

This is so gay. I mean, this is SO gay. Maybe you think you know how gay this is. Maybe you thought, "Oh, this is a lil gay" or "Oh, I'm sensing some undertones of homo-eroticism." Except you were wrong because this is perhaps the gayest movie in the history of gay movies and I loved every single second of it.

Oh yeah, good long takes, too.

(that one is at least a little funnier)

i think these read better if you assume they're not trying to be clever, but to convey enthusiasm/delight. contemporary youth chill/fun twitter/insta speak.

You just gotta use your block

when you know a movie is gonna suck ass pic.twitter.com/npRa6ZQVWR

— dream song 4 (@chickenpaprika) November 3, 2021

As a critic, David E. is a great year-end montage video editor.

thank you, Whiney, I didn't realize you could block reviewers, that is v useful

Doc C: yeah that's clearly the case with the Rope review. I guess I just fundamentally dislike the twitter/insta voice, though I think it's a more specific horny subgenre, which is more like "meta-horny," that I truly hate

Sometimes you want to watch a deep, meaningful Ghibli film and then sometimes you wanna watch one about a girl who thinks "yeah man, I'd have sex with that cat".

BECAUSE WE WOULD ALL HAVE SEX WITH THAT CAT.

This review may contain spoilers.

she wanted to fuck a cat, lets just sit with what we heard

it's really the dead obviousness that gets me

xpost ppl say this, but I have no idea why anyone would watch like "an oscar montage but titane"

i've only partially watched one of his year-end montages... it wasn't good

Finally finished up matching everything in my movie log db with its imdb id so something like importing the last sixteen years of movie watching Letterboxd is super-easy.

https://letterboxd.com/quartzcity/

I'm doing March Around The World this year, trying to focus on films I've not seen a single movie from. Basic idea is for users to watch 30 films in the month from 30 different countries (each year also has one obligatory entry - this year it's Denmark, so I've included a film by Riders Of Justice guy because I loved that one, despite having seen Danish films.=

My list:

https://letterboxd.com/reifferschizzle/list/march-around-the-world-2022/

Further to that, the challenge has a spreadsheet which is a pretty cool resource for those wanting to explore movies from less well known areas:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSux4XMP-nKjVh22Qcx148aDalBauYH_u3bJ4flO6tnRbUxfsZ2CZt0Eydyh0RD2WrDg-jyNCYqAMcg/pubhtml#

lmao

I enjoy this interpretation of the film, since it makes the girls feel more like the anarchic heroes of the piece. However, I think that it is better to read the film in a way that paints Marie I and Marie II as Lenin and Stalin. The girls are incredibly selfish and steal from both the rich and poor, leading people on and lying so that they can get everything they want. Their indulgences are the disgusting consumption of the Soviet Union and its expansion at the cost of human life and resources. The two Maries destroy and consume the entire bourgeois feast at the end (right after taking corn from working-class farmers) and this stands in for the Soviet goal of eating the West. At the end they have eaten everything, and feel regret for the first time, only because they have nothing else to eat. The film ends by punishing them for their indulgence, holding the belief that a system like the Soviet Union cannot last forever, and that eventually those in power will be punished for their wrongdoings.

(re: Daisies)

otoh this looks potentially super useful: https://letterboxd.com/oldfilmsflicker/list/classic-films-1910s-1980s-on-paramount/

Haha: https://letterboxd.com/jazzvampire/list/noir-westerns-with-titles-that-sound-like/

https://letterboxd.com/schlockvalue/list/100-essential-all-male-films/

(NSFW.)

xp Lol too easy

This queer film student whose into silent comedy, classic animation, Hitchcock, Kate Bush, Twin Peaks, and the absolute dregs of holiday-themed TV specials is perhaps my fave letterboxr: https://letterboxd.com/kissthem4me/

Recommended list: https://letterboxd.com/kissthem4me/list/1-film-1-year/

Added!

I only got into films during lockdown after decades of just not being interested so my tastes might be a bit 18 years of age discovering films but I like what I like and if anyone would like to follow me then please do. https://letterboxd.com/pfunkboy/

You can be reassured that I don't review many films.

I might get a wild hair to review on a rare occasion but I just log 90% of the time. Thanks for linking up!

I'm doing March Around The World this year, trying to focus on films I've not seen a single movie from. Basic idea is for users to watch 30 films in the month from 30 different countries (each year also has one obligatory entry - this year it's Denmark, so I've included a film by Riders Of Justice guy because I loved that one, despite having seen Danish films.

Prepping for this again, once more trying to get 29 blank countries filled in green. This year's obligatory country is Egypt - there's a lot of classic Egyptian films on YT but alas few of them with subtitles.

http://letterboxd.com/reifferschizzle/list/matw-2023/

xxp TSI, you are definitely underselling how much you've caught up since lockdown.

I only got into films during lockdown after decades of just not being interested

Feel you. I got back into films during lockdown and have been going ham ever since. LB suggests that nearly a third of the films I've seen in my life were watched over the course of the few years that I've been on LB. Which can't be right. But which might not be far off.

Kinda want to start a Letterboxd account. It looks fun.

It is as long as you don't worry too much about ratings. There's some users who frown if you give anything 4 stars or over. Thankfully its nowhere near as bad as RYM.
I just decided to use my own system for my own use. If there's a lot of 4.5 or 5 reviews and people dont like it - then tough. One review by me will not in anyway change the overall ratings of any film.

The ratings do come in handy for some lists though such as "Official Top 50 Narrative Feature Films Under 5,000 Ratings"

https://letterboxd.com/offensivename/list/official-top-50-narrative-feature-films-under/

Found a lot of gems in that list over the past year (and subsequently those films passed the 5000 mark) this one https://letterboxd.com/film/anantaram/ has become one of my favourite films. It really deserves to be seen by more people.

In the interests of accuracy I've made sure my diary includes films watched with the my daughter

https://i.imgur.com/wI7MRCl.png

There's some users who frown if you give anything 4 stars or over.

Anything that's less fusty and involved than the g-d 100-point scale is fine by me

I refuse to log all the Barney videos my cousins eldest made us watch repeatedly in the late 1990s

xp

I would also say find people you like and follow what they're up to. A lot of the frustration I hear from ppl regarding letterboxd mostly comes from just checking the most popular reviews of films, which can often be jokes or bad criticism, especially if it's a big mainstream film (mainstream here in relative terms - I wouldn't look up reviews for Tár or Triangle Of Sadness for example). If you manage to create a good ecosphere of ppl you respect you almost never have to do this.

xposts

Nobody really cares about the ratings too much on Letterboxd - which is good because let's face it nobody uses a 5* rating system the same exact way

Honestly i just love having a diary/journal of all my movie watching to look back on to figure out the last time I saw something was, and to commiserate with my local filmgoers in short bursts

^ this -- I rarely read reviews (and dislike the lowercase, sub-twitter wisecrack ones) and mostly use it just to track when and what I watch, and bookmark films for our household's weekly movie night. I will consult the average star ratings, though; I have to really be interested in the premise/vibe/subject matter to watch a 3.2 or below.

Also, my memory tends to collapse/blur together periods of my life a bit, but when I go back and see a film I logged (or a book on Goodreads), it helps me remember what was going on in my life when I watched or read that particular item. "Oh yeah, I watched this when I was in that folk horror phase because of X and Y" etc.

The average star ratings are not to be trusted imo, especially when it comes to stuff doing the rounds at festivals - way too many hot shot 18 year old Cinephiles giving stupidly low ratings. There's an Angolan movie that has a 2 star rating and none of the reviews make the slightest effort to understand its cultural context or get on the film's wavelenght.

Fundamentally I feel a 3/5 rating should be "average", watchable, decent etc. while most people seem to treat it as a failing test grade

On the flip side, I've given many "trash" films 5* because they're the best at what they are and immensely enjoyable, just as worthwhile if not more than what's been established as canon

If you really do like a film or watch it repeatedly or get something out of it then there's nothing wrong with giving it 4 and a half or 5 stars.

You can always change the rating later if you watch it again and it doesn't hold up.

If you’re going to use star ratings at all it only makes sense to do it your own way. I’ve only given two films star ratings and they’re both 5 stars.

i shd write more reviews, i only wrote one so far (independence day, 1.5 stars)

i watch films all the time and have opinions which make u think

Or you could write another book of those opinions?

also possible yes

Xp

I'm kind of leaning towards giving no star ratings lately tbh

Otoh, Independence Day deserves 3 stars - it's fun and entertaining trash!

it's boring and annoying

u shd read my review

What's your lb handle?

p_nk_s

hope u write a second review mark s

i shd and one day i will

btw silby, I really dug your recent lb review of The Long Goodbye.

ty I felt nice abt that one

Elliott Gould #2 on my Hottest Movie Men list (#1 Mifune)

i also liked that review ty silby!

I sometimes worry my ratings are inflated but then I'll see something so many degrees worse than most of what I watch, not even an infinite scale could put it in perspective

Yeah, I just don't watch bad films that often anymore. Refusing to go see things just because there's #discourse has helped.

You can always change the rating later if you watch it again and it doesn't hold up.

This is a great aspect of LB imo - star ratings always in flux, to be changed upon rewatch.

I think I've posted this before, but this is usually my dumb guide:

https://cansesclasseled.files.wordpress.com/2023/02/rating-scale.jpg

I like this Dan S. Rainbow scale

Truly, no one I follow has more alluringly idiosyncratic favorite film lists: https://sallittfavorites.wordpress.com/

I like using Letterboxd but whenever a review calls any movie whatsoever “boring” I get incandescently mad

rt

Helpful discussion. I think if I sign up, my plan will be to avoid ratings and avoid writing reviews per se – I’m mostly interested in exploring older world cinemas, and maybe journaling some of that, if I can think of anything to write.

I haven't reviewed or starred anything, I suppose I'm just leeching off of other's watch lists/diaries. I have no shortage of things to watch, but often I'll see something pass by on my friends list that left-field enough to get a "what the hell is that?" It may just be a cool poster and no review at all, but tbf I did buy records based only on the artwork.

Wait ILX0r Dan S is Dan Sallitt?

Yeah, I don't rate/review anything, either. I just log the films I watch. I like reading other people's reviews, though.

When I signed up a while into the pandemic, I was reviewing each film I logged, but that got tiresome. Instead, I assigned a shorthand to the star ratings (which I borrowed from Michael B and modified). Works well enough.

Follow me for more middlebrow viewing! https://letterboxd.com/mondosalvo/

I like your rubric. I've been reluctant to assign star ratings because I feel like I would overthink it, but maybe I just need to develop something like that.

When I signed up a while into the pandemic, I was reviewing each film I logged, but that got tiresome. Instead, I assigned a shorthand to the star ratings (which I borrowed from Michael B and modified). Works well enough.

hehe I borrowed and modified Mike's too.

Honoured to be an influence lol

Speaking of reviews, how come the pithy one-reviews I write get more likes than the reviews I devote a bit of time to?!

Because that's the style favored by the youngs of today. My follower count would be off the charts if could just bring myself to write 'slaaaay' and hit post.

perhaps the greatest skill is editing your review down to a single word or phrase that best conveys your thoughts

What’s your boxd again, Michael B?

https://letterboxd.com/carrotbourke

the correct way to use the stars is to force yr readers to triangulate the quality of the films with the content of yr reviews so as to work out how yr numbering system operates

xp thanks! Following

mark s probably has one of those letterboxd accounts where everything that’s rated is a tepid 1 - 3 stars with the exception of a single 5-star Shrek review

I will not be checking to confirm this

How did you know???

a couple of friends and I came up with this for the ratings, probably pretty similar overall to everyone else’s

5 — special, all time favorite
4.5 — near perfect movie
4 — great, one of the best of the year
3.5 — really good, some flaws but worth seeing in a theater
3 — solid, worth seeing if you like that genre
2.5 — uneven, too many problems, but some redeeming qualities
2 — a mess but I can see what they’re trying to do
1.5 and below, various degrees of feeling insulted having had to watch it

my ratings skew toward the higher end, I don’t do this for a living or anything so I generally am only going to see movies I’m interested in

I’m @radiokeller

Yeah, I'm generally a softy when rating things because I also don't seek out films I think I won't like.

However, my lowest score belongs to 'The Villain,' a live-action Warner Bros cartoon from the late 70s with Kirk Douglas and Arnold Schwarzenegger that I thought was hilarious as a kid and realized as an adult it isn't funny or even competently made.

I'm probably throwing the algorithms off because I never use the star ratings - just the check as to whether or not I liked it. If I'm watching something that is clearly crashing-and-burning for me, I'm out. I'm not sticking around to go, yup... that's a 1 star p.o.s. and I'm affirming that I watched every frame of it.

I don't watch things I know I wont like either. So it looks like I like everything but hey ho. It's not like anybody will follow me for recs.

Have any of you got a list of favourite films or 5 star rated films? If so, please post a link to them. I'd like to peruse them for recommendations.

I've a fav by year list but it's badly in need of revising, will post later.

Because that's the style favored by the youngs of today. My follower count would be off the charts if could just bring myself to write 'slaaaay' and hit post.

Don't think this is strictly a youngs thing, millenials shaped by twitter prob as responsible as anyone. I'll admit if something's longer than a paragraph or three I skip past too, feel like capsule reviews serve the format better, longform reviews I think are better suited to blogs (or I guess in 2023 newsletters).

because when I'm scrolling through my feed U really don't want to read more than three paragraphs for any one entry. think of it like texting YouTube video links that are longer than a minute, nobody wants that

Here's the list. I messed with it a bit, trimming away films I've played out or which don't mean that much to me anymore. Still wish I'd explored more of the good stuff of the 80's and 90's, original list was riddled with childhood faves and it's still a bit too much of that. Anyway had fun doing my own personal version of the S&S results, playing the outrage in my head as Truffaut leaves the list, etc.

http://letterboxd.com/reifferschizzle/list/favourite-movies-for-each-year-1920-2022/

You’ve watched
49 of 103 47%

A film per year is a good idea. Some years are awfully tough.

I had a go, but I think I may have accidentally left a year out but I cba checking which year. If anyone spots it then please let me know.

https://letterboxd.com/pfunkboy/list/favourite-movies-for-each-year-1920-2022/

'68 and '69 are missing iirc

Most of my 'best of' lists are for the vast array of trashy movies that I love, but my 1930s list is relatively respectable: https://letterboxd.com/plooplepop/list/top-films-of-the-30s/

yeah i ended up checking and fixed it

xp

there are users who regularly post thoughtful reviews that get hundreds of likes, but i think it takes a willingness to spend a not insignifcant amount of time writing reviews on letterboxd to build a following that's willing to read them. i regularly block people who have popular glib one-liners with thousands of likes because usually they're serial offenders and it lessens the odds that i will have to see a trying-hard-to-look-dashed-off dimwitticism as the most popular review under every movie. i'm very thankful for the pauline kael account that has trascribed her writing under tons of movies, i wish there were more accounts like that

just tbc all of you wonderful ilxors i've followed have been a pleasure ;)

How do folks deal with diary entries in the past where you don't know the date you saw it - just make something up? I didn't keep a regular film diary until 2006, so I'm filling in the previous 35 years of movie watching as best as I can. So while I know I saw David Lynch's Dune on opening night in 1984, I know zilch on when I would have seen the original D.O.A. on late night KTLA-TV in the 1970s.

I only do diary entries prospectively, anything from the past I just rate/review (if I remember it well enough) but don’t log

it's interesting which tv shows people log on letterboxd. like people are logging black mirror episodes now? i guess bc it's an anthology series so each episode is its own "movie." i find it annoying personally.

Yeah, plus limited series. I do log the ones I watch (most recently, White House Plumbers) but don't rate them. I guess that's my moral line in the sand?

LB is also pretty inconsistent about what tv shows it considers to be movies in the first place.

I mean, honestly, I submitted this well over a year ago thinking it would get yanked within weeks, and it's still there: https://letterboxd.com/film/clown-ministry/

The standards aren't that tight

Their incredibly hazy stance on TV drives me nuts. Like, why do episodes of Black Mirror count but not episodes of The Outer Limits?

I had to find a whole other TV-centric platform (Serializd) whose UI is basically a jankier Letterboxd and which seems to be populated by a total of 15 people who are in their early twenties. It does what I need it to do, though, for the most part. I started using Letterboxd mostly as an aid for my sieve-like memory so the lack of interaction with other humans is fine but there's definitely a strong sense of shouting into the complete and utter void over there.

I don't log TV shows. That's in part bc when I started keeping a movie diary 30 years ago, I decided I would only log theatrical releases and not, for instance, TV movies. I've backed away from that a bit in recent years as major filmmakers have made movies that haven't played in theaters. it seems weird not to log Soderbergh's Kimi bc it was only on HBO. But Black Mirror episodes seem like a bridge too far.

That said, the Emmys have always considered them in the TV movie category, so I get why Letterboxd treats them that way.

I'm not above larding up my total number of items watched; I just don't want to give them ratings

i think twin peaks: the return is the only tv-adjacent thing i've logged but even then i logged it as one thing, not each episode individually

ok, I'm in

https://letterboxd.com/centuriessound/

im still p_nk_s

Letterboxd draws its catalog of titles and data from The Movie Database (TMDB) (https://www.themoviedb.org/); I don't know where they source their info or how they distinguish between cinema/TV/other. It seems to be possible to add listings--I follow on YouTube several aficionados of obscure comedy shorts. Not all of these titles turn up on Letterboxd, but a certain uploader's titles always do.

The only more-or-less TV title I've logged on Letterboxd was the video for "Old Town Road" (2019).

I made a case for an Indian art-house miniseries once. It showed up months later. I kind of doubt it had anything to do with my request.

Would def prefer my feed be clogged up by comedy shorts and Indian arthouse series rather than those fucking Black Mirror eps.

Makes sense there'd be a TV clone/competitor to Letterboxd, but what I really want is one for video games

I'm not above larding up my total number of items watched; I just don't want to give them ratings

― fair but so uncool beliefs here (Eric H.), Tuesday, June 20, 2023 10:06 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

See, I would do this, but then do I go back and add that I watched the miniseries Alex Haley's Queen starring Halle Berry in February 1993?

I had to give up any hope of a reliable, exacting diary of screening dates when I misguidedly chose to import my IMDB entries, which not only screwed up that plan but then also introduced a much harsher rating system for older entries, which was my own fault. I tended to rate "average"/"neutral" movies at, like, 3 on IMDB, rather than the 5 that would've made more sense.

Makes sense there'd be a TV clone/competitor to Letterboxd, but what I really want is one for video games

― Nhex, Tuesday, 20 June 2023 18:36 (one hour ago) link

I want one for logging everything (e.g. digging through lots of mid-'60s media atm). Which is basically just a blog iirc. And which isn't really a thing anymore but the longer I shout into multiple complete and utter voids the more I'm just like 'Blogger here I come (again)'.

One day I thought "I'll just add every single film I've ever seen" and started with a genre, going through the list alphabetically, planning on going from genre to genre. I lasted one long afternoon session and didn't make it through the alphabet one time. Maybe I'll go back to that someday.

― Motoroller Scampotron (WmC)

I should get back to this project. Someday.

I sometimes think about adding the movies I saw before 1992, when I first started keeping track. In the late '90s, I tried to make a list of these pre-1992 viewings in a notebook, which I still have, although there are a few titles with question marks next to them. I'm still not convinced I ever saw The Karate Kid, but it's possible.

Some of my biggest gaps are from when I worked at the movie theater in high school -- crap like The Relic and Def Jam Presents: How to Be a Player, which I just added now

When I first got into it I sat down and marked "watched" every movie I could remember watching in my life, but def made no attempt to log, rate or review them. I'm sure there must be some childhood gaps, but I'm satisfied, and it was kind of fun to do!

I log TV shows by season, but I'm also involved enough to build my own database to track everything (books, tv, movies) and then export out what I need. Filling in the gaps is indeed fun - since I know that everything in my log prior to 2006 is suspect I'm giving it an arbitrary date (I know I saw Casablanca at UCLA sometime in the late 80s) and tagging the date as suspect. Somewhere on the net I found an archive of New Beverly Theater flyers from the 80s and 90s. and it's like finding a site full of old gig flyers.

I'll list TV shows on letterboxd if they are a one-season-and-out. Things like Pistol, Adam Curtis' documentaries, etc

They changed the scoring system for the Letterboxd top250, presumably to prevent a less than a year old film from being at the top. Current 250:

https://letterboxd.com/dave/list/official-top-250-narrative-feature-films/

It's an interesting mix of regular canon, IMDB bait (Shawshank in there at 10, Nolan Batmans and such) and more interesting/out of left field choices. Anyway if the modern film geek canon puts Kobayashi's Harakiri as the best film of all time and Come & See as #2 that's certainly nothing to complain about.

One film that used to be top10 and is now gone from the top100 altogether is Auto da Compadecida, a Brazilian comedy that apparently got in there purely through a concentrated effort by Brazilian users to troll US letterboxders angry at its inclusion in the top100.

Across the Spider-Verse is already #7 of all-time so if they're trying to avoid recency bias it's not working

Cool that La Haine is up there, felt like that movie was pretty overlooked for the last couple decades

I went on a rant about how much I didn't like La Haine once and it turned out the person I was speaking to loved La Haine so much that it inspired him to become a filmmaker, I only found this out later from his brother, a close friend of mine.

Not sure what the lesson here is, sorry.

The Letterboxd top 250 means less now than the IMDB one does, which is pretty sad

Ugh

Across the Spider-Verse is already #7 of all-time so if they're trying to avoid recency bias it's not working

Cool that La Haine is up there, felt like that movie was pretty overlooked for the last couple decades

― Nhex, Wednesday, June 21, 2023 9:10 AM bookmarkflaglink

lol and the previous Spider-Verse is at #33

The nice thing is that new films eventually fall once the first wave of superfans subsides and the rest of us catch up, and yet some of the original IMDB atrocities persist (Shawshank mainly, but also the outsized reputation of the female-less 12 Angry Men)

i tried to get obsessed with letterboxd during the pandemic but it didn't take. which is weird because its made for my kind of brain. i just got weary of documenting/listing things in general back then. i ended up writing some tiny reviews though!

https://letterboxd.com/skotrok/films/reviews/

5 stars!

https://letterboxd.com/skotrok/films/rated/5/

The fun thing is to sort your top-rated movies in order of average ratings (lowest first): https://letterboxd.com/ephender/films/rated/5/by/rating-lowest/

The new Spider Verse was #1 before the rejig so yeah it is working.

tbf new Spidy might just be one of my fav superhero films of all time (need a second watch to confirm placement)

The Letterboxd top 250 means less now than the IMDB one does, which is pretty sad

Eric H with the "Shawshank Redemption better than the works of Kobayashi" take.

The fun thing is to sort your top-rated movies in order of average ratings (lowest first)

lol, yeah, some of the trash at the top of mine is fabulous, and I'm sorry that the rest of the world can't see it: https://letterboxd.com/plooplepop/films/rated/4.5-5/by/rating-lowest/

I'm guessing most people don't feel this way here but... frankly, isn't having IMDB darlings like The Shawshank Redemption a more "honest" rank? Like Godfather II, Dark Knight, etc. are overwhelmingly loved by the masses and critically. Nothing against films like Hara-Kiri... for example, I love High and Low but outside of cineastes, who remembers it? It's probably not even in the top 5 most famous Kurosawas! Many of these entries are only here seemingly because they're streaming on Criterion Channel (which is fantastic! love that all this stuff is so much more available to everyone now).

The list of high-rated, under-logged movies (Top 50 under 5000 ratings) is potentially more interesting to me. Two Gintama movies??

Interesting(?) factoid I discovered a while back (which may have changed since I discovered it): The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is the only film on LB that's both the most popular and the highest rated film from a given release year.

I'm guessing most people don't feel this way here but... frankly, isn't having IMDB darlings like The Shawshank Redemption a more "honest" rank? Like Godfather II, Dark Knight, etc. are overwhelmingly loved by the masses and critically. Nothing against films like Hara-Kiri... for example, I love High and Low but outside of cineastes, who remembers it? It's probably not even in the top 5 most famous Kurosawas! Many of these entries are only here seemingly because they're streaming on Criterion Channel (which is fantastic! love that all this stuff is so much more available to everyone now).

I think the "honesty" here depends on who you think the list is supposed to represent. For me it's like, the Sight & Sound poll tells you what actual critics think, the IMDB list tells you what normies think...and the LB 250 is in some weird netherworld between the two but also taking in demographics that fit neither (thus the amount of anime present). Harakiri and Come & See are a great one-two punch for me, because they're both highly respected canonical films but also both works you'd never see make the top5 in any regular critics list. And yet, why not? They're fine choices!

Come & See is my 18 year old son's favorite movie. for what it's worth. he does not write for Sight & Sound.

I'd never even heard of Come & See until a couple years ago, and it almost instantly became one of my favourites. It's like, canonical in some circles, but still a major shock for new viewers.

I haven't seen either film -- am I right in suspecting that that top 2 is a little idk bro-y? (happy to be corrected)

otoh I saw 12 Angry Men for the first time a few days ago and loved it, sorry Eric

i watched come & see with both my kids because it was just such an unbelievable movie to me and i felt like i needed to share the experience. though its definitely not for everybody. i had no idea that they would end up loving it so much.

The list of high-rated, under-logged movies (Top 50 under 5000 ratings) is potentially more interesting to me. Two Gintama movies??

I've seen exactly one (The Mysteries of Lisbon), and honestly haven't heard of about half of these.

I've been putting off the Troells too long. Should I watch The Tree of the Wooden Clogs?

Devils On The Doorstep is good, should give a content warning for "shit that will fuck you up" on there though.

peter watkins' edvard munch rules. the pseudo-doc format lets you sink into it in this langourous sort of way, like watching a documentary in school that you expect to suck but you slowly realize is amazing. it seems like it might be dry at first but it circles back to key moments repeatedly and they accrue power as memories do when reflected upon throughout one's life

I haven't seen either film -- am I right in suspecting that that top 2 is a little idk bro-y? (happy to be corrected)

Difficult to answer this as both def take place in very masculine environments but if by "bro-y" you mean movies that straight men love because they're badass then yeah no, they are very much not that. Come & See frequently gets mentioned as the most harrowing anti-war film ever made, Harakiri is like many samurai films of its era a condemnation of the feudal code that this setting previously romanticised; I don't entirely remember but I think there's, like, zero actual swordplay in it.

Should I watch The Tree of the Wooden Clogs?

yes. Lots of good films on that list.

seconding the Munch film.

this is so crazy. i go downstairs to make dinner tonight and my kid tells me that he watched Harakiri yesterday and tells me that its number one on letterbxd! what a weird world i live in. reading this thread and then him telling me that out of the blue! i didn't even know that he paid attention to stuff like that. its in the air, i guess.

To be clear, I like 12 Angry Men ... I just think its prominence on the IMDB is kind of a giveaway that a disproportionate number of those in the IMDB-user demographic (and the Letterboxd one as well) prefer their movies to not prominently feature women

A few weeks ago I saw that someone was uploading 12 Angry Men in short chunks on TikTok and it was going viral, with zoomers wondering what was going to happen.

this is so crazy. i go downstairs to make dinner tonight and my kid tells me that he watched Harakiri yesterday and tells me that its number one on letterbxd! what a weird world i live in. reading this thread and then him telling me that out of the blue! i didn't even know that he paid attention to stuff like that. its in the air, i guess.

― scott seward, Wednesday, 21 June 2023 23:47 (yesterday)

It's one of the coolest facets of Letterboxd tbf

RIP. Killed by private equity

https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/letterboxd-acquired-50-million-deal-valuation-1235740185/

Blame probably falls on the owners/founders/sellers today, at least.

No social network lives forever, god willing

Canadian private equity though

Climate change-proof, at least

Until it burns down from fire

Netflix dvd, on its last day today, allowed me to download the entire history of my rentals over the past 10 years, including rental dates and my ratings. It was a nice gesture.

Over the last couple of weeks I have looked at their website to see which great films they still had in stock. I was able to get Mulholland Drive, Jeanne Dielmann, Sunrise, Singin' In the Rain, The Rules of the Game, and Sansho the Bailiff. A lot of my favorite films were not available.

They said they wouldn't expect any dvds to returned, so I'm keeping them. They also suggested they would give their subscribers up to 10 dvds for free on their last day, depending on dwindling availability, but they only gave me one, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. It is one of my favorites ever so I'm not unhappy.

I was thinking of going to letterboxd, but I don't know anything about it.

how is this site ever going to make back $50 million? this can't bode well

Welllll...hell. Looks like the only social media-ish thing I use is about to go straight down the shitter, huh. The internet has really been doing a splendid job of chasing me off the internet of late.

Suddenly feeling good that I just made my own database for tracking movies, books, etc.

fwiw, Letterboxd does make it easy to export your data. might be a good idea to do regular backups.

My Letterboxd diary was originally begun 31 years ago on Cardfile in Windows 3.1

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f7/Cardfile.png

Picture "Soapdish" and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey."

how is this site ever going to make back $50 million? this can't bode well

― Nhex, Friday, September 29, 2023 10:01 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yeah lol these media logging sites can't really be monetized for much, the core functionality is personal and not social

how is this site ever going to make back $50 million? this can't bode well

aiui they bought 60% in a deal that values the site at $50 million, so whatever disasters are in store, there’s no demand to return $50+ million imminently

Tiny Capital's founder Andrew Wilkinson spouts some of the most ridiculous affirmative tech speak nonsense that it seems written by GPTzero. Worth searching the internet for if you want your cognition interrupted. OTOH, perhaps there's a chance he'll leave Letterboxd alone.

"the core functionality is personal and not social" ---- otm. i like that i can follow a very small group of people, most of whom i personally know (plus some ilxors), and see what they wrote about whatever movie. that's kinda the extent of the "social" i want. my greatest fear is some rando parachuting into my comments demanding a debate or w/e.

OTOH, perhaps there's a chance he'll leave Letterboxd alone.

Over the years, I’ve been approached by many private equity firms. Typically, the process was a miserable three- to six-month ordeal where they would tell me one number at the beginning. Then, it would end up being a horrible earnout structure and a cultural mismatch and all sorts of other stuff. I was looking at Buffett and thinking, “Buffett seems to do deals in two to four weeks by being upfront and straightforward. I should just do the same thing for all these great founders.” So I started doing that. That resonated with founders, and we were able to buy a ton of great businesses. We did exactly what Berkshire does. We do deals in less than 30 days. We don’t participate in competitive processes. We leave the founder to run the business if they want to. If not, we work with them to hire management. We just focus on incentives, capital allocation, and net new M&A up at the head office level.

"the core functionality is personal and not social" ---- otm. i like that i can follow a very small group of people, most of whom i personally know (plus some ilxors), and see what they wrote about whatever movie. that's kinda the extent of the "social" i want. my greatest fear is some rando parachuting into my comments demanding a debate or w/e.

Weird to think that is one of the factors that makes it maybe the only social media site I've ever given money to, besides this one

“goodreads for movies” is partially right, but not addressing what goodreads has become is a glaring oversight

makes sense to see letterboxd as an acquisition when rottentomatoes is totally cooked

As utterly psychotic as I find those who, like MD'A, keep decades' worth of viewing-log records with all kinds of coding (i.e. walkout; rescreen; format; etc.), it's also probably the only legit way to keep track, by doing it yourself on your own property

i looked into that kind of stuff for a while with different text editors, personal wikis etc. and frankly i do like having a third party site do it better than something i could hack together

Scorsese allegedly joined Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/mscorsese/

so close..

https://i.imgur.com/3JMZ5JB.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9hck1PfGLk

ah fuck now I can't use Blood On The Moon as my go-to "you've probably never heard of this film, but..." choice

wrote some blurbs for this:

https://letterboxd.com/reifferschizzle/list/new-to-me-23/

Lots of unfamiliar titles there. I want to check out Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 & Life Without Principle!

I did a similar list too - https://letterboxd.com/carrotbourke/list/23-for-2023/

Just watched Crystal Swan from your list, Daniel. Really good!

Here's my list: https://letterboxd.com/anniella/list/best-first-watches-of-2023/

Ooh, ooh, I dood this too: https://boxd.it/jXwAg

Too Many Ways... is hard to get hold of (I saw it on a twitch stream), but Life Without Principle is on netflix in the uk, really amazing film - 50% banking, 50% triad shit, and the banking stuff is way nastier.

Found Crystal Swan through the LB March Across The World challenge which I use to fill in parts of my world map on lb, found lots of cool stuff that way.

Lots of classic Hollywood goodness I'd like to rewatch on yr list Old Lunch.

LWP is one of those billion Johnnie To movies that come out and I find out exist years later. Gotta try to find that

I own a DVD of Too Many Ways To Be No. 1 -- it's just a really great one (it's also the first Milkyway film.)

https://letterboxd.com/silby/list/top-10-new-to-me-2023/

silby please review every movie starting with the apartment

I liked The Apartment! What’s the next movie after that?

https://vhscollector.com/sites/default/files/vhsimages/24645_z2.jpg

Important question: if you get part-way into a movie but it’s not working out and decide to fast-forward to the end, how much must you have watched for it to count as “watched”? 50%? More? What if you watch the rest at 4x?

I'm pretty hardcore, will only log if I've seen the whole damn thing. Who knows whether the last 5 minutes will redeem a stinker?

I will pretend you didn't say that about 4x.

One of the few instances where I logged and reviewed a movie that I didn't finish was when I accidentally started watching Campus Code directed by Martin Scorsese's daughter (with an appearance by her father). The little bit that I saw suggested that it might honestly be the worst movie ever made, and I saw my LB review/warning as a public service.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA5VgVxxVzg

I can't remember the last movie I saw only part of, but when I started a movie diary in the '90s (which I eventually migrated to Letterboxd) I think my rule was that I had to have seen more than half of it.

I remember a borderline case with Scent of a Woman, which a high school teacher put on to show us a particular scene in the middle of the movie, and then just let the rest of the movie play out until the end. I decided not to log it because I was annoyed that I'd missed the first half and felt like I lacked the context to really appreciate what I did see. (Also, looking it up know, I see that it's 2 hrs 37 min(!), so there's no way I actually saw more than half of it in a single class period.)

These days, I do sometimes zone out of a movie I'm not feeling, usually toward the end, and maybe look at my phone instead of the TV for a while, though I don't fast-forward.

i think there is a reasonable point where you can log it, because i'll sometimes catch 75% of a movie on TV. but usually i don't

I log it and note that I skipped or phone-surfed through a lot of it.

I dont log movies that I don't watch until the end although I did watch Magnum Force recently and fell asleep and missed the last quarter of it but I felt it was bad enough to give it a 2.5.

The ending's the best part of Magnum Force!

this is true lol

a man's got to know his limitations

Yeah I don't think I'm going to back and find out tbh

feel like i hate this place more and more

why?

the only ppl I know who hate letterboxd are people who read the reviews from people they don't follow, and why would anyone do that?

It depends on who you follow I suppose, but as I don't do reviews I'm pretty sure I'm safe from Ivy's wrath this time.

LB and ILX are like the last two places on the internet that don't melt my face off.

same

yup. you absolutely don't have to see voices you don't like, a safe silo
still fun when people on your list disagree, so I get to see wildly divergent takes on Civil War

everyone here is right, i just had to toggle my feed settings and now everything’s much more tolerable, but like… i didn’t need to do this four years ago, and discovering new thoughtful voices on this platform used to be one of the nice things about it

whereas now it is a really unbearable echo of movie twitter (rip?)

If you’re going to write a review for Letterboxd, write a review to remember: https://letterboxd.com/murdermurder/film/blackhat/1/

whereas now it is a really unbearable echo of movie twitter (rip?)

― ivy

sometimes i read a bunch of the movie twitterish reviews and think everyone is a sociopath now.

yeah the great thing about the ‘boxd as opposed to twitter is you can really make what you want of it. I only follow irl friends, ilxors, and critics I think have something interesting to say. there’s no need to follow “accounts”

everyone here is right, i just had to toggle my feed settings and now everything’s much more tolerable, but like… i didn’t need to do this four years ago, and discovering new thoughtful voices on this platform used to be one of the nice things about it

ivy otm, it used to be a site where browsing and clicking around was enjoyable and you could learn new things.

Now it's really twitter-fied, too many people on there are trying to be a stand-up comedians, and it gets tiresome.

I have no idea what movie twitter is like

yeah i dont really like the way people review on there i just use it as a personal log and not for the social aspect

I never read it as a Twitter-style feed, I just look at friend's reviews if it's something I've just watched, or am thinking about watching, or if something randomly pops into my head ("I wonder if Jamelle Bouie ever reviewed Superman III" etc)

block accounts that write popular one-liner reviews, a lot of the ones that float to the top are from repeat offenders. i tried the same technique to try to get rid of the massive generic lists that clog out the more interesting ones specific to the film i'm looking at, but decided that's hopeless, they just need to tweak the algorithm to filter "every movie ever" lists from appearing under every gd movie

have blocked so many accounts making lists of every movie

My partner watches a lot of Seventies occult exploitation films, many not very good, but she digs the outfits and "vibes". It amuses me that, no matter how inept or boring the film is, there's usually at least one five-star review proclaiming it "an overlooked masterpiece of psychosexual suspense and brooding atmosphere" or some such. Always makes me wish I saw the film the way they did.

Browsing and clicking around is still enjoyable, I learn about something new every day! Browsing through random actor/director's filmographies, lists of faves from ppl I trust, etc.

I do also still find new ppl to follow but this comes mostly from checking out reviews for ultra niche shit.

In terms of high profile new releases, whether arthouse or mainstream...tbh I usually don't even check out what ILX has to say about those, sure as fuck ain't going to do it on letterboxd.

I'm a minimal letterboxd user maybe - I don't read reviews or recommendations, but it's very useful for keeping a universal watchlist & being able to see where things are streaming. I admit it's kinda fun to log things as I watch too, but I don't always remember.

i do keep a running list of films based on crime novels, also, that i remember to update from time to time.

I just got into letterboxd earlier this year. Ostensibly, I was going to use it with my wife to come up with movies that we could both agree on trying together, but she hasn't done anything with it.

Last year, I watched something like 120 new-to-me movies, which is the most I've seen in one year. Letterboxd proved handy for cataloging them. Then I went back and added every movie I could remember seeing, as long as I could remember something about them. For example, I know that I saw Bourne Identity when it came out, but I couldn't remember anything about it, so it wasn't logged until I rewatched it a few weeks ago. Likewise, I didn't include most children's movies that I've watched with my kids. Otherwise there'd be two dozen Pokemon movies in there that I couldn't tell you anything about. There are still a few old watches that trickle in now and then, but my total is somewhere around 500.

When I first jumped on, I tried following film podcaster dudes that I listen to (presumably some overlap with Film Twitter), but I quickly realized that I didn't care that much about their opinions and ratings and shit.

I add reviews occasionally, but it's more just notes for myself. I don't write them for an audience.

ok now I’m confused. is there some sort of twitter-like “feed” somewhere on this app? serious question — or is all this social media stuff we’re talking about just accounts you are choosing to follow?

There's a feed but that's only for your activity + the activity of ppl you follow.

The bad stuff happens when you go to the page of a certain movie and read the top reviews - especially if it's a new release or well known film.

yeah, I do like scrolling through Activity to see what people I follow have recently watched, rated, and reviewed. sometimes it gives me ideas for what to watch myself, or it'll tip me off about new movies I didn't realize were out, but I also just like seeing reactions.

I also look at reviews for a particular movie after I've watched it, but usually focus on those of people I follow rather than the teeming masses.

There's a feed but that's only for your activity + the activity of ppl you follow.

The bad stuff happens when you go to the page of a certain movie and read the top reviews - especially if it's a new release or well known film.

― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, April 17, 2024 4:26 PM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ah ok that’s what I thought! anyway, skill issue for sure

sure, probably a skill issue. That said, there are a fair amount thoughtful people I follow who stopped using it 2-3 years ago. And then there are others I followed who used to write more thoughtful stuff, but have since moved on to focus on one-liners and half-ironic hot takes. Don't know what else to say, I used to find the site fun to click around in, and now I don't, so I don't spend as much time there.

i guess i probably could curate a better letterboxd experience, maybe i'll get around to that at some point

it's fun to write one-liners and I don't like thinking

I don't pay a lot of attention to reviews by strangers, and I don't see much of the "social" functionality outside of my activity feed, but stepping up from a free account to a pro one has made me super conscious of my viewing stats. Like, "ooh, I haven't watched any movies from Croatia this year...I'd better find one!" In that sense, it's very valuable. Since I signed up during lockdown, watching as many movies per week as I can has been a pretty rich experience.

It's not like I never enjoyed films before, but I'm watching 10x as many now as I ever did at any other stage of my life.

Yeah letterboxd is definitely responsible for me watching movies I’d never have seen otherwise. As I said to a friend, watching movies in large quantity isn’t a virtue in itself really but watching more gives you more chances to be surprised

In a constant struggle to not have the USA be my top country of movies watched this year, lol.

What is everyone's highest rated decades via the stats?

https://imgur.com/a/j31qozq

https://i.imgur.com/0BNd2LC.jpeg

80's, 90's and 20's, because these are decades I haven't watched that much from. The decades I actually care about I watch enough movies from to have a lot more 3 star ratings.

Yeah, it's confounding to me that the '40s is my highest-rated decade because, aside from every decade of the 21st Century, it's also my least-watched decade by far. '70s and '30s in the second and third spots feels right, though.

2000s is the most surprising for me, since I never think of myself really caring about much from those years (and I still don't, really, but I guess I rate the good stuff higher than I realized).

https://i.imgur.com/8ddEb0o.jpeg

My Stats page says my highest-rated decade is the 2020s, but I've only been rating for a year, so there are only three decades for which I've seen more than a dozen movies. My average rating for the 1960s is higher, but the sample size is 5.

Who's your most-watched actor? Mine is Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Chishū Ryū

Most watched director Jean-Luc Godard

Director is more embarrassing for me (I Was a Teenage Woody Allen Fan).

Who's your most-watched actor?

Proudly, it's M. Emmet Walsh just ahead of Bogart.

Director is Hitchcock by some distance over Huston.

Director is more embarrassing for me (I Was a Teenage Woody Allen Fan).

― jaymc, Thursday, 18 April 2024 13:25 (thirty-one minutes ago) link

Likewise

I should really figure out some historical logging or figure out what I've forgotten to log since signing up for letterboxd. My stats are kind of bizarre.

I'm running through all the John Waters films I've never seen this year, so my stats are going to be very weird in December.

Most watched are Chuck Jones and Mel Blanc; if shorts are excluded, Scorsese and Michael Caine.

i'm an idiot, how do you see your most watched actor, director, etc?

If you have at least a Pro subscription, you can click on your All Time stats and look.

That themes & nanogenres thing is relatively new innit?

Yeah...it sucks.

Apparently I've watched a lot of movies about "Humanity and the World Around Us." Very informative.

Family drama = Ozu watches

https://i.imgur.com/2iQJmdh.jpeg

Humanity and the world around us is probably Kor-eda

Ugh, just realized Woody Allen is somehow my most watched (non-animated shorts) director despite the fact that I maybe only saw the first two or so movies that he made in this century.

My most watched (non-animated shorts) actor is Tim Heidecker, lol. Closely followed by Samuel L. Jackson and Cary Grant.

Samuel L.Jackson will sneak in there yeah, especially if you didn't get off the mcu train early enough

taking a look mine and -

* Chishū Ryū ✅
* Tim Heidecker ✅
* Samuel L. Jackson ✅ (17 movies with no MCU!)

but laughing pretty hard at my #1 -

* Sylvester Stallone, 22 films!

even tho sly isn't usually in em, I generally watch a lot of horror and exploitation so my "nanogenres" are also pretty funny -

* Gruesome, Terrifying, Imaginative 62 films
* Eerie, Graphic, Screaming 52 films
* Blood, Shock, Gross 50 films
* Killer, Terror, Brutally 49 films
* Violence, Bizarre, Extreme 49 films
* Blood, Horrific, Unsettling 48 films
* Action, Gangster, Violence 48 films
* Death, Psychopath, Graphic 47 films
* Brutal, Shock, Extreme 47 films
* Victim, Bloody, Terrifying 47 films

My Highest Rated actors is weird.

I didn't attempt to log everything until recent years and Ethan Hawke is inexplicably one of my most-watched actors

These are still the only user stats I'm ever interested in:

https://scontent.ffcm1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/417445545_10159945532767358_7139205201699595527_n.jpg?_nc_cat=109&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=Hu99-2B0hnEAb60djCT&_nc_ht=scontent.ffcm1-2.fna&oh=00_AfD-9ufrsDcnRCLVW009eX6LM95x-W1MfrujCWqLRqDQOA&oe=66288D3A

https://scontent.ffcm1-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/417457570_10159945532787358_7353406479538643797_n.jpg?_nc_cat=108&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=9XPJ8KpycroAb7YxzNL&_nc_ht=scontent.ffcm1-2.fna&oh=00_AfDU-_iWiZqWRq5H3LPmNuaguwQRh1jS-TwPMUQLM8Nv8Q&oe=66288DAB

lmao those are great, especially the higher than average one

also the goonies truly sucks, thanking u

I've only rated three movies, I like that letterboxd gives me the freedom not to rate things

A lot of ratings I have in there came from importing them from IMDB, where many grades date back to, like, the year 2000, and I'm pretty sure that version of me just went to the list of the top 250 rated movies and gave roughly half of them 1-outta-10 ratings

https://i.imgur.com/lBbJSwv.jpeg
https://i.imgur.com/wUMrQVT.jpeg

oh, these pics are too big. I don't know how to post them any smaller. Sorry.

Femme Fatale is not a five star movie

It's more of a five star than Poltergeist

I like to think we all agree on Braveheart being a half star

3 and a half stars imo. The half star is for Mel Gibson's accent.

I upgraded to Patron

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/434045500476620840/1230981105230938235/Screenshot_20240419_213742_com.letterboxd.letterboxd.jpg?ex=66354b7e&is=6622d67e&hm=bb3ab9a6bb535c03391b20a11b2e2d2bd60cfe91c9097cb6bf10a22171ac12ac&=&format=webp&width=210&height=454

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/434045500476620840/1230981125774512318/Screenshot_20240419_213818_com.letterboxd.letterboxd.jpg?ex=66242802&is=6622d682&hm=aac48ab0cea8eeb6799b1b466890405ba7ac67f4d29c3cfd80046935aeea0125&=&format=webp&width=210&height=454

lol, small image size led me to wonder what A Simple Plan did to piss you off.

https://resizing.flixster.com/edCns7oCRFGZToHUcqvKFtQmrXA=/fit-in/705x460/v2/https://resizing.flixster.com/-XZAfHZM39UwaGJIFWKAE8fS0ak=/v3/t/assets/p21705_v_v10_ac.jpg
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/dh0AAOSwyQtV3MGD/s-l1600.jpg

(I was impressed with myself for catching that visual parallel but of course there's already a Letterboxd list for that: https://letterboxd.com/cinemommie/list/hello-id-like-to-report-a-poster-theft/)

Xpost
I'm actually not keen on A Simple Plan but it's been a long time

4 stars for That's My Boy is fun

And Poltergeist and Femme Fatale are, in fact, both 5-star movies, so glad I could clear that up here

Brain De Palma's horniness is truly powerful.

Brain lol

ha, love that cover connection

is that rated higher/lower than average only at the Patron level? I'm on the cheaper sub and don't see that part

Yes, that's Patron-only. It would be a neat feature to have, but I'll live.

I think it will be coming to Pro in the near future. Patron gets early access to beta features.

You can also get a pretty clear idea of divergences by looking up only the movies you’ve ranked high or low and then organizing according to average user rating

I've never given star ratings to anything, so this is kinda lost on me. (my watching queue is so long that if something isn't working for me, I'm out - can't hatewatch anymore)

You don't have to rate anything, you can just log and/or review and/or like

Letterboxd stats have been expanded so now you can keep clicking to expand the most watched director/actor lists. A fun game to play is to keep doing that and see what's the first name to make you go "who?".

For me that's my 19th most watched actor (Hong Kong character actor Paul Chung Fat, who has failed to make an impression on me over the 17 times I've seen him in something) and 35th most watched director (Wilfred Jackson, 9 films, all Disney animated features and of course I didn't pick up on who that was, wasn't checking credits when I saw them as a child).

For me, it's my 10th-most-watched: Peter McRobbie. Definitely has a familiar-looking face.

And ditto for Wilfred Jackson as a director

I hate sorting by genre and you have to weed through a bunch of superhero cape shit, animated children’s movies and anime to see movies with people in them.

there's stats provided for your lists now too

for example https://letterboxd.com/pfunkboy/list/pfunkboys-favourite-100-films-of-all-time/stats/

this is a fun game! i also have Wilfred Jackson high, and his Disney colleagues Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi and Jack Kinney. biggest "who?" actor was stuntman Thomas Rosales Jr. (16 films!).

boy howdy tho, does the app love to lose your place whenever you switch away to something else, like the browser where you're trying to compose an ILX post.

carrieandtracy at letterboxd. 🎥

— Carrie Coon (@carriecoon) December 13, 2024

darmokandjalad at tanagra

taramian letterboxd would be lit

> darmokandjalad at tanagra

lol

this is cool

Letterboxd should have a feature to show you if anyone has the same top 4 as you

— Rachel Lapides (@rachellapides) December 17, 2024

You can! type fan:[TITLE] with a space between each one (no one has my top 4 but me)

— Aloysius Cappadocia (@kvo2021) December 17, 2024

And substitute hyphens for spaces in the titles eg: fan:bull-durham fan:along-came-polly

— Alex Mitchell (@AledMitch) December 17, 2024

does fan cover the "like" button or only if you put in your top four? I've never been able to decide on those

that particular search function finds users who have a film in their top 4

my new-to-me list for 2024:

https://letterboxd.com/reifferschizzle/list/new-to-me-24/

the Beavers count themselves as a 2024 release due to the final cut being post-festivals iirc

they didn't send letterboxd the memo, alas

Best new watches '24

24 for 24 https://boxd.it/BTAxa

Best new watches '24

24 for 24 https://boxd.it/BTAxa

Here's mine:
https://letterboxd.com/anniella/list/best-first-watches-of-2024/

the Beavers count themselves as a 2024 release

Letterboxd used to base the year on theatrical release, but then they began using the year it first appeared at a festival or whatever and it screws up everyone's lists/stats for a given year.

Here's my list
https://letterboxd.com/mondosalvo/list/40-favorite-first-time-watches-of-2024-1/

Letterboxd used to base the year on theatrical release, but then they began using the year it first appeared at a festival or whatever and it screws up everyone's lists/stats for a given year.

Also removes the fun of going to a festival and getting to log something from the FUTURE.

mine for last year: https://letterboxd.com/jamesdevine/list/fav-first-watches-24/

Think I'm gonna actually log this year instead of just lurk/use the list function to keep track of things. I'm particularly interested in seeing how much great new (to me) old stuff I might see in the span of a year.

my discoveries of 2024

https://letterboxd.com/adamt/list/discoveries-of-2024/

here's mine:

https://letterboxd.com/mattmc387/list/best-first-watches-2024/

Kinda interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ0lJcxqJq4

You know what might be better than 32 minute video? A list on film-logging site Letterboxd.

https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/66346/1/jeremy-corbyn-is-on-letterboxd-reviewing-up-a-storm-ken-loach

5 star review for 2001, mark s will be heartbroken

If it's really his account.

haha yeah, NME is covering it so not really certain

13,441 followers to date and the only one he's following is the TUC - "Reviewing movies from the only perspective that matters - workers' rights" which seems to be a spoof account itself.

https://letterboxd.com/unawarewolf/film/the-silence-of-the-lambs/

Love this: https://letterboxd.com/quinnrex/list/this-film-is-adapted-from-a-book-theres-a/

haha that's cool

see also films that begin with a row of books and then focus in on a copy of the story we're about to see

lol great list

pretty much the kind of thing letterboxd was made for

Here's the NY Times 21st Century list in Letterboxd form
https://letterboxd.com/hetchy/list/the-new-york-times-100-best-movies-of-the/

I've seen 63 out of the 100, but nothing on my final ballot of 10 was on the NYT list which I'm kinda proud of
https://letterboxd.com/quartzcity/list/ny-times-21st-century-movies-final-ballot/

Out of the 1100+ ones I've seen, narrowing it down to an initial 40 was easy. I like this list more than I do the final 10
https://letterboxd.com/quartzcity/list/ny-times-21st-century-movies-initial-list/

I'm somewhat surprised to see that I have seen 67 of them.

as I posted elsewhere, I've seen 94. the ones I haven't -- Amour, Fish Tank, The Gleaners and I, Memories of Murder, Ratatouille, and Toni Erdmann -- were already on my Letterboxd watchlist but now taking priority.

If y'all wanna follow me: https://letterboxd.com/AlfredSoto/

Nice! It's time I did something with my account, rather than compile lists and look at other people's reviews.

You're right on re: Falcon and the Snowman, btw. I can't stand Penn in that one!

pretty surprised I've seen 91 of the nyt list

one's i've not seen:

whiplash
best in show
aftersun
everything everywhere
act of killing
past lives
lotr
interstellar
black panther

I love Aftersun

Me too.

NYT Best Films of the 21st Century

83/100
I'm embarrassed about some of the ones I've put off watching. Toni Erdmann, A separation, Portrait/Lady/Fire, Memories of Murder...

Sea wanna ekz

I just found out today that the reason Sean Oneal hasn't been writing AVClub Newswire bits for months is b/c he's EiC of StarWipe. His style has transferred over intact.

http://www.starwipe.com/article/charlie-sheen-falsely-accused-building-sex-robot-y-817🔗

I just found out today that the reason Sean Oneal hasn't been writing AVClub Newswire bits for months is b/c he's EiC of StarWipe. His style has transferred over intact.

http://www.starwipe.com/article/charlie-sheen-falsely-accused-building-sex-robot-y-817🔗