letterboxd, the vexing and sometimes OK film logging website

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