letterboxd, the vexing and sometimes OK film logging website

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.