letterboxd, the vexing and sometimes OK film logging website

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