letterboxd, the vexing and sometimes OK film logging website

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.