letterboxd, the vexing and sometimes OK film logging website

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.