Loving Letterboxd
Monday is movies. (Sometimes TV). Today it's all about the film social media site, Letterboxd.
Right through high school, I kept a diary. Every day, an entry. It’s not interesting stuff at all, but I guess it got me in the zone for when social media arrived – more than that, I like to think it was like leg-day at the gym for writing. I hit it hard and honed the muscle – preparing me then for more than just social media; my adult life has been a series of writing tasks that require regularity: blogging, this newsletter, newspaper reviews – and my own approach to poems and creative writing has been shaped by this too.
The other thing I love is lists.
My diaries all had pages at the back where I listed all of the cassette tapes I purchased, the books I read and the movies I watched.
So for years now I’ve updated my Discogs account which lists all my CDs and vinyl; I’ve set a reading challenge and updated my Goodreads page with mini capsule reviews of every book I’ve read, trying my best to remember back to what I was reading as a kid also…
And, after a few years of wondering how I might catalogue films, I found Letterboxd. It was launched 10 years ago – and was created in New Zealand. Letterboxd is a site for movie nerds. You can list all the films you’re watching and make other lists – creating wishlists or themes, there’s the option to follow/friend other users and to just generally be part of the social media aspect of it, and you can read reviews from fellow movie goers.
I love my Letterboxd account – I update it most days. Setting myself the ridiculous task of trying to remember every film I’ve ever seen. I have a pretty good memory. But I’ve been watching movies near-nonstop for over 30 years now. So there’ll never be a way of cataloguing everything. That thrill though is implicit in the chase.
I’ve now logged over 7000 films. It might be still a drop in the ocean. But it’s a fun task.
This weekend I upgraded my account to the pro setting – meaning I dropped them some cash, a small annual fee to go ad-free. And there’s a few other perks too.
It means now I can probably start a list of the movies I actually own, which is cool – since I’ve just made the decision this year to buy back into physical media and start a small, curated collection of films I must have. I’m buying them super cheap – thrift stores, DVD sales, TradeMe, and I still review movies for my site, Off The Tracks so I’m sometimes sent screener-links, other times actual DVDs and Blu-Rays.
The other thing I did – exciting weekend here! – was add all of the film reviews I’ve written to Letterboxd.
I write about film here on a Monday, but I also have pumped out a few movie reviews over the years (DVDs or actual theatre-visiting experiences). And I have word-doc copies of at least 10 years of movie and music reviews.
I don’t write about every film I see, but I’ve still written hundreds of reviews. I’ve uploaded them all to Letterboxd – because it’s free to check out any of the content (you have to create an account if you want to start your own lists, and there are mobile apps and all of the usual jazz).
So you can now check out 28 pages (and growing) of my film reviews on Letterboxd.
I don’t know if that’s a lot or a little, again there’ll be users offering far more than I am – and users that run their own private world on there and neither write nor use reviews.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention this – been wanting to write about Letterboxd for a while, because it’s given me great joy over the last year or two, sitting down to remember the films I’ve seen and assigning a rating, looking through lists and collections that some of the other users have made.
I haven’t gone down the path of listing the number of times I’ve seen certain films, you can clarify that something is a rewatch – but hey, there’s always next winter for that…
One of the really great things about being old and uncool is understanding, finally, that none of this matters whatsoever, but also on some level if it’s not hurting, then it actually is helping.