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I guess many of you have heard about Letterboxd. To me it's THE social network about movies - a place to log what you see, give your ratings, keep watchlists and other lists, see what your friends are watching/liking. To me it seemed different from the others mostly in how nice the UI looks and feels compared to other similar services. And especially the way movies are shown with posters makes a lot of sense to me.

 

Anyway, at the moment I just noticed there is a campaign to let you import data (in IMDb format) into Letterboxd for free - usually you would have to pay for the Pro account to be able to do that. So at the moment there's a rather good opportunity to give Letterboxd a try if you have a lot of movie watching data or ratings on some other service.

 

BTW, I'm T4ffer on Letterboxd.

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I like Letterboxd, I am dium on Letterboxd.

 

I said it before in another thread, but I've found the practice of keeping a movie diary to be quite valuable; it's noticeably enhanced how I engage with movies (in that I think about them beyond simply 'was I not entertained?').

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I am on there as well.

 

Like a lot of social media sites, you need to follow a bunch of people to get the most out of it. Here are some people I'd recommend following for their reviews.

 

Sean Gilman (professional film critic, sees a lot of new releases and is expert in Asian cinema)

Michelle (podcaster/experimental musician, good mix of experimental film and new releases)

Filipe Furtado (Brazillian critic, watches a LOT of classic/foreign film, very politically minded)

Benjamin Nason (critic, good mix of arthouse and action movies)

Jason Coffman (film writer, exploitation movie expert, has a frighteningly thorough knowledge of Christian Scare films)

pd187 (almost exclusively watches trash, very funny and unexpectedly political reviews)

Steve Carlson (writer, horror film expert, writing a book on Shot-On-Video horror films, lots of fascinating reviews from that world)

Joe (works at the Alamo Drafthouse, I believe, great reviews well-rounded taste)

laird (programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse, sees everything, great reviews)

Ira Booker (lot of exploitation films)

street (eclectic taste, good writer)

matt lynch (video store employee, the greatest action film critic ever, sees every action film, really funny and political and brief reviews)

 

The front page frequently has "featured" reviews, so you can find more people to follow that way as well.

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I'm https://letterboxd.com/souldriver/

 

I don't use this as a social media site whatsoever I basically only started using it to log films after at the end of 2015 someone asked me what my favorite movies of the year were and I didn't even remember what I had seen.  

 

I never actually write reviews and I I probably should because looking back at just my ratings they don't even make sense to me.  Like I gave Terms of Endearment and Atlantic City both 4/5 and I like those both way more than 4/5, whatever that even means/ was supposed to mean.  

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I've been keeping a film diary on Mubi for a while, but I've been tempted by Letterboxd's very smart UI and community, and have now pitched up there too - here I am

 

I've struggled to get the import feature to work with files Mubi exports, so for now it's only my ongoing 2017 viewing.

 

Anyway, now following you lot on there!

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10 hours ago, Patrick R said:

If you don't mind me asking, how do you feel about Certain Women?

I really liked it a lot. Favourite film of last year. I really like a few of her films, her style really resonates with me. I find them really comforting despite most of them being quietly devastating.  This is probably my favourite of her films actually...  

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I don't think we had a thread about rating movies, maybe we can talk about it here, since that's a big part of Letterboxd (for me, at least).

 

Basically my movie rating scale is currently defined by The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears as a center point - that movie gets ★★½, because it was kind of incomprehensible besides having some amazing visuals and a really memorably weird premise, and it's a bit too graphic for me - so to get 2.5, a movie has to have at least something really memorable in it that sets it apart from worse movies, but it still has numerous flaws, probably. I am fully expecting to give The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears a higher rating some day in the future when I understand more, but currently that's how it is.

 

Below this score are movies I would probably not watch again, although there could be exceptions, because sometimes movies that I rate quite lowly are considered some of the best movies by others and I might be willing to watch them again for educational value: Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, It Happened One Night, The Searchers.

 

★★★ is an average movie that has a really strong central idea that I can understand (although exceptionally I can also rate highly something I don't understand that well, like Persona), but maybe not that well executed or has just too numerous flaws to get a higher score.

★★★½ is a movie that does a really good job presenting it's understandable central idea, and that I would definitely watch again

 

Another fixed point is Embrace of the Serpent, which I thought was a great movie with a sucky ending. It gets ★★★★ and this score is kind of my high limit for a really great movie that has some obvious flaws distracting from the enjoyment. For example I would also put Mario Bava's Black Sunday here because the second half has some bad plot mistakes that probably had to be left in due to shooting budget. A really good genre movie is generally at this level.

 

Above that are already masterpieces, maybe slightly flawed but really strong in presentation and probably have something meaningful to say about the human condition.

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For a long time on my personal film diary site that I no longer use I went with letter grades, because I had more experience with them in my life. As I started to use Letterboxd I had to pair these letter grades with stars and eventually my mind just switched over to the star system. Rating art is dumb but at this point my brain does it anyway, and the advantages of keeping a Letterboxd film journal outweigh the downsides.

 

★★★★★ - Unimpeachable greatest film of all time material. Examples: Rear Window, In the Mood For Love, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Meet Me In St. Louis

★★★★½ - I adore this movie, but I have a slight reservation about it. Examples: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner, Blue Velvet, Tangerine

★★★★ - This is a great movie. Examples: King Kong, Touch of Evil, Akira, What Time Is It There?

★★★½ - This is a good movie. I'd give a warm recommendation.  Examples: mother!, Edge of Seventeen,  Duel, Au Revoir Les Enfants

★★★ - Pretty good. A mild recommendation. Most movies I see end up here. Examples: The Big Sick, Babette's Feast, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, In & Out

★★½ - Mediocre, little of interest. Examples: It (2017), Captain Phillips, Inside Out, The Darjeeling Limited

★★ - This is a bad movie. Examples: Poltergeist 2, Straight Outta Compton, Platoon, Vertigo (I know, I know, I just do not understand what people see in it at all)

★½ - This is a really bad movie. Examples: The Bye Bye Man, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Amistad, A Bug's Life

★ - God, this was awful. Pissed me off. Examples: The Neon Demon, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Jurassic World, Driving Miss Daisy

½ - Mostly interchangable with ★. Just wretched. Examples: Natural Born Killers, Jason X, The Ninth Gate, Quintet

 

Ratings below 2 stars are somewhat rare as I normally just turn off movies I'm watching if I hate them that much.

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I use Criticker which means my rating scale is customizable. You can find all my rankings here. I use a 1 to 100 scaled divided into 8 tiers:

 

100 / Perfect: I like this movie so much! Examples: Blade Runner, Dr. Strangelove, Okja, Pulp Fiction, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Swiss Army Man, The Empire Strikes Back

90-99 / Amazing: Tremendous movies! Examples: All About Eve, In a Lonely Place, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension!, Ratatouille, American Graffiti, A Separation, The Seventh Seal, Stop Making Sense, Adaptation, Last Year at Marienbad, Spring Breakers, Annie Hall, F for Fake, Dunkirk

85-89 / Great: Great movies! Love 'em! Examples: The Hateful Eight, High Noon, Iphigenia, Paterson, Dead Man, Colossal, Das Boot, Happy Together, Eternity and a Day, The Draughtsman's Contract, Fresh, Tangerine, M, Real Life

80-84 / Very Good: Quite good movies! Like 'em a lot! Examples: Groundhog Day, Inception, The Social Network, Sonatine, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Clueless, Point Break, eXistenZ, Days of Being Wild, Turtles Can Fly, Everybody Wants Some!!

70-79 / Good: I like these movies! Examples: Bullitt, Diner, Don't Think Twice, Iron Man, The Road to El Dorado, The Asphalt Jungle, Unbreakable, Brooklyn, Ant-Man, The Devil Wears Prada, Gone With the Wind

60-69 / OK: I don't hate these movies! Examples: Elysium, Avatar, Donnie Darko, 25th Hour, Forgeting Sarah Marshall, A Few Good Men, War Horse, The Men Who Stare at Goats

50-59 / Bad: Not a fan of these movies! Examples: Westworld, Independence Day, Blank Check, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, GoldenEye, The Shawshank Redemption, Star Trek: Nemesis, Superbad

0-49 / Terrible: Really don't like these movies! Examples: It Happened One Night, Revenge of the Nerds, Slumdog Millionaire, Wedding Crashers, Kick-Ass, The Boondock Saints, Religulous, Wing Commander, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Lucky Number Slevin

 

Here's how many movies I have in each tier (approximately - there are some TV rankings in there):

 

Perfect: 8

Amazing: 154

Great: 250

Very Good: 225

Good: 306

OK: 128

Bad: 57

Terrible: 65

 

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Interesting. I'm going to find my stats as well... I think mine might be skewed towards the top since I only started rating movies recently and only as I watch them, and I've been going through various top films lists.

 

★★★★★ (72) - Psycho, Rear Window, Nashville, Harakiri, Man with a Movie Camera

★★★★½ (130) - The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Taste of Cherry, Mirror, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Raise the Red Lantern

★★★★ (177) - Embrace of the Serpent, Black Sunday, The Long Goodbye, A Swedish Love Story, Fish Tank

★★★½  (171) - The Love Witch, Clouds of Sils Maria, Lady Snowblood 2, The Motorcycle Diaries, Amarcord

★★★  (93) - Gummo, I Don't Feel Home at This World Anymore, Get Shorty, 28 Days Later, Theeb

★★½  (35) - The Strange Colors of Your Body's Tears, Kubo and the Two Strings, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, In Order of Disappearance, Blue in the Face

★★ (26) - The Isle, It Happened One Night, Noroit, Alice Sweet Alice, Near Dark

★½ (8) - Blade Runner 20XX shorts, November, Roukli, Tremors 5, Hugo

(12) - Suicide Squad, Weekend, The Searchers, GoodFellas, The Trouble with Harry

½ (1) - Fifty Shades of Grey

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Movies that should not be in the lowest rating: Goodfellas, Jason X.

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Very good answers! Though the one to "are you a horror fan?" was a bit wordy :P

 

I'd be interested to hear what you think of this recent fan film:

 

 

EDIT: the stuff they say about the sequel to the 2009 film seems totally inaccurate. Apparently there was going to be a sequel in 2010 but that got cancelled. Then there was going to be another reboot this year, not a sequel (though seeing as there doesn't seem to be a single film journo on the planet who knows what 'reboot' actually means, this might be inaccurate), but it got cancelled as well. mother! took its release date but I find it unlikely that it was an either/or choice for the studio. Apparently it's rumoured that it was cancelled because Rings did badly.

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2 hours ago, Ben X said:

Very good answers! Though the one to "are you a horror fan?" was a bit wordy :P

 

I'd be interested to hear what you think of this recent fan film:

 

 

EDIT: the stuff they say about the sequel to the 2009 film seems totally inaccurate. Apparently there was going to be a sequel in 2010 but that got cancelled. Then there was going to be another reboot this year, not a sequel (though seeing as there doesn't seem to be a single film journo on the planet who knows what 'reboot' actually means, this might be inaccurate), but it got cancelled as well. mother! took its release date but I find it unlikely that it was an either/or choice for the studio. Apparently it's rumoured that it was cancelled because Rings did badly.

 

Ha, it wasn't an open-ended question! I wasn't told that my answers would just be reprinted verbatim and if I knew I would have re-worded and embellished some of them.

 

The mother! thing seemed a bit far-fetched, but I don't follow film news so I took them at their word. 

 

I haven't seen that fan-film but heard of it recently, from somewhere, so I'll check it out after work. A lot of fan-films these days are a little too polished for my taste. I like fan-films that feel cheap and junky and are the work of kids with too much time on their hands, obsessively inventing new mythologies, like Del From Hell's Friday the 13th Part 3: Jason's Revenge. But I like slasher fan-films any way you slice it, so I'll check it out.

 

Anyway, here are my star ratings as exemplified by slasher movies:

 

★★★★★ - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Halloween (1978), Alice Sweet Alice, Scream

★★★★½ - A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

★★★★ - My Bloody Valentine (1981), Visiting Hours, Silent Night Deadly Night

★★★½ - Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, The Funhouse, Happy Birthday To Me, The Burning

★★★ - Neon Maniacs, Final Exam, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, Friday the 13th

★★½ - Hatchet, Don't Open 'Til Christmas, Silent Scream

★★ - Halloween (2007), Hell Night, Gruesome Twosome, Graduation Day, Sorority Row

★½ - Hatchet 2, Don't Go In The Woods, Friday the 13th Part V: The New Beginning, Halloween 5

★ - 31, Unrest, Prom Night (2008), Halloween Resurrection, 

½ - Jason X, Jason Goes to Hell, The Clown Murders

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I agree that rating art is dumb and reductive, but I've been doing it for the last year as part of keeping a film diary and I've found it a useful catalyst for critical thought. I tend to enjoy almost every movie I bother watching (because the internet is a well-optimized recommendation engine, and because I want to enjoy things, and, I guess, because I'm easy to please), so the meaning of my scale is slightly different: if I truly dislike a movie it gets 1-star, with anything higher than that a degree of 'good'.

 

★★★★★ - An unreserved favorite. This movie's 'flaws' are wholly endearing to me.

(The Big Lebowski, Casablanca, Road House)
★★★★ - A movie that I like a lot.

(Raiders of the Lost Ark, most of the Christopher Guest mocumentaries, Josie and the Pussycats)
★★★ - A movie that I like, but that I don't feel strongly about liking, or that I like with some significant caveats.

(The new Star Wars movies, most of the Fast and/or Furious movies, plenty of old classics that I'm too young & dumb to fully appreciate)
★★ - A movie that I may have enjoyed watching, or that I like some aspects of, but overall find disappointing/off-putting/something-negative.

(Hook, Bringing Up Baby, Wild Wild West)
★ - I don't like this movie at all.

(Crocodile Dundee)

 

When I started rating movies, with no previous personal ratings to use as points of reference, it was easiest to disregard half-stars. Now that I have a hundred or so movies rated, the temptation to dip into half-stars is surprisingly great... I gave both Baby Driver and Napoleon Dynamite ★★★ but I like the former notably more than the latter. 

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On 10/22/2017 at 2:40 PM, Ben X said:

 

 

I'd be interested to hear what you think of this recent fan film:

 

 

At the risk of transforming this into the F13 thread (just kidding, I love it), I will repost my review from Letterboxd:

"Stretches the definition of "fan-film" not because it's too good/polished*, but because I can't imagine what part of the Friday the 13th films this person is a fan of. The entire appeal of fan-films is seeing amateurs attempting to recreate their favorite films and, as a result of their lack of money and skill, accidentally reveal more about who they are and why they like the series than anything else. This is a completely unrelated thing that happens to take place at Camp Crystal Lake, probably because it made it easier to raise Kickstarter money that way.

 

Also the bro lead of this gets into multiple fist-fights with Jason Voorhees who, instead of just punching his head off like we all know the real Jason would, just retaliates with hoss wrestling moves. Bodyslam Jason only works as a WWe2K create-a-character. Hard pass.

 

*This isn't actually good or polished but it does have drone shots so I get why people on this site have been tricked into thinking this is, like, actually a good movie. Kids love found footage and drone shots."

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Re.the fan-film, I thought the premise was pretty good, and it was well-made, but yeah actual Jason is lame in it. I liked some of the hallucination stuff though, that felt fresh.

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