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Man there's a lot of Matts on Letterboxd
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Mar 19, 2025 14:26
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I'm at a point where I think LB would be so much better if I could have it completely private outside of friends. I have no interest in the movie-watching marketplace of ideas *shudder*
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Mar 19, 2025 16:08
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I enjoy reading people’s personal reactions to films. When people take rankings seriously or are only looking at obvious classics like The Godfather, I just assume they’re young. I don’t mean to gatekeep, but I ignore their content just in a “I’m going to sit out you guys talking about the same few thousand films incessantly” kind of way because I’m past that age of discovery myself. I’m not opposed to Letterboxd implementing a going to private mode and killing off part of the Film Twitter effect, but I wouldn’t have a use for it.
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Mar 19, 2025 20:51
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Summarizing a movie in a sentence or two is more fun then writing an essay about it. How much is there to say about Raped by an Angel 4: The Rapist's Union anyway?
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Mar 19, 2025 21:55
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I dunno i haven't seen it
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Mar 19, 2025 21:58
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thotsky posted:Summarizing a movie in a sentence or two is more fun then writing an essay about it. That may be true. It may also be a justification by stupid people with disordered thinking and nothing to say.
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Mar 19, 2025 22:50
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One of my brothers writes thoughtful well reasoned essays about the movies he watches. The other writes single sentence bangers. What I like is that I see both of them. My reviews are bad multiple sentence not bangers.
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Mar 19, 2025 22:55
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thotsky posted:Summarizing a movie in a sentence or two is more fun then writing an essay about it. How much is there to say about Raped by an Angel 4: The Rapist's Union anyway? The series really fell off after the 2nd, and once they started being DTV you knew it was gonna be crap. Bonus challenge: What actual franchise am I referring to? all of them
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Mar 20, 2025 00:59
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I think the only time a quirky joke review on letterboxd annoyed me was that very popular review for Emilia Perez that was just a description of the guy playing Civilisation. It's not a good film, sure, but that review's also tapping into a fairly ugly side of human discourse that doesn't need celebrating.
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Mar 20, 2025 01:59
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Open Source Idiom posted:I think the only time a quirky joke review on letterboxd annoyed me was that very popular review for Emilia Perez that was just a description of the guy playing Civilisation. It's not a good film, sure, but that review's also tapping into a fairly ugly side of human discourse that doesn't need celebrating. Lol what
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Mar 20, 2025 02:04
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https://boxd.it/8ZQQQ1
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Mar 20, 2025 02:30
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Yeah that's the one. And like, that guy's decently funny but I feel like it's a review that's trading on the author's clout and the film's infamy rather than drawing any comment from the interaction between the viewer and the actual film itself. If you're gonna poo poo on the thing poo poo on it, I don't care for the film and even if I did that doesn't matter to me, but that review's just telling people what they what to hear for clout.
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Mar 20, 2025 02:55
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idk it feels like the one place where you can write something totally unrelated and because it's attached to a particular movie, it stands as a "defiant" way to describe how much you disliked it in a way a "real" critic could never. and yeah you could post to twitter or imdb or something but time and place. letterboxd is hot right now. i see that review and im like yeah i get it, EP is bad and you used this space to write about some completely unrelated poo poo to drive home the point ::raises fist in the air:: someone i follow who follows me back (can't tell if i added from this thread or somewhere else) writes poo poo like "this was fun! i went and got a double whopper meal at bk after and did some laundry, it was a good day" or whatever the gently caress, and you know what hell yeah. to think that comments anywhere online need to be held to a certain sanctimonious standard is a little bizarre imo
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Mar 20, 2025 03:15
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Stavros Halkias's review of Casino where he elegantly takes down LB admin Brat Pitt's attempt to abuse her clout to silence him is a thing of beauty, though
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Mar 20, 2025 03:15
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ShoogaSlim posted:to think that comments anywhere online need to be held to a certain sanctimonious standard is a little bizarre imo It's not sanctimonious to say I was annoyed or to explain why.
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Mar 20, 2025 03:31
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Open Source Idiom posted:It's not sanctimonious to say I was annoyed or to explain why. Yeah, I understand that it’s a visibility thing. I had Sean Baker blocked for a while because he would lead off reviews with how he watched a thing instead of putting it in tags and then just saying vague remarks about how he liked it when the star rating he gave it was enough. I wouldn’t give a poo poo if I was just scrolling through reviews, but everything he writes gets pushed to the top, crowding out actually useful reviews on the site. But I decided to stop blocking people after a while. Felt too mean and also futile considering how many reviewers I’d have to block if I really wanted to not see everybody whose reviews I just skip past.
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Mar 20, 2025 13:20
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:That may be true. It may also be a justification by stupid people with disordered thinking and nothing to say. Do you need to have something to say in order to use a watchlog app?
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Mar 20, 2025 14:34
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There’s some people on the internet who see it as an outlet for their brilliant thoughts and insights in detail. And some people who think it’s an outlet for how brilliantly funny they think they are. Letterboxd is where those two meet.
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Mar 20, 2025 14:52
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STAC Goat posted:There’s some people on the internet who see it as an outlet for their brilliant thoughts and insights in detail. And some people who think it’s an outlet for how brilliantly funny they think they are. Letterboxd is where those two meet. Precisely, but also, the social media gaming means a lot. You know what the one-liner Letterboxd reviews look like without the hearts? The Blockbuster Video forum.
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Mar 20, 2025 15:24
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Precisely, but also, the social media gaming means a lot. You know what the one-liner Letterboxd reviews look like without the hearts? The Blockbuster Video forum. Sounds like there's a story here.
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Mar 20, 2025 15:27
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I mean, it's a story that's already been written by smarter people than me:quote:It’s a site whose premise (anyone can post reviews of movies, and the interesting and perceptive ones will rise to the top) is ruined by the social mandates shared by anyone under 55 years old (I need to take every possible opportunity to show the world how clever I am, how good I am, that I’m a star!) Yes, there’s some very insightful and perceptive reviews on Letterboxd. And I am not in fact immune to the appeal of humor. You might, I don’t know, embed a joke in a longer, more substantive review, if that’s not too crazy an idea. Some of the ones that are both insightful and perceptive also manage to be funny! I further recognize that some people go too far in the opposite direction; Letterboxd is not the place for the 10,000 word, Film Comment-style exegeses some people write. But you cannot click through more than two or three movies without finding one where the top review, and a majority of the first several pages of reviews, are all one-sentence jokes. It makes me very tired. BTW just clicked on recent movie The Monkey and of course, the top reviews are stupid jokes. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/bring-me-anything-but-jokes
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Mar 20, 2025 15:36
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I mean, it's a story that's already been written by smarter people than me: Oh lmao, no my bad. I meant what's the deal with the Blockbuster Video forums (which I'm assuming are defunct). Thanks for posting that though.
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Mar 20, 2025 15:59
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Check it out right here.
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Mar 20, 2025 16:08
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Bbv isn't really like that fwiw. Nu-bbv is just imp zone for not gaming and is a pretty chill, slow moving forum. Their movie club is fun.
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Mar 20, 2025 16:15
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I mean, it's a story that's already been written by smarter people than me: 
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Mar 20, 2025 16:16
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MacheteZombie posted:Bbv isn't really like that fwiw. Nu-bbv is just imp zone for not gaming and is a pretty chill, slow moving forum. Their movie club is fun. Well I went in there and it's definitely changed from what it was back when it started. As with many things, I am out of date. Good for them for turning it around.
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Mar 20, 2025 16:16
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Lol that article is like weaponized sour grapes. Just go back to criticker if you're having such a horrible time. 
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Mar 20, 2025 17:29
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I never really received that obvious message, maybe because when I signed up for Letterboxd in 2016 there were still more longer reviews at the tops of pages to emulate. A little weird to assume that everyone wants to be a star too. I hang out in my little corner of LB and I’m fine. What I write isn’t worthy of much attention. It is nice to get likes though, true.
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Mar 20, 2025 20:02
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I just stopped scrolling down further than my friends' reviews and it improved my experience significantly. I get new film recs from a mixture of criticker and LB's "popular with friends" section on the homepage. That provides more films than I have time to watch
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Mar 20, 2025 20:08
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Yeah, I don't get incensed about it since I mostly use it as a logging and watchlist app, but I do feel that discovery on Letterboxd has become a bit more difficult over time because of it. When the more substantive reviews were surfaced at the top of each film, it was far easier to scan through them and quickly understand whether or not a film would match my tastes. Now I often find myself having to go to All Reviews and scan through a bunch before getting the same feel. It's a minor annoyance, but it definitely feels like a downgrade for how I want the app to work. It's also not like I'm not guilty of writing a pithy single-sentence review once or twice, and yes, they got more likes than any of the stuff I put a lot more thought and time into. Plus some of the joke reviews still give you a sense of the film's qualities or vibe. It's the ones that are purely comedic and not at all informative that annoy me.
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Mar 20, 2025 21:40
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The only thing that bugs me on Letterboxd is when someone's bio is just a long-winded explanation of what each different half-star rating means for them. You don't need to explain that 3.5 stars means you liked it a little more than a 3 star film, we all know how numbers work 
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Mar 20, 2025 21:49
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Over on RYM one of my favorite things is someone with an insanely long and detailed bio explaining their rating system in extreme detail but then they have like 2k ratings (WRT that site this is a low number), and it's pretty funny to see it happen on Letterboxd but with a couple hundred ratings.
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Mar 20, 2025 21:51
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gey muckle mowser posted:The only thing that bugs me on Letterboxd is when someone's bio is just a long-winded explanation of what each different half-star rating means for them. You don't need to explain that 3.5 stars means you liked it a little more than a 3 star film, we all know how numbers work yup
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Mar 20, 2025 21:59
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fenix down posted:Lol that article is like weaponized sour grapes. Just go back to criticker if you're having such a horrible time. agreed 100%. you gotta ask yourself WHY you give a poo poo about letterboxd reviews at all even a little bit in the first place. a "real" answer might be that you wanna learn what the general vibe check is for a movie you haven't seen and let it determine whether you should watch it or not. go check the user reviews on imdb or rotten tomatoes and let me know if they're more worthwhile. also, does the score not already give you enough at-a-glance information about the "quality" of a given movie? let's say you're not using the reviews as a guide to influence what you watch. immediately you're taking a plunge into dangerous territory. it's like swimming with sharks knowing you have an open wound. i struggle to believe anyone thinks letterboxd is the exclusive place where the most brilliant film appreciators go to engage in serious discourse. why are you looking up reviews for the godfather 2, one of the most watched movies of all time, looking specifically for someone's longform take you've never considered before? for me, LB works bc it's a crossroads between casual movie audiences and film buffs. you don't only get inundated with mass market slop and, on the flip side, you don't only see prestigious arthouse stuff take center stage while leaving out the stuff does have cultural significance. consider this: dogville, a 100-year-long movie by lars von trier that's just actors pretending to walk through doors and is only available to watch on mubi of all places, has a 4.2 average rating. anything over a 4 is generally pretty tough to land on for most movies. so that right there proves the LB has credibility for the serious film fans. then again, barbie and la la land are among the top most logged movies on the entire app. in closing: LB is for everyone and that's good. the reviews reflect that, and you're probably even looking at them for the "wrong" reason (i'm happy to debate that) so really it shouldn't be seen as rendering the service completely unusable.
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Mar 20, 2025 23:03
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hmm yes but what about trakt
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Mar 20, 2025 23:08
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Letterboxd is serious business. I will die on this hill and this Freddie deBoer guy will cradle me in his arms and whisper me quotes from Mark Kermode's most outraged reviews as I shuffle off this mortal coil.
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Mar 20, 2025 23:12
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Darthemed posted:hmm yes but what about trakt Pissed off the entire userbase and are likely in a death spiral.
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Mar 20, 2025 23:13
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I'm guilty of being annoyed by all the quippy one liner reviews when I first started using the site but now I don't even look at the review section of a movie until after I've watched it. Then I give the top reviews a quick look, maybe the quippy joke review will be pretty funny, maybe it'll be an actually good in depth review (action/Hong Kong stuff generally seems to and that's what I've been binging lately), and then I go to friends reviews and read those. LB owns, I enjoy checking it throughout the work day and reading what people thought about what I just saw.
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Mar 20, 2025 23:17
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ShoogaSlim posted:also, does the score not already give you enough at-a-glance information about the "quality" of a given movie? Absolutely not. Not all "quality" is equivalent. By that metric, a blandly mediocre film, an interesting failure, and a firing-on-all-cylinders piece of schlock could all have the exact same rating, or even spread of ratings. I don't care about how "good" a movie is, I care about whether it matches my tastes and sensibilities. I love tons of low-rated stuff because it hits all the notes I care most about. If I read a 2.5 star review that says "This feels like it was made by amateurs but it has some really cool ideas and some inventive effects" that might be a 4.5 star movie for me. A star rating gives you a sense of how much it was enjoyed on average, not why the people who enjoyed it enjoyed it. I really couldn't care less about averages.
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Mar 20, 2025 23:20
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gey muckle mowser posted:The only thing that bugs me on Letterboxd is when someone's bio is just a long-winded explanation of what each different half-star rating means for them. You don't need to explain that 3.5 stars means you liked it a little more than a 3 star film, we all know how numbers work I also hate this, but lovingly. It feels so 2000-era, like those little bars people would put in signature on forum websites for all their favorite media/hobbies. Absolutely no one cares how you define your star ratings and no one ever will. It's so self-grandizing to feel like anyone is going to respect you more because you have a "well defined" very serious criteria for how you rate stuff. Or to believe all ratings are anything more than a vibe check. Your ratings are letters you're writing to yourself, no one else gives a toot. Bless them but also it's a red flag & I'm probably not following an account that does that.
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Mar 20, 2025 23:26
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