Letterboxd: We Set Up Our Accounts and Picked Our Favorite Films

We’re all rookies on the Letterboxd site, but it seems to be a social networking website and app for movies. It reminds me of Goodreads but for films. We all chose our four favorite movies, found some people to follow, discovered some new movies, and looked for one more thing to do on the site. 

Here’s a few things I learned about Letterboxd: 

1. Headquarters are in Auckland, New Zealand
2. Started in Oct of 2011, so that’s over 15 years ago 
3. Over 30 million users 
4. Some notable account users from Wikipedia: Martin Scorsese, Charli XCX, Ed Sheeran, Francis Ford Coppola, and Michael Mann
5. From Wikipedia: The “Four Favorites” feature, which allows members to pin four films to the top of their profile, has become a prominent element of film publicity. Letterboxd’s editorial team conducts red carpet and junket interviews in which filmmakers, actors, and celebrities are asked to name their four favorite films.

We’re going to start by trying to guess each other’s four favorite films. Anne, what do you say we try and guess Izzy’s first? 

• My Izzy guesses: Sing Street, Beautiful Boy, Notting Hill, Moonrise Kingdom 

• My Anne guesses: 2001 A Space Odyssey, Bridesmaids, Best in Show, The Dark Knight 

What films were tough for me to leave out? 

1. Hoosiers. I worried it was too on the nose? 
2. Pulp Fiction. Seems stereotypical. 
3. Good Will Hunting 
4. Sinners 
5. The Royal Tenenbaums 
6. Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt 

There’s an ability to communicate with movie posters sort of like some people do with emojis. I like a movie podcast called The Big Picture and one of its hosts, Sean Fennessy, signaled his distaste for the show’s new partnership with Netflix with this post:  

I didn’t know the $$$ film. I think it is this:

• $, also known as Dollar$, Dollars or $ (Dollars), and in the UK as The Heist, is a 1971 American heist comedy film starring Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn

Find some people to follow. You can search names. You can find people who wrote about movies that interest you. Who did you follow? 

• Sean Fennessey. He has To Die For, Something weird’s on the air, Bamboozled, and Magnolia on his page. 
• Patrick Willems. I discovered him through his review of Air. I noticed he is followed by Sean. 

Figure out a way to discover a few movies you never heard of that look good. 

1. Find at least one “recent story” and read or watch it. Tell us about it. 

• I read a short article titled “Ben Affleck Knew He Had to Direct Animals.” Oh, it’s a summary of an article. 
• From the summary: The film follows Los Angeles mayoral candidate Mark Kimball (Affleck), whose campaign is upended when he and his wife Abigail (Kerry Washington) get a late-night phone call from a man claiming to have kidnapped his son.
• It links me to something called Tudum. It’s the script of an interview. 
• Affleck said this in the article about Los Angeles: I wanted to make a story that is really true to all of the disparate aspects of this city. It’s like a mosaic. If you’re on one of the tiles, it looks like that tile, but it’s adjacent to something that’s different from it, whether it’s socioeconomically, ethnically, culturally, or linguistically. This is a city where at least as many people speak Spanish as speak English. The movie moves into Spanish-language storytelling, not because it’s a Spanish story or an English story, but because those languages exist in LA, often side by side.

2. Do one more thing on Letterboxd. Tell us what you did. 

• I added Salesman to my watchlist. (it had a “play” button next to it on my list and took me right to our HBO account to watch)
• I downloaded the app and hope to keep adding films to my watchlist and I hear about them. 
• Reviewed Blackberry. 

Click here to check out and possibly connect with Bill on Letterboxd. 

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