Trying out Letterboxd~

March 3, 2014 — 2 Comments

In a state of MUBI panic, I opened a Letterboxd account.

amy-letterboxd

Okay, I did more than just try it out. I spent a few couple of hours coordinating my rating from both IMDb and MUBI, and I’m pretty much done with anything that’s not between 2000-2009. With top ratings from 2010-2012 and all ratings from 2013.

I still miss Favorite Cast Members and Directors and lists from MUBI. Also a “favorite” seems to be quite different to “a like” in my lexicon.

The Good

The movie database seems to be a lot more complete than MUBI, for sure, despite some missing titles of lesser known *cough* cinematic parts of the world. Namely: I haven’t been able to locate some Peruvian films. In terms of data, IMDb is still the go-to place on movie information despite its lack of accurate information on Asian films (for that go to Asian Wiki).

But it’s pretty okay.

I also like that you can tag films if you add them to your watch diary, and that you can point out whether it’s a new watch or a re-watch, and point exactly when you watched it. I’m using tags instead of lists because they’re much simpler to keep and sort. Classic Films, Contemporary Classics, and Top Flicks About Chicks, among others.

You also get a meter of how much of someone’s filmography you’ve watched, fade titles that you’ve already seen; you also get to sort titles by name, date of release, rating, film length, popularity and when you added it to your profile.

It also tracks “x number of films seen this year.”

The Bad

It’s boring. The only customization that you get is your avatar, which is grabbed from your gravatar account (or twitter, if it’s linked), and your biography text. You can’t shift (or get rid of) modules, and you only get to list four favorite films.

Like I said above, “liking a film” is completely different to have “a favorite film,” so there are differences in my MUBI and Letterboxd profiles. But it, at least, allows half stars… even if I’m already spoiled for quarter stars.

I really REALLY miss the fact that you can’t favorite actors or directors, in a way that you can get newly added films into your activity feed.

The Ugly

Gross film data consolidation (misses and repeats), film credits and separate profiles for stars and crew of one personality. You can’t do anything about Zhao Wei or Zhang Yimou having two pages for the films they’ve starred in or the ones they’ve made, but if you could be willing to add missing films or tell them about their repeat titles or missing credits, you’d have to have a TMDb account.

GROSS. At least MUBI and Flixster had their own forms.

In terms of user generated databases input, I’ve sort of grown accustomed to Xiami’s form. In Xiami, you can simply fill their form to add an artist by their category (male solo from west, female solo from china, group from japan, etc), their origin, name (in english and original alphabet), biography and an image… all accompanied with a source.

For albums input it gets a little bit more complicated, but you get the drift. After submission, it takes a while to get processed and get your entry approved depending on how famous/popular your new entry is.

So if you’re on it, you can follow me. :)

2 responses to Trying out Letterboxd~

  1. There are rumors that MUBI will return to its old form in about a month. Also, you can access your lists by going to your profile and then typing “/lists” after the address. Same with other things that used to be on your profile.

    • Yeah, they’ve promised me they will bring back cast and director pages, at least. But it’s suchhhh bother to add new films to list this way. I’m still using MUBI, just on the side Letterboxd. On newer non-American/European releases, I’ve been more active in Letterboxd.

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