Here Comes Letterboxd

Filmschoolrejects was offering invitations to Letterboxd, the new movie watching social networking site for film fans. They were plugging it pretty enthusiastically, so I figured I'd give it a look, and asked for a beta invitation. I'm always looking for new movie sites to help me organize my film watching activity, since I'm one of those people who go through a ton of movies. Currently, I only keep a very informal film journal with basic identifying information for each film I watch, plus a line or two of notes. I don't keep track of the specific dates I watched anything, which turned out to be a bit of a problem when I started inputting my recent watch history into Letterboxd.

You can use the Letterboxd interface for several different things, but one of the major functions is creating a film diary. Fortunately, most of the movies I was watching were through Hulu, since I'm in the middle of another one of my Criterion Collection benders, so the Hulu service had kept track of all the movies I'd watched in the last month. Also, I use the movie checklist site Icheckmovies, which I update fairly regularly, so between those two sites and my own records I was able to work out the schedule of what which movies I'd watched on which days during the month of June. It was gratifying to note that the Letterboxd database recognized every single film I inputted, including several older French and Japanese films, even though I had to try alternate titles in a few cases.

I like the user interface, which represents individual movies using icons of their movie posters. This makes for nifty looking displays of lists, recently watched movies, and other data arrangements. However, I did run into a couple of cases with the older and upcoming films where posters were not available, leaving only a sad-looking transparent icon with the film's title as a placeholder. Also, for some lengthy lists, like when you're searching for films by director, it would help to have a more condensed list view available. Navigation isn't very intuitive and takes some effort to sort out. For instance, the top menu has a tab for "Films," which takes you into a list of new films to browse. To get to the films that you've told Letterboxd you've watched, you have to go to your own user menu and select the "Films" option listed there. Only then can you access your film diary and ratings from the next sub-menu that comes up on that page.

When you add a film that you've watched, a little window pops up giving you the option to note the date you watched it, whether you want to put it in your favorites list, what rating out of five stars it should get, what tags you'd like to create for it, and there's also some handy text space for a review or notes. It's all very thoughtfully conceived and easy to use, but after I pressed save and clicked away to another part of the site, it took me a very long time to figure out how to get back to that little window again. Click on a title in any of your lists or recently watched streams, and it takes you to the main information page for the film, not the page where you input data. Don't add a date, and a film won't show up on several of your "watched films" pages at all, until you go back and fix it.

Now Letterboxd is supposed to be a social network, and the site wants you to interact with the other users. They encourage you to "follow" other people, to "like" and comment on each others' reviews of movies, and to send out invitations to the site to your friends (I've still got all three of mine, if anyone would like them). However what the site is missing, which is also what I think other sites like Icheckmovies are sorely missing, are groups and forums. Yes, I know that forums are hard work because they need moderating and oversight, but I'm not seeing many spaces on Letterboxd for users to really get geeky with each other and have discussions about movies that would extend beyond one-on-one conversations. And that's the biggest thing I'd really like out of a new movie site right now, especially one that's billing itself as a social networking movie site.

Of course, the Letterboxd is still in beta so there's still plenty of time for some of these issues to be worked out. I think it could turn out to be pretty valuable tool for organizing your film watching experience, but as with all of these movie sites, your experience really all depends on how much effort you're willing to put into it. I'll keep up my new little film journal on the site for a while, and see what develops. But for now, I think Letterboxd is very much a work in progress.
---