This wouldn’t be a movie theater without a little discussion of films, right? Given, the name of this substack, movies were a major part of my growing up; they’re a fantastic medium to share ideas with others. Being able to talk with someone about a film they loved is incredibly rewarding. Whether it be specific plot devices and clichés they may have enjoyed or a theme they resonated with, there are seemingly infinite conversation branches that can stem from a singular topic.
Watching films on my own has been an important proponent of my self-growth. Discovering a new movie when you need it rarely happens but its cathartic when it does. For example, when I was having friendship ails and bouts of self-loathing, I watched “A Silent Voice” for the first time alone in theaters. Ugly crying in public never felt so good.
All this to say, ever since 2021, I’ve kept a running log of movies I had seen along with an informal review. This was tucked away in a Notion page that progressively got more mismanaged with every entry. I converted to Google sheets at around ~50 entries but now, at a whopping ~130 films and plenty of encouragement from a friend, I decided I need to reduce the overhead of managing my movie reviews. This is where Letterboxd comes in.
Letterboxd is a movie review site mostly composed of amateur reviewers. Thankfully, they have a route for people like me who kept their own lists and want to import it into Letterboxd. Their importer takes various valid file types and the specific fields/formatting are specified here.
Since my categories were different from what the importer asks for, after I exported my ‘media-queue’ to .csv, I wrote a quick Python script using the Pandas library to rename and reformat the columns. After finagling with the date/time formatting for a bit, I had a new .csv file to import to Letterboxd.
And now my Letterboxd is populated!
I have two gripes with it right now after some light usage.
I hate that it’s a 5-star rating scale in increments of .5. It’s essentially just 1–10 integers only. Previously, I would rate from 1-10 in increments .1 which gave me a high level of granularity. I’ve been wondering if it’s too pretentious (how would I tell between a .1 difference) but it just intuitively feels right. I know some people agree and circumvent this by adding their real rating in their written review
There are missing some major TV show entries like “The Bear”. I believe this is somewhat intentional since they’re trying to stick to films, but there are plenty of K-dramas and a few one-off TV shows in their catalog.
Otherwise, I love it and I think it’ll save me a lot of time. This past year has been slow for my movie consumption so far, but it’s always an ebb and flow.
More movie reviews to come.
- chris
It’s been difficult to find movies that are compelling to me nowadays, but just watched the Social Network for the first time based on your review and it was great! Will definitely be coming back to this page for more recs:)
Letterboxd is a movie review site MOSTLY composed of amateur reviewers... mostly...