IAMT #4: In a Movie Theater

weekend project of moving my movie review catalog to Letterboxd

My Letterboxd

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.

my unkempt google sheet of reviews

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.

1. 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

2. 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