So, I started a Letterboxd account in May. And as I logged films, I started figuring out how I wanted my page to function.
I began by logging every single film I've watched, even going back to some movies I saw when I was a kid. Like, I added Agent Cody Banks, which is also the movie I've seen the most in theaters. Nine times, thanks to the time it was cool to have your birthday party at the movie theater, and a sister who wanted to see it a couple times.
Then when figuring out the diary, I tried to remember the dates of movies I had watched before I set it up to see if I could get a clearer picture, but I couldn't, which explains why it looks like I only watched two movies in March and April. They just happened to be the only movies I saw in theaters, and I had the ticket information. One of my favorite things about the diary is not just seeing what I watched this year, but the spread of genre and decade. At the time of writing, the earliest movie I had seen was Marcel the Shell with Shoes On when it came out in theaters and the oldest is The Little Foxes with Bette Davis from 1941.
A thing I decided to do was not add television shows, with one exception being made for The Last Movie Stars, the docuseries about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. They deserve to be logged. But I'm not gonna add tv, because I really think Letterboxd works best for tracking your cinematic exploits. I also made a rule for documentaries where I would log them, but not put a rating. I don't know why I decided that, but I did. Probably because, while a lot are entertaining, I don't feel right ranking something that's meant to inform.
Now, reviewing, I live up to the whims of the day. Sometimes it'll be a blurb, some a long winded scribe, some maybe nothing. Who's to say how I feel after I watch a thing, so I'll just leave it up to the moment to decide if and how I review something.
The only thing I haven't figured out is what to do with the 'like' feature. Because that really means what are your favorite movies, and I've never been good at making those lists, so I'm just gonna leave that one unused for now. Maybe one day I'll bite the bullet and pick my favorites, but today is not that day.
That's my explanation for how my Letterboxd will function. Really the only reason I did this blog post was for me to make it make sense to myself. And I think I did that.
