![]() ![]() Most people either stumbled upon it themselves or had it recommended to them by a friend, and its growth to 2.5 million users (1 million of them active) over the past eight years has been slow and organic. There was never a time when its presence was trumpeted to the world, no event or scandal that suddenly drew attention to it or led to an eye-catching spike in membership. “Social film discovery” is how the homepage labels it-a phrase that’s in keeping with the no-frills, unassuming nature of the site.įor as long as users have trickled onto it, Letterboxd has seemed less like a dot-com than a utility-something that is simply on the internet, changing so incrementally that it never appears to have changed at all. Letterboxd is a social media site that opens up those habits to public scrutiny, but the trade-off is that it also functions as a vast warehouse of opinion and hard data, an opportunity both to survey reactions to popular films and head down various rabbit holes. The common denominator among Letterboxd users tends to be a compulsion to log and order the things they’ve seen, which many of them were already doing using spreadsheets or pen and paper. The other word was “Lists.” Those were the building blocks of the service, and they’re almost embarrassingly true to how the cinephile mind works to compartmentalize the films that pass through it. “Diary” was one of the words Matthew Buchanan focused on when he and his cofounder, Karl von Randow, were conceiving Letterboxd in the years before it launched in 2011. For me, the movies and my life really intersect.” “Just having something that charts your life. “The diary aspect is my favorite part of it,” says Vicino. ![]() That Fight Club review is a reflection of how our understanding of art can change as we do, reshaped by our own experiences or by the perspective of others, or how it settles in the culture. ![]() “I don’t necessarily agree with a lot of the stuff I said in 2016,” she says, but the habit of logging titles and reviews, creating what the service calls a “Diary,” has allowed her to track her evolution as a moviegoer-and, to some extent, as a human being. Vicino has been on Letterboxd since she was 19, when she had a developing passion for movies and wanted to keep track of everything she watched. And it’s the type of writing that could have a home only on Letterboxd: a casual, personal shorthand that’s aimed squarely at the cognoscenti. Yet this 183-word nugget perfectly captures the film’s turbulent two decades in the culture, where it’s been celebrated as a barometer of masculine outrage and vilified as an instigator of the same. (If you’re posting directly to the site, you have to put in the HTML code yourself.) There aren’t even periods. Vicino writes a repertory column for the Willamette Week, an alt-weekly in Portland, but her entry for Fight Club dispenses with the formalities. It was authored by Mia Vicino, a 24-year-old from Los Angeles who posts under the handle Brat Pitt. One of the most popular reviews ever written on Letterboxd, a social media site for cinephiles, was posted about David Fincher’s Fight Club in early 2018. ![]()
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