'Rediculous' Customer & Critic Reviews

[J Wilson]

I'm more shocked that he's seen over 100+ films in the year already when we haven't even reached the end of the first month!

My guess is he hasn't, he just skims other reviews and cobbles together keywords for his own "reviews." Unless you're independently wealthy and otherwise have no life, who has time to watch up to five films a day?

[therewillbeblus]

Unless you're independently wealthy and otherwise have no life, who has time to watch up to five films a day?

I don't think that's a fair assessment. People can have full lives and not be wealthy but log a significant amount of movies for a variety of reasons: they don't have families, work from home, have a profession with significant downtime or with 'busy seasons' and more spacious times of year, complete healthy activities of daily living like exercise for extended periods of time in front of their TV, have odd sleep schedules or difficulty sleeping, are students with irregular schedules, etc. If you consider short films, it's even more understandable, especially when people binge discs filled with shorts. Your diagnoses come off as pat and dismissive.

[MongooseCmr]

No it’s weird. If anything it’s weird to be such a motivated person and yet devote all that energy to watching movies. 5 a day is 7.5 hours at a minimum! That’s a full time job on top of your actual job, tv on nonstop all day, missing sleep, no other distractions ever. Or they just leave movies on and aren’t actually paying attention.

[knives]

I know I watch movies often when working. They’re helpful for my lesson planning. While I don’t have the energy to watch five features a day, I could probably fit it into my schedule between lesson planning, meals, laid back hanging out with family, and the occasional more academic viewing. For example, I’m sure this guy was for real and also managed a happy life.

[therewillbeblus]

It's weird to call something weird just because it doesn't fit with your own preferred motivations and lifestyle. I'm similar to knives - I have a very busy professional and personal life, and yet I typically get through a lot of features during the work week because of the space I work in, the structure of my day, and process by which I ingest films. I also wouldn't assume someone is cramming five every day necessarily. Days go by where I watch nothing, and then a free day might come about when I get more in, or go through a series of shorts, and that averages out to a higher number per day. It's really strange to pass judgment and assume someone is either dropping everything or not paying attention. Maybe you can't multitask but different people have different strengths and preferred methods to decompress throughout their day. I know it helps me relieve tension to watch a short or small chunks of a film between clients.

[Michael Kerpan]

All I know is that I am retired and I find watching (and commenting on -- briefly) 6 (or so) 23 minute anime episodes can be a chore. Watching and reviewing 5 features is something I can't imagine doing. (I found long ago
that I couldn't really fairly assess more than 2 films in a day -- and even that required ideal circumstances).

[therewillbeblus]

I just think that if we accept that all people are different and have different strategies, introvert/extrovert spectrum needs, preferred ways of consuming media in addition to holding different opinions on the value of spending one's time, it says way more about you to judge another using your own self as the definition of "normal" than it does about that person's viewing habits informing objective diagnostics about them, even if they log ten movies a day on LB

[MichaelB]

For what it's worth, I've seen a grand total of three features this year from beginning to end at normal playback speed.

But that may not be entirely unrelated to what I do for a living, which is why I generally curl up with a book in the evening.

[Mr Sausage]

For what it's worth, I've seen a grand total of three features this year from beginning to end at normal playback speed.

But that may not be entirely unrelated to what I do for a living, which is why I generally curl up with a book in the evening.

Reminds me of one time in college, I asked a renowned Miltonist when was the last time he actually sat down and read Paradise Lost from beginning to end, and he had no idea. He said he kept meaning to do it one day. Working in or with a medium kinda changes your relationship with it.

And 5 films a day is a lot.

[tenia]

The issue here is that he's consistently logging that many movies, at times up to 7 per day, only to post reviews that are so poor that they don't require to have seen the movies.
I can understand watching that many movies at times.
I can imagine managing to watch 4 to 7 movies per day, every day, for weeks.
But this indeed just looks like spamming letterboxd, and I can definitely imagind taking an hour for this rather than being that dedicated to watching movies and reviewing them on letterboxd but only ending up with such reviews. I mean : he could just log scores and be done with it.

I actually wonder how it's done because those adjectives often aren't even consistent with each other on a given movie, but are always written in alphabetical order, which would definitely fit with something automated.

[therewillbeblus]

This prompts a thought experiment. For context, I don't play video games. I stopped when I was in eighth grade, gave away my PS2, and never really looked back, because I found myself spending too many hours playing and feeling gross about it. Subjectively, I think actively engaging in this type of media for the equivalent of even three short film runtimes, in the immersive way that a video game demands, is a lot. Too much. The thought of doing it for even a few hours overwhelms and disturbs me. For me, films are different. Like knives, I have stuff on in the background sometimes, as I work and exercise and try to relax between sessions. It's helpful to zone out. But when I'm actively paying attention, eyes glued to the screen without distraction, I probably couldn't get through that many unless I'm sick and couchridden- though still, there's something passive about most instances of film-watching for me. Like listening to music, I'm paying attention but also charging the reserves of my energy; not sensationally heightened like when I play simple online games with kids in therapy sessions, where the adrenaline connected to even mild competition, or rote mechanics subject to consequence by external actions intruding on my plans in the game, are noticeable for me at even small levels. It feels exhausting.

So I would ask those members who I know are avid gamers: how often do you spend playing a video game when you first get it, or when you hit a stride in the story, or on a weekend day with little going on? Do you also watch movies on those days, or read or consume other media? At the end of the day, actively engaging in media consumption is what we're talking about. It's subjective to judge the value of being eclectic, but the practice of diversifying between books, movies, YT videos, internet research, reading news articles, podcasts, video games, etc., or devoting your time and energy to one over others, is meaningless to assign an objective utility. If the measurements of this being "a lot" or "too much" indicates that one should spend X amount of time out in the world each day socially, or doing non-media related things like conversing or playing games or spending time with a loved one, fine. But I think plenty of people are able to do all those things (I know I am) and also make time for significant media consumption. It's worth recognizing that everyone has their own needs to self-soothe, and there's no objectively "healthy" parameters for how much time one allots to get what they need. Heavily-leaning introverts may need more time, and while a few movies-a-day looks like a lot, maybe that amount of down time (whether spread across music, video games, movies, books, texting, or just monopolizing one activity) is what some people need to recharge to go fishing all weekend or hang out in swarmed group settings or hit those heavily-populated and loud community exercise classes. Or some of us can look at news articles and communicate and accomplish other tasks while a movie is on in the background during the day, in a way that gamers may not be able to do with a more locked-in venture.

I have my own subjective judgments around video games, but I would never declare it to be objectively excessive or pathetic to allot as much time as most people I know do to that activity, especially if those individuals play video games instead of watching as many movies or reading or listening to music, when they manage media consumption. I have some friends who are always on their phones when at home alone, as well as during transitions and occasionally in social situations, and must be logging way more hours than a few movies-a-days-worth just from that alone. Is that less pathetic? Because I'm not glued to my phone, what do I win? I do think the active/passive nature of engaging with media (i.e. how much attention and energy we're putting into it) is what everyone is assessing differently here, but that seems like a more worthwhile conversation vs. blanket judgment on number of movies logged. I imagine that some people consume media, whether video games or even movies, in a completely opposite way than I do -pursuing a stimulation that I might be too sensitive to, and vice versa. My partner is an extrovert who goes to between two and three exercise classes each day and can barely sit still for a movie. Now, obviously exercising is healthier than sitting on a couch, but there's also such a thing as overdoing it there, and to me it's "a lot" and "weird" and I could see some people hearing that and incorrectly assuming such a person must be "independently wealthy and otherwise have no life" as to devote that much time to community classes every day (with travel time, not that far off from three-four films a day...) - but she requires a different degree and kind of stimulation than I do to restore her energy. But maybe I should project my experience onto hers and tell her what she's doing is wrong. That's probably appropriate and will go well and isn't myopic at all

[soundchaser]

This a rhetorical question? Because I can tell you I've put 53 hours into Tactics Ogre: Reborn this year -- around the equivalent of a movie a day. (I have obviously not been watching a movie a day in addition to this and other life stuff, and what I have watched has been largely communal - which I'm trying to do more of this year.)

[therewillbeblus]

I'm more asking this as a way to facilitate a broader definition of media consumption to counter snap-judgments at allocating attention into one medium. I gather that some people see multiple LB loggings a day and become shocked because they have more eclectic breakdowns of how they consume media, or maybe engage in one activity at a time rather than multitask, and instinctually assume other people are also engaging in the same diversity of mediums in addition to watching so many movies, when that may not be the case. But if someone calculated the time they spend on their phones, playing video games, reading news, listening to music, watching movies, etc., it might come out closer to the time that some people are devoting entirely to just movies (or multitasking some of these over a movie) than they might initially consider. I'm also not on any social media and have no idea what the avg amount of time spent on those platforms is these days, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was multi-movie length for some

I think one's personal schedule plays a big role in this though. My hours are all over the place and there isn't a whole lot to do between gaps in my sessions, so some days I have no time and others I watch a movie or two during the day, depending on the workload and timing. Occasionally I watch a movie with my partner at night, and after she goes to bed I almost always wind down with one. This isn't a daily thing- sometimes there's none or one, and sometimes there's none for days on end (and certainly weekends are different), but I still manage to stay actively connected in my recovery group, attend meetings, run errands, participate in the community, work out daily, and connect socially with at least three people a day by phone or face to face as a personal rule. It's busy, but doesn't feel overwhelming and depending on the day it can be done with multiple movies to boot

[Mr Sausage]

In gaming culture, putting in only 8 hours a day on a game gets you called a filthy casual.

[Never Cursed]

Unless there's one specific game (almost always single-player) that's drawn me into it and become something of a tiny fixation, I only play games for about an hour a day before I get tired of them. They make me feel existential now in a way that movies don't, so I've sort of been drawn away from them in the past year (though I played more in undergrad and in high school). Honestly the bigger distraction for me is Youtube and Twitter in terms of sheer minutes wasted per day. The two games in the past year that have been exceptions to this are Disco Elysium and Elden Ring (the latter a lot more than the former - I spent about eighty hours on that over the course of around two months last year, though I did basically everything there is to do in that monster of a game).

When I did play games for entire days on end in high school, it was usually in a sort of ping-pong structure: I had a multiplayer game (say, Counter-Strike) that I knew I could always turn on and have a somewhat enjoyable experience with, while also having some single-player game that I was trying to get through and that I knew I was more interested in. If I played games for six hours straight that day, what would happen is I'd play, say, 2 hours of the single-player game, get bored, switch to the multiplayer game, get bored or annoyed, and then switch back to the single-player game. This was usually during weekends; weeknight play depended on how much work I had to do when I got home (though I definitely stole from sleep more than a little to play).

Right now, I'm not doing much of either gaming or watching movies thanks to my grad school schedule, though I'm gonna try to make it to some rep screenings this weekend (rather than do anything in the way of playing games). Most of my media consumption currently is for that - the syllabi for this coming week demands that I read four books and seriously engage with each (and one of them is Das Kapital, Vol. I, so not exactly light and fluffy faire either). If I had more free time, I would almost certainly allocate it towards movies, though.

If this is a lead-in to you trying out a video game, I'd recommend looking at Disco Elysium for you, TWBB, if your computer can run it. It's a sort of detective mystery with some fantastical and psychological elements that is as much a literary work as a game (it has no muscle memory or reflex requirements whatsoever, and it's paced well enough that I never felt the need to play it for insanely long stretches, just because so much of the "payoffs" of it were listening to its lengthy and elegant conversations and internal monologues). I figure you might like its strange attempt to adapt the IFS model of psychology into a (rather lengthy) interactive experience. Maybe look at the opening moments on YouTube?

[Mr Sausage]

What are you studying in grad school, Never Cursed?

(I also don't play video games much these days in order to focus on reading, but luckily none of that reading is fucking Das Kapital)

[soundchaser]

I tried reading Das Kapital alongside a series of podcasts by David Harvey and made it through exactly one before deciding life was too short.

Which is to say, whatever our non-movie pursuits, Never Cursed may have the worst one right now.

(EDIT: Speaking of podcasts, there's a hobby that I've resigned myself to never fully understanding.)

[knives]

I’ve taken to listening to podcasts in the car, but basically only academic ones. The most popular ones are all really annoying to me.

[Never Cursed]

What are you studying in grad school, Never Cursed?

I'm doing a History MA split between two institutions, one in NYC and one in London (next year). I'm working on an economic history project regarding the early moments of British colonization of the Americas - ask me again in like three months and I'll have a coherent answer as to what the details of that are.

All that is to say that I hope you feel the relief I do when a log of mine finally pops up on Letterboxd! (Or when the longer thing I've been writing for this forum finally gets done)

[therewillbeblus]

I’ve taken to listening to podcasts in the car

I was thinking about this as well - when I commuted to grad school and was placed in community-based internships driving around for house visits in inner-city Boston neighborhoods all day between clients, I listened to a lot of podcasts, and would finish whatever I was listening to while cooking or exercising later on. Many of these are hours(and hours)-long (sometimes I wonder if devout podcast enthusiasts would enjoy Out 1), and I guess I don't see a difference between doing that and putting on movies between or during things while working from home, without that dead time traveling. I have a client who doesn't listen to music, but listens to podcasts all day, and has the time to raise a family, enjoy hobbies, be social, work a recovery program, etc. I think this idea people have brought here that you're either not paying attention or fully engaged doesn't click unless you apply the same logic to all media. Personally, it's harder for me to listen to a podcast while doing work than a movie with both visual and audio cues; I can't concentrate and need to rewind the podcast over and over. I can do music, while others can't listen to music or can't do music with lyrics- once I discovered that jazz helped me enter a groove in relentless studying in undergrad, I never turned back. Everyone is different in terms of what works or doesn't for them, what's preferred or a grievance, and it seems silly to extrapolate one's own preferences into some definitive measurement of what's acceptable. Not saying it's healthy, but most teenagers I work with probably spend more time on social media than that guy does watching and logging movies on LB, and plenty of them have pretty active social lives in addition to attending school and participating in extracurriculars

If this is a lead-in to you trying out a video game, I'd recommend looking at Disco Elysium for you, TWBB, if your computer can run it. It's a sort of detective mystery with some fantastical and psychological elements that is as much a literary work as a game (it has no muscle memory or reflex requirements whatsoever, and it's paced well enough that I never felt the need to play it for insanely long stretches, just because so much of the "payoffs" of it were listening to its lengthy and elegant conversations and internal monologues). I figure you might like its strange attempt to adapt the IFS model of psychology into a (rather lengthy) interactive experience. Maybe look at the opening moments on YouTube?

You actually recommended this to me a while ago, and it's the closest anyone came to convincing me to bite the bullet and return to the system. It sounds right up my alley, and I've actually talked about it with clients of mine who are avid gamers and respond well to IFS work in therapy. At least one took the recommendation and found it to be a helpful tool in acclimating to the language and therapy style- so I appreciate the rec (and I'm sure he/they does as well!) Currently I'm struggling to make room for reading in my leisure time, but maybe one of these days..

[J Wilson]

This prompts a thought experiment. For context, I don't play video games. I stopped when I was in eighth grade, gave away my PS2, and never really looked back, because I found myself spending too many hours playing and feeling gross about it. Subjectively, I think actively engaging in this type of media for the equivalent of even three short film runtimes, in the immersive way that a video game demands, is a lot. Too much. The thought of doing it for even a few hours overwhelms and disturbs me. For me, films are different. Like knives, I have stuff on in the background sometimes, as I work and exercise and try to relax between sessions. It's helpful to zone out. But when I'm actively paying attention, eyes glued to the screen without distraction, I probably couldn't get through that many unless I'm sick and couchridden- though still, there's something passive about most instances of film-watching for me. Like listening to music, I'm paying attention but also charging the reserves of my energy; not sensationally heightened like when I play simple online games with kids in therapy sessions, where the adrenaline connected to even mild competition, or rote mechanics subject to consequence by external actions intruding on my plans in the game, are noticeable for me at even small levels. It feels exhausting.

So I would ask those members who I know are avid gamers: how often do you spend playing a video game when you first get it, or when you hit a stride in the story, or on a weekend day with little going on? Do you also watch movies on those days, or read or consume other media? At the end of the day, actively engaging in media consumption is what we're talking about. It's subjective to judge the value of being eclectic, but the practice of diversifying between books, movies, YT videos, internet research, reading news articles, podcasts, video games, etc., or devoting your time and energy to one over others, is meaningless to assign an objective utility. If the measurements of this being "a lot" or "too much" indicates that one should spend X amount of time out in the world each day socially, or doing non-media related things like conversing or playing games or spending time with a loved one, fine. But I think plenty of people are able to do all those things (I know I am) and also make time for significant media consumption. It's worth recognizing that everyone has their own needs to self-soothe, and there's no objectively "healthy" parameters for how much time one allots to get what they need. Heavily-leaning introverts may need more time, and while a few movies-a-day looks like a lot, maybe that amount of down time (whether spread across music, video games, movies, books, texting, or just monopolizing one activity) is what some people need to recharge to go fishing all weekend or hang out in swarmed group settings or hit those heavily-populated and loud community exercise classes. Or some of us can look at news articles and communicate and accomplish other tasks while a movie is on in the background during the day, in a way that gamers may not be able to do with a more locked-in venture.

I have my own subjective judgments around video games, but I would never declare it to be objectively excessive or pathetic to allot as much time as most people I know do to that activity, especially if those individuals play video games instead of watching as many movies or reading or listening to music, when they manage media consumption. I have some friends who are always on their phones when at home alone, as well as during transitions and occasionally in social situations, and must be logging way more hours than a few movies-a-days-worth just from that alone. Is that less pathetic? Because I'm not glued to my phone, what do I win? I do think the active/passive nature of engaging with media (i.e. how much attention and energy we're putting into it) is what everyone is assessing differently here, but that seems like a more worthwhile conversation vs. blanket judgment on number of movies logged. I imagine that some people consume media, whether video games or even movies, in a completely opposite way than I do -pursuing a stimulation that I might be too sensitive to, and vice versa. My partner is an extrovert who goes to between two and three exercise classes each day and can barely sit still for a movie. Now, obviously exercising is healthier than sitting on a couch, but there's also such a thing as overdoing it there, and to me it's "a lot" and "weird" and I could see some people hearing that and incorrectly assuming such a person must be "independently wealthy and otherwise have no life" as to devote that much time to community classes every day (with travel time, not that far off from three-four films a day...) - but she requires a different degree and kind of stimulation than I do to restore her energy. But maybe I should project my experience onto hers and tell her what she's doing is wrong. That's probably appropriate and will go well and isn't myopic at all

I think you've blown an admittedly offhand comment way out of proportion. I should have made clear that my comment was intended to be more on the unlikeliness of this behavior, rather than any judgment of whether it's right or wrong. I couldn't care less what other people do with their leisure time, or how much they do of it. I wouldn't want to do what this Letterboxd guy claims to be doing, under any circumstances, but that doesn't mean it's an objectively bad thing to do. This guy's movie viewing would likely be equivalent to a roughly 70 hour a week job, never mind the reading other people's reviews and then coming up with his own. No one I know has that kind of time for a leisure activity. Is your partner spending 10 hours a day, six to seven days a week, going to exercise classes? I imagine the answer is no. I went to a film festival this past fall and watching four movies in a day felt in a way like I'd eaten too large a meal. And it required ditching family and responsibilities for two thirds of the day to do so. Further, sticking on a movie in the background while you're doing something else hardly seems analogous to this guy's purported viewing. I put on stuff in the background as well, be it music or movies or TV, but that's primarily what it is - background noise. I wouldn't write a review on Letterboxd about a movie if I'd only occasionally looked over to see what was happening.

[tenia]

And again : these reviews could perfectly be produced by someone who actually hasn't watched any of the movies because they see just so automated and vague, they could be obtained by a script mining other existing reviews for adjectives before classifying alphabetically. That would explain why one of them has "deominous" in them, which seemingly isn't an adjective but the name of a creature in the movie, but I guess the script mixed it up with "ominous".
It'd also explain the choice of movies, most (all ?) with a limited number of reviews, which might be less of loving this kind of movies (or working for a label like Vinegar Syndrome) than choosing them so that such reviews aren't lost within the hundreds of existing ones but have so much more of a chance to be visible and gather attention.

[therewillbeblus]

To that point, I know several people on LB who don’t care about the stats or really understand the logging system, so they log films they saw a while ago in bunches at once without unclicking the checkbox that marks the viewing as today’s date. Until recently, this was a feature that automatically popped up the on mobile app but not the web version so there’s room for error even if you know this is a thing. It’s entirely possible this person did see all of these movies but is backlogging from last year during a month with more free time

[tenia]

And instead of just logging and scoring them, also took the time to create this arguably weird sentence-less reviews ?

I'd totally understand someone just having this huge backlog of un-logged movies, in which case it takes what ? 30 seconds per log, hence no reason to space them at such a regular pace of 5 to 7 per day, but why then take the time, with already such a backlog, to write reviews offering so little personal insight ?

[therewillbeblus]

I have one friend who writes reviews that look very much the same. I have no idea why he does it or what he gets out of them, but clearly he doesn't understand the platform and is just recording stray thoughts for himself (it's a different story though, since he doesn't have followers and doesn't explore LB or anything, so not looking for external validation). There's one truly hilarious one, but I have reservations about posting it here