I’ve had a lot of downtime at the airport and hotel on our Christmas trip and spent much of it looking at the movie-review social network Letterboxd. (Of all of the networks that did the “drop the ‘e’ for SEO purposes” thing, this is the worst. Call the fucking site Letterboxed. Please. It’s almost 2024, guys. Give us back our “e,” OK?) I quite like the service, but as a social network it’s a) made up of humans who are b) trying to stand out from the crowd like a goth at the homecoming pep rally. Here’s a list of some of the many annoying things people do. I’m sure someone else has done this before I have and done a better job of it.
I know you *can* go seeking out whatever pick-me behavior might be trending about a given film, but the saving grace of Letterboxd to me is that it retains a circa-2005 Facebook functionality where it can just be a conversation among your chosen friends.
The second it's acquired by a profit-motivated entity that will be shot to shit, but it works for now.
How long until someone gets a screenwriting gig because of Letterboxd (please don't tell me that's already happened) and the internet rat race to seek entry into the culture class gets even more insane?
I have no idea what Letterbox(e)d is, but it was fun reading your grouchy reaction to it. I only wish you had put a link to the Wong Kar Wai interview. That was the only name I recognized, (beside Gene Shallit.)
How much deviation does a film/series adaptation have to diverge from a book before the criticism is warranted? The example that jumps to mind is Wheel of Time, obvs.
That has to be a subjective thing, at least in part. Altman's film of The Long Goodbye is a far less faithful adaptation of Chandler's original than the one episode, admittedly, I watched of WoT was of the first book in that series. Indeed, the film is *so* divergent that holding it to some standard of loyalty to the source material seems almost like a category mistake. I love both (the novel more, but there's little enough I like more than that novel).
On the other hand, I hated the American Gods adaptation with such fury that I swore off all the in house content of all streaming services for like 3 years, because they took something I loved (a singular, meandering, whimsical novel) and turned it into a type of thing I consider worthless (10 hour long stupid comic book movie). So I have some empathy for my fellow inauthentic-adaptation overreacters ...
Hello from another fan of The Long Goodbye in both of its forms. I'm going to Mexico for a week in February and I think you just helped me pick my vacation read, so thanks for that! Been meaning to revisit the novel for a while now. (Actually now that I think about it, the first time I read it was on a cruise ship.) Talk about a book that took me completely by surprise. And I love Altman's adaptation.
Throw out all the themes, fail to understand the source material's strengths, change all the characters' characters, don't build action or character evolution appropriately, marinate in an orgy of CGI, and voila - an overpriced turd.
My 4 children, who surprisingly slogged all the way to the end of the book series, so abhorred Season 1, none wanted to watch Season 2, and they'll watch anything (else).
You have to make a good to great movie/show, then all is forgiven. No one cares if the stuff in JFK is true or not; great movie! No one cares how closely There Will Be Blood hews to Oil!
Make something enjoyable and only a handful of nerds will care how much it resembles the book. The handful of nerds will be a small population among the people talking about how much they like the movie/shoe.
Make Wheel of Time and it will be most of the conversation, because most people don’t care about it at all, so the conversation can be driven by disappointed readers who will bother with posting and reading about that (at best) mediocrity.
WoT is Exhibit A in "how not to make an adaptation...or a TV show at all." There's so little character development it's stunning. I'm not proud that I hatewatched season 2, but I did. I suppose I got at least some kind of angry catharsis out of it.
The makers of that show seemed to actively dislike both the readers of the WoT series, and epic fantasy as a genre. They seem embarrassed by both, so they tried to make changes, and it turns out, they are not very good at TV.
I don't really care how faithful the adaptation is to the source material. They're different things. I'm far less interested in the question of "is this movie faithful to the source material?" then to the question of "is this a good movie, and does it stand on its own two feet?"
Adaptations can be "different things" up to a point before they're not even comparable. This is the only example that's coming readily to mind, but "Fifty Shades of Grey" was born as a strain of Twilight fanfiction. If you were going to watch Twilight and got Fifty Shades of Grey, that's not an adaptation. And if you wanted to watch a movie based on the Harry Potter books but got the same cast of characters except now they're heroes in the Marvel-verse, you're not watching a movie based off of the Harry Potter story.
I care. If it's a horribly unfaithful adaptation, but a really good movie or show, I can still enjoy it, but unless the intent is somehow to deliberately make a statement about the original, then I start to ask why they adapted something instead of creating their own thing.
I look at it, at least in part, this way: if there's a book I love, and they make it into a movie or TV show, there's a pretty good chance that's not going to happen again (though with how memetic things seem today, maybe they will). So if this thing is going to happen only once, I want to see the things I loved about the book in the fucking movie. And if I don't, even if the movie is good, I will be disappointed, because those things will probably never get shown on screen. So it goes.
I generally avoid any movie that is based on a book or books I like. However, I often find that I enjoy the setting and usually the cast. What bothers me is when they make major changes to characters or change the ending in significant ways.
This all tracks with what I've seen on that site. So many people are desperately trying to do a bit; they think they're way cleverer than they actually are.
For example, the most-liked "review" of Barbie simply reads: "s(he's) bro(ken)"
In fairness to Letterboxd, film bros come to the site pre-loaded with all the annoying personality traits social media would otherwise do the work of imparting.
Maybe I'm not hanging out in the right circles, but I honestly don't even know what a film bro is. I've never met one. I see more complaining about film bros than actual film bros.
I'm in some film-lover Facebook groups that are basically made up of Letterboxd power users at this point, and every one of these applies to them only triple concentrated. I still find good movies I would otherwise miss through them, so I haven't abandoned the group, but damn, this made me cackle.
I've never even considered Letterboxd to be a social network, the social aspect just isn't there imo (and that's a good thing). I use it as a movie database and a place to log when I watched some movie and how I felt about it, and it serves that purpose well. Yeah, the reviews often suck but why would one expect wit, originality and unique insights from internet randos? I'm glad that after however many years it's still just a website about movies and it's not trying to turn into yet another dystopian attention-economy algorithmic monstrosity.
“On rare occasions, these are funny and apt and really say something; mostly, they’re people desperately trying to appear witty to strangers and succeeding only in appearing desperate.”
Please stop with the "It's <year>". Make an argument.
As for "it's not like the book": as a movie maker, if you're too lazy to come up with your own story, and instead want to attract a built-in audience for an existing story, then the onus is on you to demonstrate that you bothered to understand the salient aspects of the source material. Extra opprobrium when a movie manages to be an incoherent set of contradictory themes completely at odds with the themes of the source material. That isn't artistic license to be innovative, it's just extreme laziness.
I know you *can* go seeking out whatever pick-me behavior might be trending about a given film, but the saving grace of Letterboxd to me is that it retains a circa-2005 Facebook functionality where it can just be a conversation among your chosen friends.
The second it's acquired by a profit-motivated entity that will be shot to shit, but it works for now.
I like to see the film 1st; read the reviews (maybe) later.
I mostly only seek out reviews after the fact if I hated the movie and want to check to see if everybody else saw the same bullshit that I endured
I hear you...and agree
A review of a review app. Peak.
How long until someone gets a screenwriting gig because of Letterboxd (please don't tell me that's already happened) and the internet rat race to seek entry into the culture class gets even more insane?
I have no idea what Letterbox(e)d is, but it was fun reading your grouchy reaction to it. I only wish you had put a link to the Wong Kar Wai interview. That was the only name I recognized, (beside Gene Shallit.)
How much deviation does a film/series adaptation have to diverge from a book before the criticism is warranted? The example that jumps to mind is Wheel of Time, obvs.
That has to be a subjective thing, at least in part. Altman's film of The Long Goodbye is a far less faithful adaptation of Chandler's original than the one episode, admittedly, I watched of WoT was of the first book in that series. Indeed, the film is *so* divergent that holding it to some standard of loyalty to the source material seems almost like a category mistake. I love both (the novel more, but there's little enough I like more than that novel).
On the other hand, I hated the American Gods adaptation with such fury that I swore off all the in house content of all streaming services for like 3 years, because they took something I loved (a singular, meandering, whimsical novel) and turned it into a type of thing I consider worthless (10 hour long stupid comic book movie). So I have some empathy for my fellow inauthentic-adaptation overreacters ...
Hello from another fan of The Long Goodbye in both of its forms. I'm going to Mexico for a week in February and I think you just helped me pick my vacation read, so thanks for that! Been meaning to revisit the novel for a while now. (Actually now that I think about it, the first time I read it was on a cruise ship.) Talk about a book that took me completely by surprise. And I love Altman's adaptation.
WoT, a thousand times over.
Throw out all the themes, fail to understand the source material's strengths, change all the characters' characters, don't build action or character evolution appropriately, marinate in an orgy of CGI, and voila - an overpriced turd.
My 4 children, who surprisingly slogged all the way to the end of the book series, so abhorred Season 1, none wanted to watch Season 2, and they'll watch anything (else).
You have to make a good to great movie/show, then all is forgiven. No one cares if the stuff in JFK is true or not; great movie! No one cares how closely There Will Be Blood hews to Oil!
Make something enjoyable and only a handful of nerds will care how much it resembles the book. The handful of nerds will be a small population among the people talking about how much they like the movie/shoe.
Make Wheel of Time and it will be most of the conversation, because most people don’t care about it at all, so the conversation can be driven by disappointed readers who will bother with posting and reading about that (at best) mediocrity.
WoT is Exhibit A in "how not to make an adaptation...or a TV show at all." There's so little character development it's stunning. I'm not proud that I hatewatched season 2, but I did. I suppose I got at least some kind of angry catharsis out of it.
The makers of that show seemed to actively dislike both the readers of the WoT series, and epic fantasy as a genre. They seem embarrassed by both, so they tried to make changes, and it turns out, they are not very good at TV.
“There's so little character development it's stunning.” This observation so accurately describes many of the people we encounter every day IRL.
I don't really care how faithful the adaptation is to the source material. They're different things. I'm far less interested in the question of "is this movie faithful to the source material?" then to the question of "is this a good movie, and does it stand on its own two feet?"
Adaptations can be "different things" up to a point before they're not even comparable. This is the only example that's coming readily to mind, but "Fifty Shades of Grey" was born as a strain of Twilight fanfiction. If you were going to watch Twilight and got Fifty Shades of Grey, that's not an adaptation. And if you wanted to watch a movie based on the Harry Potter books but got the same cast of characters except now they're heroes in the Marvel-verse, you're not watching a movie based off of the Harry Potter story.
I care. If it's a horribly unfaithful adaptation, but a really good movie or show, I can still enjoy it, but unless the intent is somehow to deliberately make a statement about the original, then I start to ask why they adapted something instead of creating their own thing.
I look at it, at least in part, this way: if there's a book I love, and they make it into a movie or TV show, there's a pretty good chance that's not going to happen again (though with how memetic things seem today, maybe they will). So if this thing is going to happen only once, I want to see the things I loved about the book in the fucking movie. And if I don't, even if the movie is good, I will be disappointed, because those things will probably never get shown on screen. So it goes.
I generally avoid any movie that is based on a book or books I like. However, I often find that I enjoy the setting and usually the cast. What bothers me is when they make major changes to characters or change the ending in significant ways.
I'll be incorporating all of this into my reviews. Thanks for all the help!
I give this post 5 bags of popcorn and two sodas
And a tiny keychain of a boar to remember Freddie deBoer
This all tracks with what I've seen on that site. So many people are desperately trying to do a bit; they think they're way cleverer than they actually are.
For example, the most-liked "review" of Barbie simply reads: "s(he's) bro(ken)"
In fairness to Letterboxd, film bros come to the site pre-loaded with all the annoying personality traits social media would otherwise do the work of imparting.
Maybe I'm not hanging out in the right circles, but I honestly don't even know what a film bro is. I've never met one. I see more complaining about film bros than actual film bros.
Come to my local arthouse theater. They're real, and they're spectacular.
I'd say ur avoiding the right circles, bro
I'm in some film-lover Facebook groups that are basically made up of Letterboxd power users at this point, and every one of these applies to them only triple concentrated. I still find good movies I would otherwise miss through them, so I haven't abandoned the group, but damn, this made me cackle.
My Letterboxd experience has improved dramatically by blocking the most annoying and prolific tweet-reviewers (hello, “Lucy”)
“X. That’s it, that’s the review.” shut the fuck up!!!!!!!!!!!
*salute*
Just here to say thanks for the "Letterboxd" spelling rant, agree it's annoying as all get out.
The internet (and especially social media) has been slowly mangling grammar into ridiculous levels of stupid for way too long now.
I've never even considered Letterboxd to be a social network, the social aspect just isn't there imo (and that's a good thing). I use it as a movie database and a place to log when I watched some movie and how I felt about it, and it serves that purpose well. Yeah, the reviews often suck but why would one expect wit, originality and unique insights from internet randos? I'm glad that after however many years it's still just a website about movies and it's not trying to turn into yet another dystopian attention-economy algorithmic monstrosity.
“On rare occasions, these are funny and apt and really say something; mostly, they’re people desperately trying to appear witty to strangers and succeeding only in appearing desperate.”
Seen.
"Please. It’s almost 2024"
Please stop with the "It's <year>". Make an argument.
As for "it's not like the book": as a movie maker, if you're too lazy to come up with your own story, and instead want to attract a built-in audience for an existing story, then the onus is on you to demonstrate that you bothered to understand the salient aspects of the source material. Extra opprobrium when a movie manages to be an incoherent set of contradictory themes completely at odds with the themes of the source material. That isn't artistic license to be innovative, it's just extreme laziness.
Saying "Because it's 20xx" is so 2015, and not cool in 2023. Justin Trudeau wore out the meme for everybody in one (very ignorant) use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8OOIU7xQrk
When used, it's not an argument, succinct or otherwise, it's the avoidance of making an argument.
REAL heads would never miss the Yakutsk Film Festival, you philistine.