Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!
I was trying to get away from social media when I found myself signing up to yet another new app.
I blame (or give credit to) Francis Ford Coppola for my biting of the bullet and signing up to Letterboxd.
The man posted a list of his influences and gave his own film Megalopolis a five-star review.
Though billing itself as 'a social platform for sharing your taste in film', Letterboxd isn’t social media as we’ve come to know, love, and then hate it.
Essentially it’s a place to keep track of your and other people’s viewing habits, post reviews or simply give films the old-fashioned stars out of five.
If you say, ‘Ah, I do that already for books, so it’s Goodreads for film, then?’ Pretty much, but it’s also become a standard question to ask filmmakers and actors on almost every movie read carpet run in the last couple of years, "What’s on your Letterboxd?"
Founded in New Zealand in 2011 by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow; the app chugged along until its membership exploded following the worldwide release of the greatest (real-life) disaster movie to strike cinemas since the heyday of Irwin Allen. This picture not only starred every current big and small-time actor under the sun, but all of us too as collective above-the-credit leads: COVID was a worldwide smash, closing every picture house from Ankara to Wellington. Nobody wants a sequel. But what many of us did want at the time, it turns out, was a place to log all the sequels (as well as the other movies) we were watching.
When the virus finally ended its run and red carpets were tentatively rolled out again, the question "What did you do during COVID?" quickly morphed into "What did you watch during lockdown?" So those Letterboxd logs and lists came into their own.
And it was the perfect place to experience 2023's Barbenheimer phenomenon - the internet challenge to see both Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, often on the same day.
Currently across the app, many are writing of their experiences seeing Brady Corbet’s 3hr 35min epic The Brutalist, in lieu of its general release on digital and film this Friday. The 70mm print showing at the IFI in Dublin is four miles long and weighs in at eighteen-and-a-half stone (I can confirm this after carrying it up three flights of stairs). While Oppie and Barbie were epics in their own way, The Brutalist can be classed as an ‘experience’, as it will be the first time a younger audience will interact with the old-fashioned phenomena of the intermission.
After a hundred minutes, the story reaches a certain climax, the lights come up - not fully, about three quarters, so as not to completely remove you from the collective shadows (at least that’s how I’m handling it from the projection booth). A card appears on screen announcing an intermission, with a fifteen-minute clock counting down. Time enough for you to nip out to the loo or shop to top up your drink and popcorn... Or log your progress online. Director Corbet has gone one step further and - in a nice touch - has made the picture on the intermission card relevant to the plot. This reminded me of the legendary 70mm release of 1963’s It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World, where during the intermission you could hear continuous police radio reports over the speakers informing you what the characters were up to.
To this day, I look out from my projection booth window at the crowds and sell-out shows and remember that this return to form was a long time coming. To get people back to the cinemas, they first had to be still watching movies.
You can complain about the gaming of the moviegoing experience which this encourages; but I say fair dues to those New Zealand fellas. Those who go to The Brutalist just to ‘be there and log it’, their guard will be down. If even a quarter of them emerge from this dazzling film about architecture and one Hungarian holocaust survivor’s attempt to find his place in the world in 1940s Pennsylvania, crying "What the hell did I just watch?" That's a massive win for the art form. And no small amount of credit should go to Letterboxd for maintaining the potency of movies to today’s millennials and other lettered generations.
To this day, I look out from my projection booth window at the crowds and sell-out shows and remember that this return to form was a long time coming. To get people back to the cinemas, they first had to be still watching movies. God knows, there isn’t a paucity of TV shows out there; hundreds and hundreds of episodes of multi-season television going back decades. But a good three-act, two-hour film is still something special. Or in the case of The Brutalist, two-act, near four-hour; but who's counting? Well,I am, frankly. I’m counting the bums on seats from way up high. And it makes my heart glow to see so many of you sitting in them. Alright, back to your seats; the film is about to begin again.
The Brutalist is in cinemas now. Paul Markey is a projectionist at the Irish Film Institute and BoothProjection on LetterBoxd
