Simian Substitute Site for January 2025: De Witte Aap
Living For The Weekend: A 2025 Diary By The BBG

Spankify Wrapped 2024: Letterboxd

So that's about one film for every six beers I drank in 2024.Quite honestly, you could take the fifth paragraph of Spankify Wrapped 2024: Untappd, do a quick search and replace on a couple of key words, and they’d fit in just fine here. Because it’s a very similar story. Late last year, I started seeing people sharing summaries of their year on Letterboxd, the app where you can log, rate and review all the films you’ve seen. And I thought, “that looks fun, maybe I could try that in 2024.” So I did.

Just like Untappd, it meant that I spent a whole year turning one of my favourite pastimes into an administrative exercise. And just like Untappd, the numbers it gave me at the end of that year made me feel appalled with myself. “What do you mean, I only saw ninety-one films this year?”

Here's the summary Letterboxd sent me, since you asked. Their roundup of my year – and unlike Untappd, it’s a proper full calendar year, which is why it wasn’t available until January 8th – doesn’t have all the animated bells and whistles of the equivalent from Untappd or Spotify, but the stats follow a similar format. You get the big headline numbers at the start, as seen in the picture above, and then they break them down in interesting ways.

There are a couple of things worth noting. If you’d asked me which actor I’d seen the most of in movies this year, I doubt that I would have come up with Shido Nakamura: but him being in both parts of Red Cliff and having a small part in Monster swung it for him. It’s a similar deal with Ryusuke Hamaguchi being my top director, which is down to just two films, one of which is literally a remix of the other. As for the films themselves, it's hard for Letterboxd to come up with a top three for anyone, given the bluntness of their rating system. But it seems odd to me that it's picked two of my 5 star films and one 4.5, given that one of the 5 stars they ignored is my actual film of the year.

Once you get into the more esoteric stats, things get a bit more interesting. October 14-20 was my busiest week! (Well, that's hardly a surprise.) Sunday was my busiest day! (That one's more of a surprise, to be honest.) And then, in an obvious nod to the ridiculous music genres that Spotify makes up for you at this time of year, they've imagined me as being the sort of person who'd walk into a video shop and head straight for the Fighting, Cool, Killing section. I mean, there may be some truth in that, but it's a little reductive.

It turns out Letterboxd could be less reductive if I wanted it to be, but it'd cost me money. If I was prepared to fork out eighteen quid for a Pro membership, I could get a much more detailed analysis of my moviegoing year. As an example, take a look at my erstwhile MostlyFilm colleague FilmFan, who justifies having a pro account by being an actual Pro who reviews films for money. As a result, his headline numbers are several times the size of mine: but that isn't the only reason why FilmFan's year in film is spectacular to behold, with its extended lists and huge collection of Nanogenres®.

I'm not quite committed enough to want to go down that route, I'm afraid: as with Untappd, I've just used Letterboxd for the duration of 2024, and have no plans to touch it again. It's the admin I won't miss, even though it was partly self-imposed: I was determined to give every film I saw both a star rating and a one-paragraph review, but I could have got away with just logging the film titles. The reviews I wrote overlapped with the ones you read on this site in different ways. For the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme, I used Letterboxd to knock up a first draft I expanded later for the site. During the Edinburgh International Film Festival, I wrote a review for the site first, and then put together a condensed version of it for Letterboxd: I did something similar for the LFF, but this time remembered to put in a link back to the site so Letterboxrs could also read the full length version, which I think helped my hit count a little. Plus, there were two occasions when I was running short of material for a Simian Substitute post and just copied and pasted in a review. Anyway, all that aside, there are still several thousand words worth of my film reviews you haven't read before on Letterboxd, so follow the links on my diary page and fill your boots.

One final thing to note: all the other Spankify Wrapped posts (and there's one more still to come) have ended with some sort of YouTube overview of my year in whatever, so this one should do the same too. Unfortunately, as I've already mentioned, Letterboxd doesn't do big video roundups. So I've had to make my own. Got a few hours to spare?

(The Snow Flurry, Tree and The Shadow Scholars don't have trailers on YouTube and have all sent a sick note.)

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