If you ranted and raved about the recent Oscar nominations on Facebook, but none of your friends seemed to care, it’s time to either A) find new friends or B) find a social network that caters to your cinematic needs.
Here are five great sites that help you connect with film fans from all over the world.
1. GetGlue
If you love movies, but your interests are too varied to be contained to one medium, then GetGlue is for you. Much like Foursquare, you check in to your favorite activity — everything from movies, TV shows, the big game, music, books and plenty more — using the website or the mobile app. But instead of badges, you earn stickers with every checkin. Some stickers will give you the opportunity to win prizes, but most are simply a great way to show your geeky pride to the people that follow you. Unlike Foursquare’s badges, though, you can actually request physical copies of the stickers you’ve earned, so you can take that pride offline as well.
The interaction on GetGlue is pretty one-on-one. So if you’re looking for conversation, the best thing to do is check in after you’ve watched the movie and include a quick review in your post. Someone will usually chime in with their own opinion and you might make a new friend.
2. iCheckMovies
Some movie fans set a goal to watch everything on a particular list of films, like the Best Picture nominees, the IMDb Top 250 or any of the AFI 100 inventories. With iCheckMovies, just check off the movies you’ve watched and it will automatically track your progress on a variety of these indexes all at once. You can even create a personal list if you want to target a specific genre or area of interest. When you’ve completed a list, you’ll earn awards that display on your profile to show your movie-watching prowess to the world. Based on the movies you’ve seen, the site will try to match you with people who have similar tastes so that you can easily follow their progress and discover new movies.
If you want even more interaction, iCheckMovies recently set up forums for users to discuss genres, regional films and for fans of film podcasts to chat about the latest episode. Depending on the level of involvement you want, the site offers free membership or a couple of paid membership tiers, but for most people, the free version is all you’ll need. Be careful, though — checking off movies can become quite addicting.
3. Letterboxd
One of the newest social movie sites out there, Letterboxd is still in beta, so you’ll need to request an invite or find a friendly film fan that will send you one. Once you’re in, create a personal profile and then populate it by searching for movies. Each title has its own page, complete with a brief plot synopsis, cast information, average star rating from the community and popular reviews written by other Letterboxd users. From here you can mark that you’ve seen the movie, like it, give it a star rating, write a review or put it on a custom list, like “My Favorite Samurai Movies.”
Nearly all of your Letterboxd activity is broadcast on the site, so there are plenty of avenues to find users who share your cinematic interests. And because you don’t have to send a friend request, you can follow anyone in order to check out the latest movies they’ve seen, lists they’ve created and reviews they’ve written. Just add your own two cents to one of the ubiquitous comment boxes and get the conversation rolling.
The site is gaining quite a bit of traction with online film critics, so look to connect with some of your favorite personalities from /Film, Movies.com, FirstShowing.net, Twitch and more.
4. MUBI
If your film standards lean more toward Federico Fellini than Lindsay Lohan, MUBI may be the social movie site for you. MUBI (formerly The Auteurs) focuses on international films, experimental shorts and titles that you might find in the Criterion Collection. On the site, you can set up a personal profile complete with the style of films you prefer, like Fashionable Alienation, Vanguard Cinema and Neorealist, among others.
Next, rate your favorite directors, your favorite movies, post notes to your wall and follow people from all over the world or in your region to see what’s playing at the local art house theater. Jump into the forums where you’ll engage in discussions like “Cinema that redefines narrative,” “Kurosawa vs. Shakespeare,” and “Nihilistic Cinema.” Some of these conversations are so deep it’s like a film class in a box.
If you’re an aspiring filmmaker yourself, check out the Garage to connect with other auteurs who can help you make your cinematic dreams come true.
What really sets MUBI apart is the ability to stream hundreds of these great films directly to a computer or Boxee device on your TV. Most of the short subjects are free, longer films are available for a one-time rental fee of 99 cents to $2.99, or for unlimited access to the entire catalog, it’s only $6.99 a month.
5. Seenth.at
Seenth.at hasn’t even launched yet and it’s already generating quite a bit of buzz among movie fans. Like other sites, users can mark a movie as seen, owned, add it to a custom list, give it a star rating or write a review. But with Seenth.at, you can also recommend a movie to a single user, a group of users or the community at-large. All of this activity is grouped together as part of the site’s Chatter, a Pinterest-like graphical presentation of everything Seenth.at users are doing.
The Chatter can be broadened to all users, narrowed to only the people you follow or even filtered down to an individual film to see what people are saying about it. From there, it’s easy to recognize positive reviews in blue, negative in purple and spoiler-filled reviews are clearly marked in yellow so you don’t accidentally click on them. In addition, you can post your favorite quotes from the movie, as well as start conversations so that others can offer their opinions and insights.
The site is set to launch soon for a small group of VIP members, but the Seenth.at developers hope to make it available to a larger audience in the coming months, so get signed up for beta testing now. With its strong visual approach, this is one site you’ll want to keep an eye on.
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