Top 25 of the 2010s, statistically audited

As you would probably know, I posted my top 25 movies of the last decade (plus ten honorable
mentions) just a couple days after I posted my best of 2019. This was back in January.

Why, then, am I interested in revisiting that list less than a year later? When everything from last decade should be well and truly ancient history?

It has to do with what I used -- or rather, what I didn't use -- when I went about making my list.

As you would probably also know, when I make lists on this blog, I like to actually make them. In other words, I like to take the subset of films that relate to that list and shape them into a perfect order myself, without the help of outside sources.

I have a choice in methodology because I do have a source in my life that could just make the list for me. That's Flickchart, and it allows you to easily see your favorites in certain categories -- your favorite Disney movies, your favorite movies directed by Quentin Tarantino, your favorite movies from 1996, and yes, your favorite movies from an entire decade, like the 2010s. There's almost no limit to the way you can filter your chart to see your relative favorites in various subsections of it.

But as I've always said, for a list-maker, it's not fun to just copy over a list that gets made for you, even if that list is a reflection of your own tastes hashed out over thousands and thousands of previous indivdiual choices made by you -- as is the case on Flickchart, where your lists are the result of thousands of duels between two movies to create an ever-more-accurate list of your relative preferences.

So I was never going to use Flickchart to make my best of 2010s list. One reason was that I did not want to. The second reason was that I couldn't.

See, I've gotten way behind in adding my films to Flickchart, a consequence of once deciding I wanted to wait 30 days before adding a new movie to my chart, so it had the chance to "settle" in my mind, and not be placed artificially due to either a strong positive or strong negative reaction to it. I still think that's a useful approach, but it has the practical limitation that it's easy to fall behind. When you have no routine of adding a movie right after you've seen it, it means to add any movies at all, you have to purposefully sit down for a session of Flickcharting at a random time. And it became easy for those to drop from my list of daily priorities.

Over time, I got as much as two years behind on adding new films to my chart, and have forever been trying to work my way out of that hole.

With the pandemic, I've caught up more than I have been in ages. I am now only a little more than ten months behind, and that means I have just surpassed adding the last new film I watched before finalizing my list of the best films of the previous decade.

So for the first time, I do have a way to statistically produce my best of the decade list, now only as an interesting exercise rather the official record. And I do enjoy interesting exercises.

So today, after this typically long preamble, I'm going to see how the movies I chose for my list actually rank on Flickchart, now that they have all been added. 

I should say before I get started, there figure to be some big variances here. That's primarily the case in films where my opinions of them have either grown or shrank on subsequent viewings. If I loved it at the time I added it, but my thoughts on it have cooled a bit since then, it may take some time for that film to work its way down by losing casual duels. When a film loses a duel to a film below it, the most it can move down is one spot in the rankings. So its total loss of position, over time, comes from either losing individual duels itself, or from having other films leapfrog over it by beating films that are higher than it. At the highest ends of my chart, then, it might take a year or longer for a film to drop even 30 spots, on a chart of more than 5,000.

Because of the way Flickchart works, it's easier for a film to take big leaps in the standings rather than big drops. Any film that beats my #1 film in a duel, for example, immediately becomes my #1, even if it had previously been my #3487. (Of course, that would never actually happen, but just to illustrate how the site works.) Still, though, the lower film has to have the right duel at that right time if it wants to make one of those jumps. If my #500 movie really belongs somewhere in the 200-300 range, but it only gets random duels against my top 50 movies of all time or ones that are lower than it, it will not make that jump.

I suspect you've already expended today's allotted reading time on this post before we even get to any of the actual movies. So let's get to that now, on the off chance some of you are still here.

Here is what my top 25 of the decade looked like in January, including the honorable mentions:

25. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Celine Sciamma)
24. BlacKkKlansman (2018, Spike Lee)
23. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel & Ethan Coen)
22. Red State (2011, Kevin Smith)
21. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)
20. Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade)
19. What Maisie Knew (2013, Scott McGehee & David Siegel)
18. Zootopia (2016, Byron Howard & Rich Moore)
17. 127 Hours (2010, Danny Boyle)
16. If Beale Street Could Talk (2018, Barry Jenkins)
15. A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi)
14. Boyhood (2014, Richard Linklater)
13. Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho)
12. A Ghost Story (2017, David Lowery)
11. Beyond the Hills (2012, Cristian Mungiu)
10. Under the Skin (2014, Jonathan Glazer)
9. First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader)
8. The Blackcoat's Daughter (2017, Osgood Perkins)
7. Inside Out (2015, Pete Docter)
6. Like Father, Like Son (2013, Hirokazu Kore-eda)
5. Tanna (2016, Martin Butler & Bentley Dean)
4. The Social Network (2010, David Fincher)
3. Rabbit Hole (2010, John Cameron Mitchell)
2. Spring Breakers (2013, Harmony Korine)
1. Tangled (2010, Nathan Greno & Byron Howard)

Honorable mentions (listed alphabetically): Before Midnight (2013, Richard Linklater), The Breadwinner (2017, Nora Twomey), Hell or High Water (2016, David Mackenzie), The Last Five Years (2015, Richard LaGravenese), mother! (2017, Darren Aronofsky), Other People (2016, Chris Kelly), Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris), The Skeleton Twins (2014, Craig Johnson), Tangerine (2015, Sean Baker), Whiplash (2014, Damien Chazelle)

And here is what Flickchart says it would have been had I made all the same dueling decisions, but was actually entering the films into my Flickchart at the time I saw them, meaning the rankings would have been available mid-January. Included also is their overall ranking out of 5454 films on my Flickchart:

25. Your Sister's Sister (2012, Lynn Shelton) - 233
24. Wonder Woman (2017, Patty Jenkins) - 217
23. Under the Skin (2013, Jonathan Glazer) - 212
22. First Reformed (2018, Paul Schrader) - 211
21. Creed (2015, Ryan Coogler) - 200
20. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Celine Sciamma) - 193
19. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015, J.J. Abrams) - 189
18. If Beale Street Could Talk (2018, Barry Jenkins) - 187
17. The Skeleton Twins (2014, Craig Johnson) - 176
16. Toni Erdmann (2016, Maren Ade) - 170
15. Inside Out (2015, Pete Docter) - 164
14. 127 Hours (2010, Danny Boyle) - 160
13. Beyond the Hills (2012, Cristian Mungiu) - 150
12. Ruby Sparks (2012, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris) - 144
11. A Ghost Story (2017, David Lowery) - 143
10. Rabbit Hole (2010, John Cameron Mitchell) - 130
9. Parasite (2019, Bong Joon-ho) - 126
8. The Blackcoat's Daughter (2017, Osgood Perkins) - 118 
7. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel & Ethan Coen) - 114
6. Tanna (2016, Martin Butler & Bentley Dean) - 113
5. A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi) - 92
4. The Social Network (2010, David Fincher) - 91
3. Spring Breakers (2013, Harmony Korine) - 84
2. Like Father, Like Son (2013, Hirokazu Kore-eda) - 73
1. Tangled (2010, Nathan Greno & Byron Howard) - 14

Honorable mentions (listed alphabetically): Before Midnight (2013, Richard Linklater), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu), BlacKkKlansman (2018, Spike Lee), Coco (2017, Lee Unkrich), Hell or High Water (2016, David Mackenzie), Ida (2013, Pawel Pawlikowski), Red State (2011, Kevin Smith), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018, Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman), Take Shelter (2011, Jeff Nichols), Winter's Bone (2010, Debra Granik) 

I was thinking of taking these film by film and analyzing the differences, but I've already taken enough of your time on an exercise that primarily interests me, so let's go for more of an overview.

The big similarities

My top ten has seven of the same films on both lists, with three (Tangled, The Social Network and The Blackcoat's Daughter) landing in the exact same spot. It mightn't have worked out this way except that the top two in my organic list, Tangled and Spring Breakers, made jumps into my top 100 in the past couple months through the course of adding the new films, and then dueling between each new add as a palette cleanser. Tangled then made the big jump into my top 20, where I've come to determine it truly belongs. (This is probably a good time to note I have a controlled methodology for adding new films. I will add a film, then engage in a session of random dueling until a lower film beats a higher one, and continue alternating between the two in perpetuity -- until I'm fully caught up, anyway. This ensured, for the purposes of this experiment, that I did not try to artificially inflate the amount of random dueling I was doing, to help whip the rest of my chart into better shape.)

In the rest of the top 25, A Ghost Story, Beyond the Hills, 127 Hours, If Beale Street Could Talk, Toni Erdmann and Portrait of a Lady on Fire all landed within five spots on Flickchart of where I placed them organically on January's list. In the case of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, its current ranking at #20 relfects the certainty I expressed at the time that it belonged higher than #25. Only two weeks after seeing it for my one and only time, I felt I could not place it any higher than #25 at the time. It's at #20 even though I liked it a little less on my second viewing. 

The big differences

There are four movies in my top 25 on Flickchart that did not even make my honorable mentions back in January: Your Sister's Sister, Wonder Woman, Creed and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Each of these are films I saw at least three times, and five in the case of Star Wars. The first three all came in at #2 of the year they were originally ranked, and when I added them on Flickchart, that glowing sense of them was still in place. Though I still love them, repeated viewings took a bit of the shine off them, such that they could not even crack the honorable mentions. In the case of Star Wars, it always ranked high but then beat a film that was on its way down (Chinatown), allowing it to jump from in the 300s on Flickchart to in the 100s. I hope that will even out a bit over time.

There were three movies that made my organic top 25 that could not crack the honorable mentions when looking only at Flickchart: Boyhood, What Maisie Knew and Zootopia. In fact, they are my 41st, 52nd and 53rd favorite movies of the decade if you go only by Flickchart, with Maisie and Zootopia actually appearing consecutively on my chart at #378 and #379. Boyhood is certainly a case of my appreciation of it increasing over time, now at three total viewings, which brought it to #14 on my organic list -- though it hasn't obviously had the right duels to really make a big jump on Flickchart. The other two I have always loved, but maybe ranked them conservatively to begin with, and they didn't get the right duels either. 

In terms of leaps or drops within the top 25, Inside Llewyn Davis is my #7 on Flickchart but only my #23 on my organic list. Again, it was the fourth viewing that kind of knocked it down a peg in my mind, though it obviously remained high enough to make my top 25. The reverse is true for another four-time viewing, Under the Skin, which is only my #23 on Flickchart but #10 on my organic list. It has not yet gotten the right duels to reflect my increase in appreciation for it over the seven years since I first saw it. Another notable title to discuss is Ruby Sparks, my #12 on Flickchart but only an honorable mention on January's list. I was passionately in love with this film, my #1 of 2012, when I first saw it, as it entered my chart around #90 overall. A steady cooling of those passions has only managed to knock it down to #144, good enough for 12th overall -- which gives you some sense of how long it takes for a film to drop unless you forcibly re-rank it.

Summary

Both lists please me in a way. They are both, in a manner of speaking, a reflection on my favorites in film from the years 2010 to 2019.

You'd think the outcome of this exercise would be to show me the difference between what I think I like and what I actually like. Instead, I think of it as the difference between a snapshot of what I liked in that moment, in January of 2020, and a history of what I liked over the whole decade. I was Flickcharting that whole decade, having started in 2009, so it's useful to see how my tastes progressed, and what evidence remains of my one-time passions. It's valuable to have a record of having loved films like Ruby Sparks, Creed and Wonder Woman, and I think it's good that Flickchart's core mechanisms make it difficult for their light to fade quickly. You should be reminded of the passion you once felt for something, because chances are you were only a little bit wrong about it, not a lot wrong. And if you were a lot wrong, then you can forcibly re-rank it downward, as I did after my viewing of Field of Dreams back in July. 

The other thing that interested me to see about my Flickchart list is that it's more diverse, both in terms of the filmmakers and in terms of the subject matter. Whereas my organic list has only two female directors on it -- Maren Ade and Celine Sciamma -- the Flickchart list has those two along with Patty Jenkins and (the dearly departed) Lynn Shelton, not to mention a half-directing credit for Valerie Faris. It has the same number of African-American directors, but with Ryan Coogler replacing Spike Lee in the main list but Lee still appearing in the honorable mentions, the whole list of 35 has one more Black director on Flickchart. Then there's things like the Flickchart list having a superhero movie (Wonder Woman) and two movies in franchises (Creed and Star Wars: The Force Awakens), while the organic list has none of those, unless you count honorable mention Before Midnight. 

Okay, exercise complete. I release you.