My 1996 film rankings (in 1996)

This is the final entry in a 2022 monthly posting of the 12 year-end rankings I completed prior to starting this blog, on the occasion of my 25th anniversary of ranking movies. I'm posting them as a form of permanent backup, plus to do a little analysis of how my impression of the movies has changed since then. I've posted them in reverse order and this is the end of the road.

Well we've reached the finish line of this year-long recapping of a dozen years of film rankings I had never committed to permanence, because they predated the start of this blog.

And fittingly, we go back to the beginning, where it all started.

I don't remember why the viewing of Looking for Richard enthused me so much that I decided to start formally documenting my favorite films each year. I'm not even sure my affection for Al Pacino's documentary had anything to do with it. It may have been as simple as the natural list-maker in me no longer being able to stay suppressed. It was time for him to come out and rear his head.

This was not the first list I'd ever made, mind you. I'd made music lists before. The first-ever rankings I did were of my top 15 songs each month on pop radio, circa 1986 to 1988. I had a very specific formula for this top 15. The first two were always new songs that hadn't been on the chart the previous month -- my favorite new song and my second favorite new song. Then slots 3 and 4 were reserved for my favorite two songs returning from the previous month. However many other new entries I wanted to add went from #5 until #whenever, and then the list was rounded out by the remaining returning songs. I know I still have those in a sketchpad somewhere. Maybe when our stuff shipped from America finally arrives in Australia, I will dig through and find it.

In terms of movies, I'd been keeping my whole list of all the movies I'd ever seen, something I first created in the early 1990s with the help of a catalogue from a local video store. That list had its holes, but over the years I filled them in. I gradually added a bunch of other lists, but I didn't yet have any others in 1996, or early 1997 I should say. 

The one ranked movie list I remember was my top comedic performances by actors in the 1980s. It was made on the occasion of the calendar rolling over to 1990, and was something another friend did with me -- incidentally, not the friend who does these year-end lists with me now. 

But then in late December 1996 or early January 1997, I decide to make committing my favorite movies of the year to permanence an annual thing. Actually, I was likely just noodling around that first time, but had such a fun time doing it that I continued and expanded it from there. 

The thing I do clearly remember is sitting down with a notebook in my dark Providence apartment (it was partially submerged under street level) and working from a list of all the movies I'd seen that year to come up with what you see below. Now here's the interesting question: If I wasn't keeping lists at the time, how did I even have a finite list of all the movies I'd seen in 1996? It's a good question and I don't have the answer. It surely wasn't all ticket stubs because obviously some of these were movies I saw on video. It might have been that I was already keeping my individual alphabetical movie lists of movies seen in a particular year, which I still keep. But I can't say for sure. 

My methodology became more definitive a year or two later, when I started adding movies to the list as I saw them and would move them around over the course of the year as I saw fit. Effectively, it is the same thing being done when you add a new movie on Flickchart, only you don't bother with the early duels. If you already know a new movie was bad or a new movie was good, you just go to that part of the list and find the movie you think is just better than it and the movie you think is just worse, and you stick the new movie in between the two of them. That isn't a permanent spot, however, and a lot of tweaking is expected over the course of the year.

In terms of where I found myself in my life, 1996 might have been the most tumultuous year, geographically, that I've ever had. Part of the chaos was a result of intending to attend Columbia Journalism School in the fall, meaning I had an open schedule to do other short-term things in the meantime. But I didn't get in to Columbia on my first attempt, reapplying two years later and getting in then, after I'd built up some experience in the working world.

- I started the year living in Boston at my parents' house -- yes they were still together then -- and working for a family friend in Boston at his company that was doing an early version of content filtering in business news stories. I did a lot of checking of headlines to determine if a particular algorithm was getting too many false positives. I was still dating the woman I'd dated at my summer job the previous summer.

- In February I moved to Los Angeles for three months, where I worked as a production assistant (PA), mostly driving around town (using my trusty Thomas Guide) to deliver scripts and videotapes to editors and other talent where they lived or worked, from our headquarters in Studio City. A friend from high school was living out there with his college friends, and had convinced me to use some of my unprogrammed time to join him. This was of course an amuse bouche before moving to Los Angeles "permanently" (for 12 years) in 2001. 

- In May I was back east in order to work at Star Island, my summer workplace during my college years, one last time, even though I was one year removed from graduating college. That made an even five summers and might have been one summer too long, as it was a very difficult summer with some highs but a lot of lows. 

- After "close-up" (staying on the island to shut things down for the winter after all the guests leave -- yes, think of The Shining) finished in October, I moved in with a friend -- the same friend who does these lists with me now -- for just two months in Somerville, Massachusetts, as I looked for a job. It was with him that I saw Looking for Richard at the movie theater in Somerville. The job I found in journalism ended up being in Rhode Island, leading to ...

- My final move of the year, in December, to this partially submerged apartment in Providence where I was making up this very first-ever year-end list.

Which list? Why I'll tell you right now:

1. Looking for Richard
2. Flirting With Disaster
3. Fargo
4. The Cable Guy
5. Secrets and Lies
6. Big Night
7. Ransom
8. Bottle Rocket
9. The Pallbearer
10. A Time to Kill
11. Trainspotting
12. Star Trek: First Contact
13. The English Patient
14. Jerry Maguire
15. Fear
16. Beautiful Girls
17. Mars Attacks!
18. Mission: Impossible
19. Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy
20. The Birdcage
21. Rumble in the Bronx
22. The Long Kiss Goodnight
23. That Thing You Do! 
24. Courage Under Fire
25. I Shot Andy Warhol
26. Happy Gilmore
27. James and the Giant Peach
28. 2 Days in the Valley
29. William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet
30. Twister
31. American Buffalo
32. The Juror
33. The Craft
34. The Rock
35. Independence Day
36. The Truth About Cats and Dogs
37. Tin Cup
38. Primal Fear
39. Eraser
40. The Sunchaser
41. Mulholland Falls
42. Broken Arrow
43. Before and After

And here is the order in which those movies rank out of 6182 movies currently on my Flickchart. Following the ranking is the percentage of the ranking out of 6182 and the number of slots they rose or fell on my Flickchart compared to the other movies from that year that I ranked at the time. A positive number indicates a comparative rise of that many slots, a negative number a fall.

1. Fargo (7, 100%) 2
2. The Cable Guy (16, 100%) 2
3. Flirting With Disaster (53, 99%) -1
4. Trainspotting (164, 97%) 7
5. Looking for Richard (274, 96%) -4
6. Bottle Rocket (285, 95%) 2
7. Big Night (392, 94%) -1
8. A Time to Kill (480, 92%) 2
9. The English Patient (521, 92%) 4
10. Jerry Maguire (555, 91%) 4
11. Star Trek: First Contact (581, 91%) 1
12. The Pallbearer (666, 89%) -3
13. Secrets and Lies (689, 89%) -8
14. Rumble in the Bronx (1195, 81%) 7
15. Mars Attacks! (1230, 80%) 2
16. Happy Gilmore (1357, 78%) 10
17. Ransom (1497, 76%) - 10
18. Beautiful Girls (1592, 74%) -2
19. Mission: Impossible (1649, 73%) -1
20. Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1654, 73%) -1
21. Fear (1725, 72%) -6
22. The Birdcage (1994, 68%) -2
23. The Long Kiss Goodnight (2541, 59%) -1
24. The Rock (2566, 58%) 10
25. That Thing You Do! (2670, 57%) -2
26. William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (2961, 52%) 3
27. Courage Under Fire (3236, 48%) -3
28. Twister (3549, 43%) 2
29. The Sunchaser (4300, 30%) 11
30. The Craft (4378, 29%) 3
31. James and the Giant Peach (4385, 29%) -4
32. 2 Days in the Valley (4427, 28%) -4
33. The Truth About Cats and Dogs (4522, 27%) 3
34. Primal Fear (4524, 27%) 4
35. The Juror (4568, 26%) -3
36. Eraser (4660, 25%) 3
37. I Shot Andy Warhol (4662, 25%) -12
38. Independence Day (4737, 23%) -3
39. Tin Cup (5113, 17%) -2
40. American Buffalo (5484, 11%) -9
41. Mulholland Falls (5821, 6%) 0
42. Broken Arrow (5911, 4%) 0
43. Before and After (5932, 4%) 0

Five best movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Bound, Breaking the Waves, The Crucible, Hard Eight, Swingers
Five worst movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): The Crow: City of Angels, The Fan, Fled, Jingle All the Way, Last Man Standing
Biggest risers: The Sunchaster (+11), Happy Gilmore (+10), The Rock (+10) 
Biggest fallers: I Shot Andy Warhol (-12), Ransom (-10), American Buffalo (-9)
Stayed the same: Mulholland Falls (41st), Broken Arrow (42nd), Before and After (43rd)
Average percentage on Flickchart: 58.8% (2 of 12)

In yet further proof that memory increases a person's fondness toward something, 1996 again attains the second highest average percentage on Flickchart, an honor just attained last month by 1997. Then again, this year does have three movies in my top 100 and two in my top 20, meaning the latter two have a 100% ranking on Flickchart when you round up, so maybe it shouldn't come as a huge surprise.

The obscure little Woody Harrelson-starring film The Sunchaser is my biggest riser. I saw this at an advanced screening while I was in Los Angeles, because at the time -- not sure if this is still the case -- there would just be people on the street (usually places like Venice Beach) offering you free tickets to movies and TV shows. In the years since I obviously think of myself as having a pretty decent fondness for this movie, though at the time I ranked it in my bottom five for the year. It's now up at 29th out of 43. 

Also rising by double digits are Happy Gilmore and The Rock, movies I might not have thought a huge amount about at the time. The fact that they have sustained in our culture (people often talk about The Rock as Michael Bay's best -- only good? -- movie) has surely affected my rankings, though I don't think I've seen The Rock all the way through a second time and it's been ages since my second Happy Gilmore viewing.

In terms of fallers, I've obviously turned pretty hard on I Shot Andy Warhol, which I think goes along with a somewhat negative perspective on actress Lily Taylor. (I know, even though she is in my beloved Say Anything. Go figure.) With Ransom, it's probably the case that a movie where Mel Gibson constantly rages feels a little icky these days. American Buffalo was another unique screening situation, but this time it was Rhode Island rather than Los Angeles. I went to an advanced or premiere screening as a result of my new job reporting for The Barrington Times, because the filmmaker (Michael Corrente) was a local guy. I didn't think all that much of the adaptation of David Mamet's play, but I must have boosted it at the time due to the uniqueness of my viewing. Over time, only the fact that I didn't much care for it remains.

Here is my final ranking of years by percentages on Flickchart, in case you are interested:

1. 1999 - 60.93%
2. 1996 - 58.8%
3. 1997 - 58.72%
4. 2000 - 55.72%
5. 1998 - 53.71%
6. 2004 - 53.25%
7. 2001 - 51.81%
8. 2006 - 51.56%
9. 2007 - 51.09%
10. 2003 - 50.67%
11. 2005 - 49.1%
12. 2002 - 47.74%

I have a couple different ways to analyze these results:

1) The fact that all but two of these percentages are over 50 suggests to me that during this snapshot of 12 years, if I saw a movie in time to rank it, it was usually something I was looking forward to that had a better chance of actually working for me. It's been the 15 years since, many of which have overlapped with the streaming era, that I've been more likely to actively seek out bad films in order to give my rankings a more complete representation in the range from best to worst. I bet if I ran these numbers from 2008 to 2021, the percentages would just continue to get lower -- or if I included the movies from these years that I saw after closing my rankings. Across all years for all films I've ranked on Flickchart, these percentages must average out to 50, and I doubt I've got an inordinate number of low Flickchart rankings in the years before 1996.

2) The fact that the top five years are the oldest five years indicates one of four things: the movies were better back then; I feel more fondly about these movies as part of some personal nostalgia for my past; a movie takes time to settle into classic status; when I saw fewer movies I was being more selective about their quality. This last is kind of an offshoot of the previous observation about the percentages. 

This has been a fun exercise for me over the past 12 months, a big trip down memory lane. I hope you've gotten something out of it too. 

Now, stay tuned for the last chapter in this year-long celebration of 25 years or ranking movies: My ranking of #1s from 1 to 26, which I'll probably try to release around New Year's Eve. 

Looking for Richard - again

If I'd wondered why they were doing an advanced screening of Stephen Frears' The Lost King six weeks before its Australian theatrical release, well, it finally became clear when I walked out of the cinema and noticed this poster. 

Since yesterday was November 16th, I guess that was the day the print was going to leave town, so they had to get us in just under the wire. 

(Do prints "leave town" anymore? Are there prints? I don't think so.)

I was a bit tricked walking into Cinema Kino, the cinema below my office, when I saw staff pouring champagne into flutes and mixed drinks into tumblers. But that, bewilderingly, was the opposite direction of where my Lost King screening was. Had they made some mistake?

Not only was there no champagne, there wasn't even a free popcorn and drink, which you often get at these screenings. And I'd eaten nothing before the 6 p.m. start, anticipating such treats.

Upon leaving, I finally figured out that the alcoholic drinks were part of some gala associated with the closing of the festival, attended by fancier people than I. I don't know what movie they showed, but given this poster, it's reasonable to assume it was also The Lost King, just in a different auditorium. The fancy people turned left when they went into the theater, and the unwashed critics with our backpacks and slightly askew hair turned right.

I was going to call this post "My unwitting attendance at the British Film Festival," since in the past I have written about other film festivals that occurred at Palace Cinemas, the German Film Festival and the Scandinavian Film Festival. Then, though, something substantive about the film made me change the title, which I'll get to in a minute.

I suppose you wouldn't know automatically that the picture above of Steve Coogan, Sally Hawkins and a third guy you've probably never heard of (his name is Harry Lloyd) was from The Lost King, especially if you've never heard of the movie. But you've heard of Coogan, Hawkins and director Frears, so you should be hearing about this movie soon.

You've also heard about the tidbit of news from ten years ago now where they found the unceremoniously buried body of Richard III under a parking lot in Leicester (or "carpark" as they say here and in Britain). This is the movie about how that came to occur, and it's delicious subject matter for the always fruitful, not always satisfying genre of "recreation of quirky minor news event from the last 20 years."

Of course finding the buried body of a former king of England is not a minor event in most traditional senses of that phrase, and the circumstances that led to it are rather amazing and improbable. 

The thing I found of most interest is how closely this marries up with the first movie I ever named my best of the year, back in 1996 -- and how much this movie felt like it could have been heading for a similar fate. Which also makes it a great thing to have occurred in a year in which I'm looking at all my previous #1s.

(I'll save you the drama and confirm that The Lost King is not a realistic contender for my #1 movie of 2022, but the fact that it was even in the conversation is saying a lot.)

1) Both The Lost King and Looking for Richard involve Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England, brought to the larger world in Shakespeare's play of the same name, who was thought to have had a hunch, to have killed his nephews, and to have been in desperate need of a horse moments before his death on the battlefield in 1485.

2) Both The Lost King and Looking for Richard view the king through a modern lens, in the latter case as an attempt to understand Shakespeare better in the 1990s, and in the former case to find his body.

3) The name of the project designed to raise money to locate Richard's corpse was the Looking for Richard Project. Which almost makes me wonder if it was a conscious allusion to the name of the 1996 movie, since this was all happening around 2010 (with a culmination of the events in 2012). (One terrible failure of accuracy, though, was that Hawkins' character's kids go to see Skyfall at a fairly early point of the narrative, and that film wasn't released until two months after Richard's body was discovered. For shame!)

The big difference between the two is that I never realized, from the earlier film, that there was a significant quantity of people out there who feel like Richard was improperly branded a usurper, who support his legitimate claim to the throne, and who thought that the traits ascribed to him (the hunch and the predilection for nephew murdering) were propaganda pushed by the new Tudor regime in trying to help the populace embrace the new king, Henry VII. After all, Shakespeare's play was written more than a hundred years after Richard's death, so how certain should we be of its accuracy?

It was actually a campaign by the Richard III Historical Society, of which Hawkins' Philippa Langley was (and I assume still is) a member, that led to the digging up of that carpark and the identification of Richard's remains. 

I won't say any more because I owe it to The Lost King to allow you to discover for yourself the other twists and turns along the way. It's well worth it.

I will say that I'm glad I didn't opt out of this screening to attend another one the same night. The advanced screening for The Menu, which comes out next Thursday, was also held last night, across town. I did RSVP The Lost King first, which was one of the main reasons I stuck with it -- even though I don't like holding onto a review until the film releases six weeks later. (In part because I have trouble forcing myself to write such a review so long in advance, and by the time I do get around to it, I've forgotten some of what I wanted to say.) Fortunately, having to only walk downstairs from my office to attend this screening was a deciding factor.

Interestingly, because Looking for Richard has dropped a little in my estimation after my second viewing, I may actually like The Lost King better -- or that could just be recency bias. Either way, it was a delight, largely because of a fun narrative device that I won't spoil, that blends the realistic events with a bit of fantasy. In any case, you should check it out. 

Finally rewatching my first #1

It was time for another documentary alternate Tuesday on Tuesday night, so I did the thing I'd been putting off for more than 25 years: I rewatched my first-ever #1 movie. (You may recall I am watching all my #1 movies in 2022 as a celebration of 25 years of ranking movies, a period that includes 26 #1s.)

So basically, I loved Al Pacino's Looking for Richard so much that it prompted me to launch one of the most enjoyable and defining ongoing projects of my life ... and then apparently thought I never needed to see it again.

I think the possible explanations for this are worth exploring.

1. A fear that it would not measure up to my memory of it. Nineteen ninety-six was a really great year at the movies for me personally, as the numbers two through four on my rankings became all-timers for me. Two are in my current Flickchart top 20 (Fargo at #7 and The Cable Guy at #16), and the highest ranked of those three -- my #2 of 1996, Flirting With Disaster -- is one of those go-to's I always think of when I consider my favorite "modern" comedies (though I don't know how modern 26 years ago is now). Its Flickchart ranking is none too shabby at #48. When we get to posting my actual 1996 rankings at the end of the year, we can explore how many other 1996 movies may have leap-frogged Looking for Richard in my mind or in my heart, but I reckon pretty quickly after the end of 1996 I knew how much more these movies meant to me than Pacino's documentary would mean going forward. I didn't regret the choice so much as noted its strong immediate impact on me, acknowledging it was an impact that wasn't likely to repeat itself on a revisit.

And speaking of revisits ...

2. I don't usually rewatch documentaries. Pacino's directorial debut was the 815th movie I have seen more than once in my life. Do you know how many others are documentaries? Thirteen. And that's with stretching the definition to include things like Bo Burnham: Inside (though I excluded the comedy specials by Eddie Murphy and -- gulp -- Bill Cosby that I used to watch on repeat, and would no longer add to my movie lists today), and with mitigating circumstances like the movies I watched multiple times while considering them for a documentary film festival. Documentaries I watched more than once by actual choice? You can almost count them on one hand. And none of those 13 movies have I seen more than twice.

3. Accessibility. You don't hear people talk very much about Looking for Richard these days, likely either a function of its availability or a determining factor in decreasing its availability. I bought my copy from a closing video store about seven years ago, so my own accessibility has not been a problem recently, and I suspect most video stores worth their salt would have carried it. But it's not streaming on any of my streaming services, though you can rent it through iTunes.

Whatever the reason, my first #1 was neglected until Tuesday night -- and it remained my only #1 I had not seen more than once, as well as the only documentary I have ever selected as #1. Yes, even my #1 of 2021 is something I've already seen twice. 

So the burning question: What did I think of Looking for Richard, at long last?

Before I get into that, I'll remind you that as I go through 2022 watching every movie I have selected as my #1 of the year, I don't plan to write about each of them here. I want to save some suspense for the end of the year when I reveal a ranking from #1 to #26. But Looking for Richard is an exception, both for the uniqueness of never having revisited it previously, and for the fact that I really haven't written about it on this blog. (A tag did previously exist for it as I wrote about it ever so briefly in a 2011 post ranking my top ten documentaries.)

So yeah, I liked it quite a bit, but I did not feel myself overwhelmed by that special feeling you get from a favorite movie. It's a very solid documentary with a very interesting project of how to help translate Shakespeare to the masses, but a masterpiece? I think not.

So I thought I'd try to put myself back in the headspace of late 1996/early 1997 to analyze why this was such a big win for me.

If memory serves, I saw it over Thanksgiving weekend with my friend, whom I lived with for a short three-month period at that time. The film was released on October 11th, so that sort of tracks -- six weeks was an easily attainable theatrical run back then, especially if the film was acclaimed, like Looking for Richard was. So there could have been a bit of a giddy holiday vibe in the air as we watched it.

I think my once and future girlfriend was also in attendance at that screening, though it's possible this was at our screening of Trainspotting in the same theater during those few months I lived in Somerville, Massachusetts. It would have been in a small group of others, not just her and my friend. She and I dated in 1991 and again in 1999/2000, so this would have been a sort of halfway point between those two poles. It's possible this added a little frisson of excitement to the experience.

Then I remember how much my friend also loved the movie, so I suspect we fed off each other's enthusiasm. Incidentally, this is the same friend who has also been ranking his movies for most of those 25 years, though I know he didn't do it in this first year. He may have been on board by 1997 though.

So as I said earlier, I certainly do not regret having selected Looking for Richard as my #1 movie. It was a true snapshot of how I felt about the film at the time, and it is indeed a really good film, possibly even a great one. 

I suspect it also resonated with me as much as it did because I was only a year removed from college at that point, and I had taken at least one if not multiple Shakespeare classes in college. Although I obviously loved the Bard, and felt the academic drive to parse and understand his words, there were always texts that didn't click with me. So I suspect I really appreciated Pacino's effort to simultaneously stage a stripped-down version of Richard III (which I had never read, and still have not read) and explain its plot in plain terms as he was going, intermingled with interviews with regular people to kind of lay the groundwork for what he was up against. The input of scholars (who aren't credited on screen) and acting greats (who also aren't credited, but I know Vanessa Redgrave, Derek Jacobi and John Gielgud when I see them) also made the journey fun, plus I enjoyed the casting of the likes of Alec Baldwin, Winona Ryder and Kevin Spacey in the play. (Yes, I enjoyed Kevin Spacey. I cannot retroactively delete him from history, much as we might like to, so when I am confronted with him I take his work at face value.)

And the film really does have a good vibe. Pacino has a lot of fun with his collaborators, sometimes argues with them vehemently, and at all times reveals the obvious passion he feels for this material.

One thing I did notice was that this clearly came out in the age before color-blind casting. Not a single actor of color was chosen to essay any of the roles, which was a pretty standard practice back in the day. There are a few minority faces among the interview subjects, but it's pretty tokenish in nature. Again, though, just as we were naive about the monster that is Kevin Spacey back then, we were also naive about representation. "It's more realistic if these people who live in 15th century England are all white." That logic would have bought off any of our qualms back in the day, had those qualms even risen to the level of our awareness.

You may think it's evident that Looking for Richard is now pretty likely to finish last in my end-of-year ranking of #1s, but hey, we have a long way to go. I still have 23 other films that could disappoint me -- if that's even an accurate way to describe this viewing of Looking for Richard -- and I already have a few other candidates in mind.

I'll watch my next one in about two weeks ... and probably not write about it here.

My real top ten "real" films

Thank you for joining me for another edition of Flickchart Tuesdays, where I examine my favorites in some category of film, based on how I have those films ranked on Flickchart.

This week I wanted to look at documentaries. The main reason for that is that my wife and I have been watching documentaries on Monday nights this summer. Last night, however, we watched a slasher film made for about 12 cents called Murder Machine!, which my wife is vetting for a film festival where she serves as a judge. Let's just say in the absence of watching a doco last night, and in order to get the taste of Murder Machine! out of my mouth, I'm writing about documentaries today.

Also, I was interested to see how my official Flickchart rankings of documentaries stack up next to the top ten and honorable mentions I came up with organically in this post, written a little over a year ago. What truer measure of the effectiveness of Flickchart at distilling my true feelings, than to compare a list I produced from my brain with one produced from Flickchart's algorithms? Then again, Flickchart might also help me identify a movie I didn't realize I loved as much as I do.

In case you are bad at clicking on links in posts, here's the list I came up with on June 30, 2010:

10. Madonna: Truth or Dare
9. Religulous
8. Super Size Me
7. Man on Wire
6. American Movie
5. Sicko
4. Microcosmos
3. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
2. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
1. Looking for Richard

Honorable mentions: Bigger Stronger Faster*, Bowling for Columbine, The Cruise, Dig!, Dogtown and Z-Boys, Jesus Camp

I'm also interested to see how far down in my rankings I'll have to go to get 20 films (since I talk briefly about the first ten, then just list 11-20). Last week, when I wrote about foreign films, film #20 was ranked just over 200th overall. However, I also argued in the post linked above that there is a "documentary ceiling" -- in other words, for me, a documentary can be only so good, and can never quite approach the impact of a fiction film.

As a side note, the comparison can't be truly accurate because I've seen possibly as many as 20 more documentaries in the year since I first wrote that post. But I'm not sure if I've seen anything that was so great that it would jump into my top ten.

But we're about to find out, aren't we? That's one of the rules of this series on my blog -- I start writing before I know what results I'll get. So let's see where the day takes us ...

1. Looking for Richard (1996, Al Pacino). And #1 is the same, as I knew it would be. I counted this as my favorite film of 1996. A potentially great Shakespeare teaching tool, Pacino's movie interweaves interviews with average people about Shakespeare and an informal staging of Richard III using fellow film actors (Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, Winona Ryder). It's totally captivating. Flickchart: #127

2. Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010, Banksy). And here comes the first movie I've seen since last year's list. How could I forget about Exit Through the Gift Shop? Wherever the film falls on the spectrum of truth, there's no other way to categorize it than as a documentary. Not only is it an amazing and unprecedented insider's look into the community of street artists, but it also plays with the traditional documentary structure in ways it's almost impossible to describe, as each of the two main characters end up making a film about the other one. Flickchart: #164

3. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007, Seth Gordon). The second-ranked documentary on my original list ends up third here, but it's still second among movies I'd seen at that time. Gordon uses the world of competitive video gaming to give us a classic story about a hero you can cheer and a villain you can hiss, and it's also just a wonderful tale about human aspiration. No wonder they're supposedly making a fiction film version of the story. Flickchart: #177

4. American Movie (1999, Chris Smith). And now we start to see some variation in the rankings. What was sixth on my original list is fourth here -- or third, if you take out Exit From the Gift Shop. However, the ranking is appropriate -- this story of two deluded dreamers trying to make a low-budget horror movie in the dead of a Minnesota winter is both funny and heartbreaking. Flickchart: #322

5. Man on Wire (2008, James Marsh). And Man on Wire came in just behind American Movie on my original list as well, meaning that both were displaced a couple spots by movies I don't actually think of as highly. The most amazing thing about this entertaining movie about a French tightrope walker trying to illegally cross between the two towers of the World Trade Center is that it does not evoke 9/11 -- not once. Marsh knows he has a great real-world spy thriller on his hands, which would only get bogged down by discussions of the terrorist attacks. Flickchart: #345

6. Microcosmos (1996, Claude Nuridsany). A middle-lister on both lists. Nuridsany's look into the microscopic world of insects is fascinating and alive, making the tiny titanic, and the insignificant significant. Possibly the best nature film of all time? Anyone who watched the Earth series might beg to differ. Flickchart: #362

7. Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991, Alek Keshishian). I saw this movie at the height of my interest in Madonna as an artist and a public figure, and I loved the way Keshishian captured her and showed us the "real" Madonna -- even if she was carefully controlling exactly what she wanted us to see. Which I assume she was. Apparently, I liked it a lot better than my tenth favorite documentary, as it was listed previously. Flickchart: #438

8. Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2009, Sacha Gervasi). My third-ranked film on last year's documentary list has fallen since then because I've heard some people make convincing arguments that this wonderful rock documentary had to have been at least partially staged. But this real life Spinal Tap is such a goofy delight, and also so touching, that I don't know if I care that the narrative might have benefited from some manufactured conflict. The movie left me feeling great, and that's what I still take away from it. Flickchart: #443

9. Bowling for Columbine (2002, Michael Moore). I guess I chose to honor the wrong Michael Moore film in my original top ten. I had Sicko, but Flickchart informs me that I like Bowling for Columbine better. Which is probably true. I remember getting emotional at the end of Sicko, but the gun rights debate in Bowling is funnier and probably more consistently astute. However, I still don't love him brow-beating a sickly old Charlton Heston at the end. Flickchart: #456

10. Sicko (2006, Michael Moore). Okay, now Sicko gets its turn after all. Flickchart: #543

I expect Religulous and Super Size Me, the two documentaries that showed up on last year's list but not this year's, as well as most if not all of my honorable mentions, to show up in 11-20:

11. Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001, Stacy Peralta). Flickchart: #544
12. Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (2008, Chris Bell). Flickchart: #567
13. The Cruise (1998, Bennett Miller). Flickchart: Flickchart: #592
14. DiG! (2004, Ondi Timoner). Flickchart: #617
15. After Innocence (2005, Jessica Sanders). Flickchart: #630
16. When We Were Kings (1996, Leon Gast). Flickchart: #673
17. 51 Birch Street (2006, Doug Block). Flickchart: #688
18. Super Size Me (2004, Morgan Spurlock). Flickchart: #704
19. Jesus Camp (2006, Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady). Flickchart: #722
20. Eddie Murphy: Delirious (1983, Bruce Gowers). Flickchart: #738

I was hoping to avoid the appearance of any standup comedy movies to avoid the debate on that particular topic -- is it a documentary or is it "something else"? -- but Eddie Murphy's first concert film snuck in there at #20.

So Religulous, which I ranked #9 on last year's list, does not even make it onto my Flickchart rankings until #1184 overall. I've definitely revised my stance toward it a little bit -- in the same way I don't think it was all that nice for Michael Moore to bully Charlton Heston, I also don't think it was all that nice for Bill Maher to bully the people he bullies in Religulous, both of which occur in the name of a liberal agenda with which I agree. But it's definitely lower in my rankings than I would have thought. I'm sure the dueling process will take care of that over time.

So the lists compared pretty well to each other, with all the honorable mentions and all but one of the top ten accounted for in my first 20 on Flickchart. It is interesting to note how long it takes to get to my 20th documentary, all the way down at #738 overall. Which is consistent with what I've said about fiction films having an advantage over non-fiction.

Back next Tuesday with more scintillating investigations of my personal Flickchart.