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.
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