The precise quality of a Thea Sharrock movie

If you don't know who Thea Sharrock is, it wouldn't surprise me. She has directed four features, two of which I've seen (Me Before You and The Beautiful Game) and two of which I haven't (The One and Only Ivan and Wicked Little Letters).

The reason I'm talking about Thea Sharrock today is that the only two movies of hers I've seen are exactly next to each other on my Flickchart.

And why does this matter? 

Because I have 6676 movies on my Flickchart, so any two from the same director being next to each other is highly unlikely -- especially when those are the only two movies I've seen by the director.

I guess I am not the world's biggest Thea Sharrock fan, because those movies are #5645 and #5646 out of those 6676.

If you don't understand how Flickchart works, you are developing a big list of the movies you've seen from your favorite to your least favorite. The movies land in their positions by duelling other movies that are already on the list. So when you add a new movie, it duels against the movie that's at the 50th percentile on your chart. If it beats that movie, it then duels the movie that's at the 75th percentile. If it loses to that movie, it duels the movie at the 62nd and a half percentile. And so forth until an exact percentile is determined and an exact ranking is handed out from the total number of movies on your chart. 

I saw The Beautiful Game in July of 2024, which gives you some idea how far behind I've gotten in adding my movies to Flickchart. I used to add them right after I'd seen them, but then I decided to try to nullify the effect of recency bias, so I vowed to wait to add movies until 30 days after I'd seen them. But then when you get out of the habit, you get way behind, and at times I have been more than two years behind on adding my films. I'm trying to catch up, but I don't devote a huge amount of time to it, so I'm not making much progress.

Anyway, when I went through this process for The Beautiful Game, the last film it didn't beat was Me Before You at #5645, while it did beat Brett Haley's 2020 film All Together Now at #5646. So that's how it ended up at #5646, pushing All Together Now down to #5647.

This would have meant nothing to me, except that part of this process means adding the movie to an Excel version of my Flickchart rankings that I also maintain, sort of as a backup to Flickchart in case it ever goes offline. So when I went to add The Beautiful Game, I was gobsmacked to see Thea Sharrock's name already appearing on the line above it. I wondered if I'd blacked out for a minute and forgotten that I'd already written her name, but written it on the wrong line.

But no, I looked it up, and Sharrock directed Me Before You, the weepie starring Sam Claflin and Emilia Clarke, where he's paralyzed and she is his health aide who falls in love with him. (Vanessa Kirby is also in it, I just noticed, though I would not have known who she was in 2016.) 

The funny thing is, when I saw it was coming up against Me Before You, I clicked on Me Before You rather quickly as my choice. In theory, when you get down to the very end of the ranking process, you should agonize over decisions because the movies are very much of a similar quality, if you've done everything correctly. When you are very quick to choose one of the two, it probably means the one you've chosen is too low on your chart -- an unavoidable hazard of Flickcharting, given that none of the movies would be in exactly their correct spot, and some can end up off by a couple hundred or more. I like Me Before You better than this ranking, though I do have some qualms about how it ends. 

I should pause here to say that I don't hate The Beautiful Game either, though the fact that I apparently only like a thousand films less than it would suggest that. I just remember thinking it was pretty mid. We watched it for and with my son, who loves soccer, but I don't think even he thought very much of it. It was no Next Goal Wins, anyway, which we all loved.

I'm making a whole post out of something that is obviously just a coincidence. If it weren't just a coincidence, and there was actual meaning behind it, something like this would have happened to me previously. But I do think it's interesting to consider whether a director's movies can be winnowed down to a precise mathematical value for their effectiveness. Which in the case of Sharrock, for me anyway, would be the 15th percentile of all the movies I've seen.

That seems way too harsh. So the least thing I can do, to be fair to Sharrock, is watch The One and Only Ivan and Wicked Little Letters. And if I do like them better, I'll certainly come back here and make sure the internet knows that Thea Sharrock deserves better than this assessment. I mean, perhaps she's even reading these words right now -- it never cease to amaze me how high up a little blog like mine appears in Google search results.