Well friends, the wait is over.
(You weren't actually waiting.)
This one is about my Flickchart, or uses it to get the movies, in any case. (Actually, the bi-monthly series, at least one of them, sort of does as well.)
First I should say that I expect my experience with Flickchart to change at some point in 2026.
I'm a "Flickchart insider," which means I know personally (though not IRL) the Flickchart creators, and then all sorts of Flickchart superfans who communicate with each other in a Flickchart Facebook group, and do movie challenges. One of the two creators, who I know significantly better than the other, shares the same favorite band with me, Nine Inch Nails, so we chat about them from time to time. I also take pride in having recommended him one of his favorite movies of all time, also one of mine, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, in one of the aforementioned challenges.
Anyway, from chats in this group, I have been expecting a change in the core dueling mechanisms of Flickchart, for something like ten years now. It's been known as v. 2, and indeed, they've been working on it forever. Some users are currently beta testing it, though it has a lot of bugs at this point. Viewing this as an outsider in that sense that I'm not one of the ones on v. 2 yet, though I could be if I wanted to, I know it uses a strange, more counterintuitive algorithm for how films duel each other and how they move within your chart once they win or lose that duel. I suppose it's strange to me only because I don't understand it.
For now, I am happy to not yet be on this new version. Because as I've told you many times in the past, I like to keep an offline version of my Flickchart in an Excel spreadsheet. Which is easy to do, because a victorious movie just jumps one head of the movie it beats, which is easy to keep on top of in a spreadsheet. This new method may not be so easy.
I probably didn't need to give you this whole preamble, though I do think this prospective change in the ranking mechanism happens to lend additional urgency to doing this series this year, because I'm not sure what my chart will look like after I'm ported over to v. 2 along with all the other Flickchart users out there in the world.
So what I want to do in 2026 is rewatch my 12 favorite movies, according to Flickchart, that I've seen only once. I am calling these "one-timers," and so the series will be called Audient One-Timers.
Now, the term "one-timer" usually connotates a movie with either subject matter you can't bear to sit through a second time, or gargantuan length. Both of those will likely apply here to some extent. In fact, I can think of one movie each in my top 100 that could potentially qualify for each.
But in my case, it's more literal, in that it's a movie I love, but I've only seen it once.
The purpose of this will be twofold:
1) If you love a movie, you should see it more than once. That's just being kind to yourself. It's always good to expose ourselves to things we love a second time.
2) If you love a movie, you should prove to yourself that you actually love it by a second viewing, especially if you are committing that love to the "permanence" of something like Flickchart.
So yes it's possible that some of these will be movies I don't love as much on the second time -- in fact, I'm pretty sure that's inevitable. At the moment, I don't plan to forcibly re-rank them on Flickchart to a more appropriate position after each viewing, though there have been some instances in the past where a rewatch has revealed a Flickchart position so out of whack with my actual thoughts on the film, that I've been compelled to do this anyway. My most recent experience with Field of Dreams, for example -- as described here -- was one such case.
The end result should be that I've seen every movie in my top 175 on Flickchart at least twice. That's right, my current 12th highest one-timer is exactly at #175 on my Flickchart.
Now, it's possible I will end up having to watch some movies that are ranked lower a second time, because there may be some of these that I can't get my hands on for a second viewing. Their lack of availabililty may be why I've only watched them once.
But I'd still like to start out with my 12th best one-timer first, and go forward from there. It's more exciting to build toward the best than starting off at the best. And then if there's a higher ranked movie I can't find, that month I will shift and watch the 13th best, or the 14th best if it happens twice, even though that means going out of order for at least that one month.
I should note two other rules:
1) If, through the normal course of dueling movies on Flickchart, a movie that is not currently among my top 12 one-timers defeats a higher ranked film, and therefore becomes part of my top 12, I will do my best to include it. This is not particularly likely to happen, but it could happen.
2) Even less likely is that a brand new viewing will be so beloved by me that I will rank it within that top 175 just from a first viewing. I don't think it serves any point to just go immediately watch this movie a second time because it is now within my top 12, so if such a thing happens, I will exclude it from consideration for this series. (That's especially less likely because I remain very far behind in adding my new viewings to Flickchart.)
I'm including as the art of this post my current 15th best one-timer, because a) I think it's unlikely to be part of this series, and b) even if it were to come up as a potential replacement for a higher-ranked unavailable movie, I doubt I could find it. John Cameron Mitchell's 2006 film Shortbus, currently my #191 on Flickchart, contains scenes that can accurately be described as pornography, or pretty darn close to it. It's also beautiful and made me cry. However, the porn adjacent aspects are what made it very difficult for me to get my hands on originally, and potentially impossible to get now.
One-timers, they come in all shapes and sizes. And in 2026, I will be engaging with a dozen of them, either deepening my appreciation of them, or potentially, at worst, sending them to a more appropriate place on my Flickchart than they've been occupying since I saw them, in many cases years in the past.
Seems like a worthwhile venture to me.
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