Seeing the one-timers twice in 2026

I've told you about my bi-monthly series in 2026 -- which is actually two intertwining bi-monthly series with the same name but slightly different functions -- but I have yet to reveal the details of my proper monthly series. 

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. 

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. 

No one's favorite movie

Flickchart is a very large place.

One of the things that always fascinates me about the movie dueling site is how many users it has, considering that I don't usually hear people talk about it outside of the actual Flickchart groups I participate in on Facebook. I assume a lot of people tried it once and maybe a sizeable percentage never went back, leaving the account created and contributing to the site's stats, but with no new activity in a dozen years. I also assume that the diehards like me, still ranking nearly 15 years after first discovering the site, are comparatively few.

But just how many actually tried it at one point is still pretty astonishing.

I don't have the actual numbers, but I can make general determinations of size through the circumstantial evidence of how many people have a particular movie as their #1.

On each Flickchart movie page, it shows how many users have this movie ranked #1. There are some really weird results. Recently I was adding 80 for Brady, and I noticed that one user had the movie as their #1 of all time. I later discovered that this person had only 20 movies, all 2023 releases, and 80 for Brady was actually their #5.

So there may be some glitching going on here. But for the purposes of this post I'm going to assume that most of the stats I'm about to give you are legit. 

On Friday I was really bored at work -- it was really slow -- and I decided to see how far I had to go on my own personal chart before I found a film that no other Flickcharters had ranked #1. It took me longer than I thought, all the way down at #51.

Here are my top 50, with the number of Flickchart users who have the movie as their #1 listed afterwards in parenthesis:

1. Raising Arizona (49)
2. Back to the Future (2140)
3. Pulp Fiction (3227)
4. Raiders of the Lost Ark (2121)
5. Citizen Kane (521)
6. Star Wars (3478)
7. Toy Story (1328)
8. Fargo (900)
9. This is Spinal Tap (55)
10. The Iron Giant (66)
11. The Princess Bride (1372)
12. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1357)
13. Goodfellas (1612)
14. Tangled (62)
15. Jesus Christ Superstar (1)
16. The Cable Guy (14)
17. Children of Men (203)
18. Say Anything ... (20)
19. Bound (5)
20. Do the Right Thing (32)
21. Run Lola Run (108)
22. WarGames (11)
23. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (50)
24. Donnie Darko (885)
25. Unforgiven (205)
26. When Harry Met Sally (73)
27. The Shawshank Redemption (3382)
28. Defending Your Life (3)
29. Time Bandits (5)
30. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1023)
31. A Fish Called Wanda (26)
32. Ghost (24)
33. Big (190)
34. Vanilla Sky (111)
35. Four Weddings and a Funeral (13)
36. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (10)
37. Die Hard (1038)
38. Lost in Translation (691)
39. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (1647)
40. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1025)
41. The Empire Strikes Back (3748)
42. Adaptation (108)
43. Galaxy Quest (47)
44. The Exorcist (511)
45. Elf (244)
46. Dumb and Dumber (583)
47. Election (16)
48. Starship Troopers (321)
49. Schindler's List (959)
50. Rabbit Hole (2)

And finally ...

51. Flirting With Disaster (0)

I did not continue to see when I'd get the next zero.

In case you weren't doing the math, that's the #1s of 35,622 Flickchart users crammed just into my personal top 50.

And this isn't even considering all the Flickcharters who have beloved films like Casablanca, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Wizard of Oz, Sunset Boulevard, Gone With the Wind and countless others as their #1. (Two of these come shortly after the top 50 on my chart. The rest are farther down.)

Simply put, there are a lot of Flickchart users out there. 

Now I know I have some popular choices in my top 50. Thirteen of these movies appear as the #1 movie for more than one thousand Flickcharters. But this top 50 is not just chalk. Bound, for example, is nothing like a household name, yet a full five Flickcharters consider it their favorite movie of all time.

Why no love for Flirting With Disaster, when so much other love is being spread around?

Helpfully, the page for each movie shows how many users have it in their top 20, and there are 18 of those for David O. Russell's 1996 film. (I mean, who am I to complain -- they have it higher than I do.)

But it's just interesting that when so many different movies are someone's favorite -- even 80 for Brady, or so it would appear to someone who wasn't investigating too closely -- that any movie as good as Flirting With Disaster would have no ultimate champion out there in the Flickchart community.

I don't know what point I really have with this post or the observations within. I think I was just bored on a slow Friday. 

6000 movies on Flickchart: How consistent have I been?

I have what you might call an obsession with documentation. You may have noticed.

One way this expresses itself is by keeping track of my movements on Flickchart, partly so that if their server ever dies, I'll still have my rankings in an Excel file. But partly also for analyses like the one I am about to do.

I've just reached the milestone of 6,000 movies added to Flickchart, which is still 187 shy of my actual number of viewings. I've gotten behind on what was once a real-time ranking of new movies seen, but right now I'm as close to being caught up as I have been in some time, only about six months behind.

And having just crossed that milestone, I decided it was time to analyze my own Flickcharting to see how consistent I've been. But first I need to explain how it was even possible I could do that.

I'll start by explaining my method of tracking my Flickcharting offline. I have an Excel spreadsheet which gives a real-time snapshot of where my movies are on Flickchart. When a new movie gets added, I go to the appropriate row on that sheet and insert it, moving all the other movies down by one, in keeping with what actually occurs on the site. When a movie wins a duel against another and moves up that way, I'll cut it and paste it from its lower rung on the spreadsheet to its new position of prominence. In this way, I will always have an exact backup of my Flickchart in Excel.

But then I also have a sheet in the same workbook where I keep track of the movements as they occur. I tend to alternate adding new movies with dueling random movies, so you will get a pair of line items on the sheet that look like this, my most recent two "transactions" completed:

A quick explanation of this.

The top line shows that The Golden Compass beat Copland in a random duel, which moves it from 929th on my chart to 884th, pushing Copland down to 885th. I recently rewatched Copland and was not enthralled with it, so I expect more duels with outcomes like this.

The second line shows my addition of C'mon C'mon, a film I was not a big fan of. There are only about a thousand films I've ranked so far that I liked less. As you can see, it landed at 4923 on its initial entry into the chart, losing to Skyscraper but besting The Last Unicorn. (Seeing as how I have not seen The Last Unicorn since the early 1980s, it's dubious how accurate this is anyway.)

If my screenshot had been extended just a little to the left, you'd see that this was row 4243 in the spreadsheet, which gives you an approximate idea how long I've been keeping track of these movements.

So what to do with all this data? Well I'll tell you.

One would be to track a particular film's movements over time. Did I mention that I also take snapshots of the main page every 10,000 rankings, saving them as their own sheet, so I can look back in time to see where I once was? Well I do that too. However, that's on as-needed basis when I'm curious about a particular title, and so far, the need has not arisen.

Instead, I decided to use this milestone to see how consistent my dueling decisions have been over the years. By searching titles -- assuming I spelled them correctly in my haste to record them -- I can see how many movies beat another movie at one point in time, then lost to the same movie at a different point in time. Theoretically, the implicit goal of working toward a perfect Flickchart means that all your decisions are sacrosanct and internally consistent with one another -- an impossible standard, but one all we Flickcharters secretly like to believe is hypothetically attainable.

This little trawl of my data would show me just how consistent I've been.

Now, if I wanted to spend all my time analyzing this data, I'm sure there's a lot I could find out. But I'd really need an algorithm to help with something like that. I'm not some Howard Hughes who has all the time I want to parse my Flickcharting decisions while wearing boxes of Kleenex on my feet.

So I decided to just go from the top of the list and see how many inconsistencies I could find in my top, say, 100. Due to the way I duel -- which I won't explain right now, just trust me -- those top 100 movies duel more than any other on my chart, so they are the easiest to track if I want the most number of results.

Now, it should be no surprise that the top ten did not contain many movements. I've not had a lot of changes in my top ten during this time. In fact, since Raising Arizona has been my #1 the whole time, it doesn't appear at all on this page of the workbook -- having never lost a duel nor needed to win a duel to move up.

But as we get closer to the bottom of that top ten, some interesting results are revealed.

For example, I discovered that my #7, Fargo, has both beaten and lost to my #8, Toy Story. Since they are only separated by one on my chart, one might assume something like this would be the case. A rewatch of either one or the other could easily be responsible for such a shift, though in this case, I doubt that's a factor -- I happen to have not rewatched Fargo since 2012 and Toy Story since 2013. I haven't been keeping this spreadsheet for that long. (In fact, Excel says I created it on May 28, 2014.)

So while we said this result is not a surprise, it may be a surprise just how frequently this has occurred after these two.

The Iron Giant, my current #10, has both beaten and lost to Wargames, my current #21. I think this movement probably occurred not long after my most recent Iron Giant viewing in late 2018, when it ultimately moved into a spot in the top ten that it has not yet relinquished.  

Tangled, my current #14, has both beaten and lost to Jesus Christ Superstar, my current #15. But then Jesus Christ Superstar has also beaten and lost to Schindler's List, which is now down at #43. JCS used to "slum it" with Schindler's List down in the 40s but has since gotten a big boost. 

As we continue, more movies have switched places with more than one other movie. Do the Right Thing (#20) has had trouble deciding whether it's better or worse than both Run Lola Run (#22) and Unforgiven (#24). Wargames not only traded places with Iron Giant, as listed above, but also with Big (#33). The same can be said for Run Lola Run, which adds Donnie Darko (#23) to its list of dance partners in addition to Do the Right Thing, and then there's Shawshank Redemption (#26) being fickle with both A Fish Called Wanda (#30) and Time Bandits (#31).

I abandoned this exercise at this point, as it was becoming pretty clear that these sort of results would continue to bear themselves out down the chart.

I suppose what I would really need is to see if two movies that are far apart from each other on the chart have actually mutually beaten each other, but a) that's much harder to track, because I would have to have my suspicions of which titles these might be in advance, and b) Flickchart doesn't really work that way, except for over a long period of time with a lot of intervening movements. Once one film beats another, they are next to each other on the chart, at least for the immediate future -- so it's not so easy for them to be at a great distance from one another again, unless you purposefully re-rank a movie because it seems out of place.

I did find one interesting result from within this top 26, which was that Bound (#19) actually beat Big (#33) at two different times. How is it possible for one film to leap over another film twice? Shouldn't it be ahead of that film after the first win? Yes it is, but then the second film can leap frog the first by beating a film that's ahead of both of them. It's nice to know that both times that Bound and Big dueled with Big in the lead, I saw it fit to reverse their respective positions. That's the sort of consistency I'm looking for. Of course, I don't and can't keep track of how many times one of the films might have beaten the other without their positions changing -- and in fact, Big might have won a duel against Bound in this scenario when it was in the higher slot.

There's one other takeaway I want to discuss before I let you go.

I noted that Shawshank had beaten A Fish Called Wanda and vice versa, but what I didn't say is that A Fish Called Wanda has actually leaped past Shawshank two different times, with Shawshank getting the win in the middle duel. 

Now I don't keep track of the dates these duels occurred on this spreadsheet, but I can tell you that on line 1888 -- which means after I'd added 944 new movies and had 944 lower movies win a duel over a higher movie -- Wanda defeated Shawshank to move from 30th to 21st. Five hundred twelve "transactions" later, on line 2400, it was Shawshank upending Wanda to go from 24th to 23rd. Then a mere 142 lines later, which was probably only a couple months depending on how frequently I was charting at the time, Wanda claimed its revenge on Shawshank by moving from 25th to 24th. It seems unlikely that I watched either movie during that time, though I have seen both movies in the past ten years.

But that's not nearly the shortest time period to change my mind. Sticking with Shawshank, on line 2602, Time Bandits bested Shawshank to move from 26th to 25th. Only 64 transactions later -- in other words, only 32 new movies added and only 32 movies repositioned by the outcome of a duel -- Shawshank took the position back by jumping from 27th to 25th. And yes, that two-slot difference suggested there was an intervening transaction related to Shawshank, which was the aforementioned Big insinuating itself between the two of them. 

The only real conclusion to draw from this is what Flickcharters have acknowledged from time immemorial, time immemorial being the 13+ years Flickchart has been available to the public: that human beings, perhaps especially cinephiles, are fickle, and they might select differently between two movies depending on what day of the week it was and what mood they were in.

And when you have a chart with more than 6,000 movies on it, these relative positions are anything but absolute -- even when your thoughts don't change as the result of new information, like a repeat viewing. These are fine differences indeed, imperceptible levels of preference and variations in quality. 

So yeah, I've written all this to conclude something you likely would have surmised before you even started reading.

Hey but at least I used my data. 

That hot erotic thriller starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow

Flickchart is known for having a wide variety of alternate posters for its movies, and its algorithm is capable of throwing different ones up there on any given occasion. It can be really delightful to see variations on posters you've seen a hundred times -- like, instead of Bruce Willis' haunted face next to Nakatomi Plaza with its rooftop exploding, a weird bit of German abstract art with few recognizable shapes.

Because the crew who add movies to the site -- some of whom I know -- like to pick up whatever posters are out there, we also get the terrible baits and switches. Like this one I saw today.

I guess James Gray probably shouldn't have called his 2008 movie Two Lovers if he wanted to avoid this inevitable prurient form of false advertising.

If you've seen this movie, you know that it's an indie romantic drama, and a really good one at that. At this point I don't really remember what I loved so much about it, but I obviously think very highly of it, as it currently sits at #653 on my Flickchart out of nearly 6,000 movies. 

This is the more typical example of its poster, and the one that far more accurately depicts what the movie is about and what viewers should expect from it:

Now, this does suggest intimacy and possibly even eroticism, but it also shows Paltrow in a winter cap. And that's something I do remember about this movie, it being very wintry.

To the alternate poster's credit, it does contain a tagline that's a bit more reflective of the film's true tone: "Sometimes we leave everything to find ourselves." It may be reflective of the tone, but I'm not sure how well it actually encapsulates the film's themes. 

In searching to find Two Lovers' exact spot on my Flickchart, I first encountered The Killing of Two Lovers, my #3 movie from a couple years ago that's even higher on my chart at #351. Just for a kick I decided to see if having the word "two lovers" in your title basically forces you to lean into the potential eroticism angle.

And while there's certainly a poster giving the accurate depiction of Robert Machoian's wintry, windswept indie ...

... you have to go to Asia to get it. (Sorry, I can't say for certain what language that is.) While the less accurate American version is ... 

Hey, skin sells. 

And if it's baiting and switching viewers into a good movie, it's for the greater good. 

Drafting a team of ten movies to watch forever

It's been a while since I've done a "project post" on this blog. Lo and behold, I thought of one right at the time that I'm preparing to move in just three weeks. Seems unlikely, or a bad use of my available time, but I need distractions right now I guess -- perhaps more than ever.

I'm not overly missing the end of my fantasy baseball season, which is now two months in the past, but I'm continuing to listen to baseball podcasts, so I guess the related issues are sticking in my head. On the most recent episode of Circling the Bases from NBC SportsEdge, they did a snake draft of Thanksgiving foods. 

For those of you not familiar with what this might mean, it means that the two podcasters selected available Thanksgiving foods in rounds to comprise a "team" of foods, similar to how you compile a team of fantasy baseball players each year in March. As in the first guy made his selection in the first round, then it was the other guy's turn, not only to make his selection in the first round, but to make his selection in the second round back to back. Then it was the other guy's turn for two selections, his second round pick and his third round pick. And so forth. 

A "snake draft" is a draft that snakes around, not returning to the first picker when the second round begins, but proceeding in reverse order. That means, theoretically, that no one picker gets a significant advantage over anyone else. Let's say there are ten teams, as that makes it more clear than just two. The tenth picker has only the 10th best choice of whatever is available -- usually, that would be major league baseball players, not food -- but then that person also gets the 11th best pick, so he/she has an advantage going into the second round. Then the ninth team gets the 12th pick. It's supposed to all even out over the course of the draft. 

And like in a draft with major league baseball players, their Thanksgiving draft required them to fill certain "positions" -- an entree, three side dishes and a dessert. Just how you can't pick all outfielders when you are drafting a fantasy baseball team, but rather, must draft someone at every position on the field, these Thanksgiving drafters had to not overload themselves on desserts, for example.

I don't know if I got the idea directly as a result of this podcast episode, but I decided to apply the draft logic to movies -- specifically, my favorite movies of all time.

Now, I would not be making any decisions in this draft. I would simply be assigning my movies to "teams" based on their position on my current Flickchart. The idea would not be to make selections among my favorite movies for a perfect team for myself, but rather, to draft up teams involving all my favorites and deciding which of these teams was my favorite.

The stakes would be high. I would draft up 16 teams of ten movies apiece, covering my top 160 movies on Flickchart. Then I would choose one team of ten movies that would be the only movies I could watch for the rest of time. It's kind of like the death match rules on the Filmspotting podcast, where they pit two movies against each other, and then the movie that loses is thrown into the incinerator, meaning no one can ever watch it again.

Why 16? Well, my real fantasy baseball league has 16 teams. And the more options, the harder to ultimately reach a conclusion, making it tougher on myself.

Just so I'm sure you understand how this works, I'll clarify the draft logic. Let's do the first two rounds so you understand which ranked movie on Flickchart gets assigned to which team. So in round one, here's what the teams get:

Team 1 - pick #1 and pick #32
Team 2 - pick #2 and pick #31
Team 3 - pick #3 and pick #30
Team 4 - pick #4 and pick #29

And so forth. And then when round 3 begins, Team 1 gets pick #33 and it goes snaking onward from there.

The following 16 teams were produced. I'm not going to go to the trouble of showing the ranking # next to each film, nor, for space reasons, a director and year for each film. If you really wanted to figure out how the films are ranked on my Flickchart, you could plug them into this snake draft formula. 

One other point of clarification: A person's Flickchart is never perfect. There are always movies that are ranked too high or ranked too low, depending on what duels they've had, how you were feeling on a particular day, etc. But these 160 movies are battle-tested, and if they deviate from my "real" feelings about the films, it's not by a huge amount. However, I would not be surprised if the end results of this little experiment included taking advantage of some movies I loved that were ranked too low on my chart -- in real fantasy baseball terms, those would be players I was able to draft later than expected, making them a "steal."

Also I have to pedantically note: Because I am writing these as a comma-separated list, I am excising commas from the titles. I know, the horror. 

Okay I suspect I have already lost most of you so let's just get into it:

Team 1 - Raising Arizona, Big, WarGames, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Return of the Jedi, Goonies, Apollo 13, Sideways, Boogie Nights, Harakiri

Team 2 - Back to the Future, Ghost, Vanilla Sky, Like Father Like Son, Seven Samurai, A Separation, The Player, Misery, My Cousin Vinny, Happiness

Team 3 - Pulp Fiction, Time Bandits, Lost in Translation, Synecdoche New York, Election, Rear Window, Silence of the Lambs, Where the Wild Things Are, Memento, Toy Story 2

Team 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, The Exorcist, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Jacob's Ladder, Under the Skin, Total Recall, Chicago

Team 5 - Citizen Kane, A Fish Called Wanda, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Adaptation, My Neighbor Totoro, Glory, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Blackcoat's Daughter, Parasite, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

Team 7 - Fargo, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Dumb and Dumber, Bonnie & Clyde, Greed, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, The Matrix, Major League, Kissing Jessica Stein, Ruby Sparks

Team 8 - Toy Story, Defending Your Life, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Spring Breakers, Jaws, Stand by Me, Finding Nemo, My Life as a Dog, A Ghost Story

Team 9 - This is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally ..., The Empire Strikes Back, Parenthood, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Philadelphia, Superman II, Inside Llewyn Davis, Rabbit Hole, Mother

Team 10 - The Iron Giant, Unforgiven, Elf, There Will Be Blood, A Christmas Story, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Twelve Monkeys, Tanna, Rain Man, United 93

Team 11 - The Princess Bride, Donnie Darko, Almost Famous, Dangerous Liaisons, Once, Animal House, Miller's Crossing, Dances With Wolves, Coco, Trainspotting

Team 12 - 2001: A Space Odyssey, Run Lola Run, Die Hard, Titanic, The Social Network, Poltergeist, Step Brothers, The Last Temptation of Christ, Ordet, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial

Team 13 - Goodfellas, Do the Right Thing, Glengarry Glen Ross, Ace in the Hole, The Bicycle Thief, Blade Runner, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Das Boot, The Untouchables, The Crow

Team 14 - Tangled, Bound, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Cell, Network, Dave, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Three Kings, Smoke Signals, Truly Madly Deeply

Team 15 - The Cable Guy, Say Anything, Flirting With Disaster, All About Eve, North by Northwest, Moon, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sherlock Jr., Kicking and Screaming (1995), Night of the Hunter

Team 16 - Jesus Christ Superstar, Children of Men, Starship Troopers, Schindler's List, Malcolm X, Sunset Blvd., Let the Right One In, Cinema Paradiso, Hamlet (2000), The Wages of Fear

Before I go any further, now is the time to make any predictions you may have, as well as choose a team for yourself. (That's such a data dump that I don't know if either of these things is possible, but more power to you if you want to do it.)

Boy was this hard. These are all my babies.

I decided I would do rounds, eliminating half the teams in each round until I narrowed it down to just one. That made it much easier actually.

As with assembling a fantasy baseball team, the guiding principle is to have an even mix of talents and positions. An even mix of positions is a requirement in that format. There are no requirements here, but if I'm going to be watching only these ten films for eternity, I need a variety of genres, tones and time periods.

And I need COMEDY. I'm going to have to have regular occasions to laugh if I'm going to be watching only these ten films. That helped eliminate some teams right off the bat. For example, neither Team 13 nor Team 16 had a single comedy in them. Easy peasy. Gone, even if that meant killing films I dearly love. That's the nature of this business. Some other teams that had a decent comedy representation were also eliminated due to other deficiencies in their variety, or doubling up on other resources. For example, Team 8 had two Pixar films, which was too much for this format.

That got me down to the following eight teams:

Team 1 - Raising Arizona, Big, WarGames, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Return of the Jedi, Goonies, Apollo 13, Sideways, Boogie Nights, Harakiri

Team 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, The Exorcist, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Jacob's Ladder, Under the Skin, Total Recall, Chicago

Team 5 - Citizen Kane, A Fish Called Wanda, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Adaptation, My Neighbor Totoro, Glory, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Blackcoat's Daughter, Parasite, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

Team 7 - Fargo, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Dumb and Dumber, Bonnie & Clyde, Greed, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, The Matrix, Major League, Kissing Jessica Stein, Ruby Sparks

Team 9 - This is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally ..., The Empire Strikes Back, Parenthood, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Philadelphia, Superman II, Inside Llewyn Davis, Rabbit Hole, Mother

Team 10 - The Iron Giant, Unforgiven, Elf, There Will Be Blood, A Christmas Story, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Twelve Monkeys, Tanna, Rain Man, United 93

Team 15 - The Cable Guy, Say Anything, Flirting With Disaster, All About Eve, North by Northwest, Moon, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sherlock Jr., Kicking and Screaming (1995), Night of the Hunter

This was the time to start eliminating other teams where there were double ups. Team 5 had two films written by Charlie Kaufman, for example, and though he's one of my all-time favorite writing talents, that was too much using the current parameters. Then Team 10 had two Christmas movies -- the only two Christmas movies out of the whole 160, actually. By itself, one of those movies would have been a boon to the team it was on, but together they were overkill.

Team 15 was an interesting case of a really good mix of movies that didn't represent me as a cinephile in all the ways that it should. Nearly half the movies are comedies while nearly the other half are from before 1960. There were some great repeat viewing candidates in there but the team ultimately was not diverse enough.

I also noticed at this stage that I was going to be eliminating any team that had an animated film in it. Tragic.

That left the following four teams standing:

Team 1 - Raising Arizona, Big, WarGames, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Return of the Jedi, Goonies, Apollo 13, Sideways, Boogie Nights, Harakiri

Team 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, The Exorcist, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Jacob's Ladder, Under the Skin, Total Recall, Chicago

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

Team 7 - Fargo, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Dumb and Dumber, Bonnie & Clyde, Greed, 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, The Matrix, Major League, Kissing Jessica Stein, Ruby Sparks

At this point I think I can start talking about their individual strengths and weaknesses.

Team 1 has my favorite movie of all time, plus a number of other sentimental favorites from my childhood (Big, WarGames, Return of the Jedi, Goonies). Extra points for having a Star Wars movie. But is that loading up too much on nostalgia? Although I respect the hell out of The Passion of Joan of Arc, I'm not sure if that's a movie I want to be watching all the time (I've still only seen it once). Harakiri is a new favorite that I've also seen only once, but is it too slow to watch repeatedly? Boogie Nights gives me what I called an "auteur epic" as I was making notes on these films. Apollo 13 is a strong selling point to this group.

Team 4 has a number of teams doing double duty, which is really useful in this type scenario. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home fell earlier on in the process, but Galaxy Quest has the same flexibility by serving as both comedy and sci-fi. Raiders and Shawshank are a very strong 1-2 punch, and this group has a lot of something lacking in the other lists: horror. Between The Exorcist, Jacob's Ladder and Under the Skin, I'll be plenty creeped out, and Ghostbusters (another double duty) even has the "There is no Dana only Zool" scene. Quest, Ghostbusters and Dr. Strangelove also provided different intellectual levels of comedy. Bonus points for having a musical (Chicago). However, Strangelove is the only film from before 1973. 

Team 6 also has four different distinct sorts of comedy from different eras, those being The Great Dictator, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Airplane! and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Star Wars, T2 and Strange Days fill out sci-fi admirably. Wizard of Oz joins The Great Dictator in giving us some bonafide classics, plus Oz is also a musical. I'll be light on horror with only The Sixth Sense, but The Sixth Sense also has a scene that makes me cry, so it can join with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly whenever I need sentiment. Butterfly also allows me to get on a foreign language film. 

Team 7 contains a Coen movie in Fargo, which is a big bonus as the Coens made two of my top ten films of all time (along with #1 Raising Arizona). Dumb and Dumber and Major League both give me comedy, and Major League is my only chance on the whole list to ever watch a sports movie again. Greed gives me a classic silent film, and having one film that runs four hours could be useful in this scenario. The Matrix and Star Trek II give me sci-fi, and Jessica Stein and Ruby Sparks give me romantic comedies, the latter with a built-in head trip element. Bonnie & Clyde provides a taste of classic New Hollywood.

After a struggle, Team 1 and Team 7 were eliminated. Bye bye Coen brothers.

Leaving only these two finalists:

Team 4 - Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Shawshank Redemption, The Exorcist, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Jacob's Ladder, Under the Skin, Total Recall, Chicago

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

And since I've already outlined the selling points for these teams above, I'll just give you the winner:

Team 6 - Star Wars, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Wizard of Oz, Airplane!, Strange Days, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Great Dictator, The Sixth Sense

The variety of types of comedy present here was a big deciding factor here. Four Weddings will remind me of my formative Monty Python period after I had to eliminate Holy Grail in an earlier round, and it's charming as hell. Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz are all-time classic family films, making up somewhat for not getting any animation on my final team. I may not have quite as much head trip content on this list as some other lists, but Strange Days and The Sixth Sense both qualify. And Airplane! is there when I just want to be goofy.

Overall it's just a very solid list with a lot of versatility. Which is what you want when you will be watching these movies for the rest of time.

I realized after the fact that I doubled up on James Cameron, as Cameron also had a hand in Strange Days as writer and producer. Oh well, no list is perfect. 

And for the 150 movies I will never see again ... you will carry on in my heart. 

Okay, thanks for sticking this out, assuming you did. 

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. 

My top 64 of the 1990s

Eight years ago I was super excited about my top 25 of the 2000s, posted on this blog about four weeks after the decade ended. (Read here if you're interested.)

I was excited enough that I wanted to go back and retroactively post my top 25 of the 1990s. But just scanning the list of my favorite titles of the decade gave me a headache. How would I ever narrow it down to just 25? The impossibility of the task put my ambitions more or less permanently on ice.

Well, maybe less permanently.

I've now got my excuse -- and also an excuse to go more than just 25 deep.

The first podcast I started listening to back in 2011, Filmspotting, is in the final four of their annual Filmspotting Madness tournament, which pits various films or film personalities in a March Madness-style tournament of 64, whittling it down to just one winner over a period of six weeks. Listeners choose a winner in all the duels by voting in polls on their website. Previous installations have focused on actors and actresses (2015), directors (2016) and last year, the films in the Filmspotting pantheon (films that have been deemed ineligible for their weekly top five lists because they're just too great and have been talked about too much).

This year is the first year in a three-year plan. In 2018 they're trying to determine the best movies of the 1990s, and they will follow that in 2019 with the best movies of the 2000s. That'll time out perfectly to be discussing the best movies of the 2010s when everyone else is talking about that in the early part of 2020.

What more excuse did I need?

Now, when I selected my top 25 films of the 2000s back in 2010, I did it completely organically. I narrowed my selections down to maybe 40 candidates, rewatched a good ten films in that January alone, and then produced the top 25 only from my own conclusions about their quality and my affection for them.

"What other way would there be to do it, Vance?"

Well I'm glad you asked. The easiest way to do it would be to just look at my Flickchart. The chart can and would tell me what my top 25 movies of the 2000s were based on the decisions I've made in various duels over time, which have led to an exact ranking for every film I've charted. If I believed it to be 100% accurate, it would arguably be the best way to go.

But I didn't necessarily believe it would be 100% accurate. Plus, making a list is a creative process. Even if my Flickhart list would be evidence of my own thought process on the topic, as recorded over a long period of time, there are enough variables in the decisions I've made that I didn't feel comfortable just having the website spit out my answers for me. I wanted to generate them on my own, if only for the aesthetic value of the exercise, of consciously considering and selecting them with only this context in mind.

And that's what I'll do in two years when it's time to choose my best of the 2010s. But the 1990s? Remember that headache I told you about that they gave me?

So I decided this time, I would just let Flickchart do its job. It'll be a lot easier on me, especially in a post I want to just crank out in a timely manner. Besides, it's a bit more honest, isn't it? I won't be selecting movies I think will gain me credibility but I don't really love, though I hope you know me well enough to know I don't do that anyway. These will be my favorites, pure and simple, a result of having selected them over time in a series of individual decisions governed by honest preferences.

I'm inclined to write a blurb about each one, but you don't need to read 64 blurbs. Twenty-five seems about right, as that's what I also did back in 2010. Twenty-five short blurbs, because many of these titles are ones you likely know, love, and know everything great about already.

So, in time for the championship game between Michigan and Villanova in college basketball's actual March Madness tournament, here's what Flickchart tells me are my top 64 films released between 1990 and 1999:

64. Short Cuts (1993)
63. Groundhog Day (1993)
62. Se7en (1995)
61. The Professional (1994)
60. Ulee's Gold (1997)
59. Smoke Signals (1998)
58. Beauty and the Beast (1991)
57. Misery (1990)
56. Trainspotting (1996)
55. Wayne's World (1992)
54. Total Recall (1990)
53. Kicking and Screaming (1995)
52. Toy Story 2 (1999)
51. Awakenings (1990)
50. A Man of No Importance (1994)
49. The Crow (1994)
48. A Simple Plan (1998)
47. Thelma & Louise (1991)
46. Speed (1994)
45. Before Sunrise (1995)
44. The Crucible (1996)
43. Swingers (1996)
42. Contact (1997)
41. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
40. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
39. Apollo 13 (1995)
38. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
37. Jacob's Ladder (1990)
36. Happiness (1998)
35. The Sixth Sense (1999)
34. Three Kings (1999)
33. My Cousin Vinny (1992)
32. Boogie Nights (1997)
31. Dave (1992)
30. Dances With Wolves (1990)
29. Philadelphia (1993)
28. Malcolm X (1992)
27. The Player (1992)
26. Starship Troopers (1997)

25. The Matrix (1999) - The two most influential films of the decade bookend my top 25, with The Matrix clocking in here. This barely made my top 25 of 1999, landing at #22 on my year-end list, but I couldn't have known at that time how it would change cinema and grow in stature. I don't just love The Matrix because of its reputation, though. I love it because it's almost perfectly realized, and is a total whiz bang of a movie.

24. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) - I still remember watching this on a date in 1991 and feeling enthralled by it. And though I haven't revisited it more than twice in the ensuing years, that feeling of being enthralled has never left me. It has one of the most iconic characters/performances of all time, and it set a new standard for serial killer movies that made it almost as influential as my #25 and my #1.

23. Strange Days (1995) - Rarely is technology in a science fiction film used so successfully to find the heart of the story. This is a movie about love, loss and the loss of love in a scuzzy near future that is looking more and more like our own, in the film that showed me Ralph Fiennes could play a hero as well as a monstrous Nazi, and reminded me that Angela Bassett is just awesome.

22. 12 Monkeys (1995) - Another great head trip takes my next spot. Bruce Willis' first comeback (would that be fair to say?) has one of its true highlights in Terry Gilliam's film about a virus and time travel and, well, quite a bit else. It's Gilliam through and through and though that might disappoint us nowadays in light of his recent support of Harvey Weinstein, it was great then, and I won't deduct credit from the movie in retrospect.

21. Galaxy Quest (1999) - A comedy so good I saw it in the theater on consecutive nights. This loving Star Trek lampoon may be in my top ten comedies of all time and gave me a permanent fondness for Tim Allen (who will also appear later on this list). The cast also includes Sigourney Weaver and Sam Rockwell and I could just go on and on in a lovefest about this movie. It's got heart, it's got great production design and it's funny as hell.

20. Titanic (1997) - My heart will go on, and so will my affection for Titanic. I just can't quit it. (Wait, now I'm crossing my movie quotes.) A theatrical viewing of this in 3D a few years ago confirmed that I still love my #1 movie of 1997 and that I'd be happy on almost any occasion to sit down and watch it for three hours and 15 minutes. Some Titanic defenders might swear their appreciation for it is purely technical, but what can I say, I love the love story too.

19. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) - The movie I would have least expected to appear on this list if you asked me after I first watched the trailer for it. "Who is this Hugh Grant character and why does he think he's so great?" Well, the answer is because he is so great, and this movie is delightful as hell -- even with Andie MacDowell in it. This is like comfort food for me. I own it and come back to it regularly.

18. Dumb and Dumber (1994) - The fact that Dumb and Dumber is only my 18th favorite film of the 1990s shows you how crazy good this decade was for me. I could watch this movie any time of the day or night. I used to say that if this came on TV I would be unable not to watch it until the end, though I'm not sure how many times that actually happened. It makes me shoot milk out of my nose. "Ah lahk it a lot."

17. Flirting With Disaster (1996) - David O. Russell was never better than in the 1990s, and this is his best of three great films from the decade. This is the very definition of the modern screwball comedy and it just flies from one great set piece to the next. I've never liked Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tea Leoni or Richard Jenkins better -- though Stiller has another reason to be praised in 1996 coming up later on the list.

16. Election (1999) - It's appropriate that Alexander Payne's best film comes right after Russell's, since for a while I thought of them both as personal favorites who couldn't do wrong. For a while. They've both gone comparatively astray for me recently, but Election is prime Payne, when his wicked humor combined perfectly with structural narrative playfulness to produce something utterly rewatchable. Strangely, it's a feel good movie even though most of the characters are bad.

15. Ghost (1990) - As with Titanic, you'll never take the romantic out of me. This was Titanic before Titanic, a film to which I was slavishly devoted on first viewing with its high concept ideas and a romance that made me swoon. But guess what? This one holds up too. I watched it a few years back and I continue to think it has one of the best and tightest scripts of any film I've ever seen. If Ghost told me it loved me, I'd say "Ditto."

14. Schindler's List (1993) - I finally sat down for my second viewing of Schindler's List last year, 24 years after my first -- which confirmed it was not just hanging around the upper end of my Flickchart on reputation alone. This is still an epic accomplishment of almost unbelievable quality and importance, feeling almost like a documentary in spots, yet it's also got a truly cinematic villain that allows it to function, in some respects, like a Spielbergian popular entertainment. The ending still slays me.

13. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) - I saw T2 before I saw The Terminator, so the latter never stood a chance. James Cameron's best film will always be one of my most mind-blowing exposures to special effects of all time, but it doesn't get by on the T-1000 alone. It was a brilliant decision to reclaim Arnold Schwarzenegger as the hero of this series, and a whole host of iconic imagery follows from that. It's one of my favorite action movies of all time, and that scene of nuclear apocalypse still gives me the willies.

12. Bound (1996) - Bound has spent time in my top 20 overall on Flickchart; that's how much I love it. I simply love spending time in the company of such interesting characters who make such smart decisions within the context of a tight noir gangster thriller, and the hot lesbian sex doesn't hurt either (yuk yuk). The Wachowskis' debut feature is still their best, and it gets remarkable narrative mileage from just the sets of two adjacent apartments. All scripts should be this intelligent.

11. The Iron Giant (1999) - You've cried in movies before, but how many of them still reduce you to tears after a fifth viewing? That's about how many times I've seen Brad Bird's masterpiece all the way through, and I still get that lump in the throat at the end. It's a simple and wondrous snapshot of a particular time in Cold War America with a message of friendship and non-violence that's the perfect antidote to it. Simply put, one of my favorite children's movies of all time.

10. Defending Your Life (1991) - Surely the most obscure film to place so high on my list, Albert Brooks' afterlife romantic comedy nails both the romance and the comedy. He and Meryl Streep have never been so laid back and lovely as they navigate an afterlife processing station where they must convince a judge that they deserve to move on to the next plain of existence, or be sentenced to return to Earth to give it another try. It's high concept and marvelously joyous, with a useful message about confronting fear thrown in for good measure.

9. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) - The highest ranked 1990s film on my chart to just miss my top 20, though it's been as high as 12th or 13th in the past. David Mamet annoys me more often than he wins me over, but this is the massive exception to that, a foul-mouthed and dialogue-heavy look at four men trying to sell worthless investment properties in order to stay afloat. "Third place is your fired." Alec Baldwin's monologue would probably be enough, but then there's the rest of the movie. A tour de force of writing and acting.

8. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) - Yet another film whose backlash has never been a consideration in my affection for it. Shawshank is a masterpiece, pure and simple. It'll never be my #1 film, but I understand why it's #1 on IMDB, and I would never begrudge someone who called it their own favorite movie. It's a depressing prison movie that sings on the strength of its script, acting, and message of hope in the face of total hopelessness.

7. Unforgiven (1992) - Another exception after Glengarry. I have historically not loved the western, though I've developed an appreciation for it in recent years. Yet I've always loved Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood's best film and one of the most thoughtful examinations of morality, heroism and the consequences of violence that I've ever seen. "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he has, and all he's ever gonna have." "Well I guess they had it coming." "We all got it coming, kid."

6. Goodfellas (1990) - And this is the first of the current Filmspotting final four to make my list, with two more ahead. I guess Filmspotters have good taste. What can a person say about Goodfellas other than that it is an absolute flat-out classic, as confident a display of the mastery of the cinematic medium as exists. We bow before the cinematic god that is Martin Scorsese.

5. Run Lola Run (1998) - I had a sub-par viewing of Run Lola Run a few years ago. And then a few weeks ago I saw it again and remembered why I didn't penalize it on my Flickchart for that sub-par viewing. A symphony of editing, music and cinematic derring do, Tom Tykwer's film is a singular experience that also gets you in and out in only 80 minutes. Its narrative invention is combined with a philosophical, existential approach to fate that is also thought-provoking. Dense and rich.

4. The Cable Guy (1996) - No rational argument will explain why this movie is ranked above some of the other films on this list, but I can tell you that few films that I've ever seen so largely exceeded my expectations for them. The film that made me love Jim Carrey has so much going on that I could never possibly do justice to it in five lines of text. Let's just say that this became a personal cult favorite with friends and has since become a measurable part of my identity as a cinephile. And here's that other Ben Stiller accomplishment I was telling you about. He should get more credit for it.

3. Fargo (1996) - The film up against Goodfellas in Filmspotting's final four. I may not have realized until they made a fantastic TV show version of this movie just how singular of a creation it is, using trademark Coen elements to carve out an absolute distinctive cinematic landscape that ties together comedy, tragedy and melancholy. If it weren't this funny, I probably wouldn't love it as much as I do, but the same is true if it weren't this tragic. Somehow, you aren't depressed as hapless Minnesotans leave a trail of bodies as they just try to make better lives for themselves.

2. Toy Story (1995) - And my #1 children's movie of all time is not one of the classics from Disney's mid-century height, but the first film released by Disney's subsidiary, Pixar. Pixar's first feature arrived fully formed, from the technology used to animate it to the whip-smart dialogue and script. Oh, and the heart -- the tons and tons of heart. Like with Galaxy Quest, I saw this on consecutive days in the theater, and many times since then. Pixar has never bested it.

1. Pulp Fiction (1994) - The other Filmspotting finalist (it goes up against Silence of the Lambs), Pulp Fiction is my #4 film of all time and the highest ranked film that I saw after I became a cinephile. The number four also represents the number of times I saw it in the theater, still a record. A narrative pretzel that simply blew my mind and instantly elevated any number of its scenes to all-time iconic status. This movie showed me what filmmaking could be, could do, and remains one of my most influential viewing experiences of all time. It doesn't take this top spot by accident or by default; it's fully deserved.

To show you just how much I love this decade, all 64 of these films are listed within my top 200 all time on Flickchart. Short Cuts gets in just under the wire at #199, though it's a perfect cut off because my #65 is then #208 overall. That means 32% of my top 200 are films from the 1990s, nearly a third.

Here is a breakdown by years for each:

1990 - 8
1991 - 5
1992 - 9
1993 - 4
1994 - 8
1995 - 7
1996 - 7
1997 - 5
1998 - 4
1999 - 7

I don't consciously think of 1992 as a great year for cinema, but clearly I thought it was. This was also a bit of an important in my maturation as a film fan, as 1992 straddled my freshman and sophomore years in college, when this was all start to mean so much more to me. That was also the year I had my first collegiate film class. Probably no coincidence there.

Oh, and just so they could cheat and add a few more titles, the Filmspotting guys had eight play-in games, allowing them to add eight more titles to the list. In case you're wondering, my next eight are: Truly Madly Deeply, Natural Born Killers, Looking for Richard, Bottle Rocket, Quiz Show, Close-Up, The Blair Witch Project and Carlito's Way. And yeah, I'm sure I could easily make arguments for these over some that came ahead of them. Tough decade.

I should mention that although I had a lot of the big titles in common with the Filmspotting 64, I did diverge from them in a number of other ways. Only 24 of their 64 overlapped on my list. I suppose I'm happy with that, as a cinephile gains his or her personal identity more on the basis of idiosyncratic favorites than the ways he or she conforms to conventional wisdom. Filmspotting themselves even accounted for their own preferences in making this list, as producer Sam van Halgren fought to have The Insider included even though it didn't make any of the major lists they used to figure out the most beloved films of the decade. More power to you, Sam.

I'm a bit alarmed that so few of these films are in a language other than English. As much as I love my 1990s, I know I have big blind spots in that decade, a function of what was available to me at the time I was falling in love with these movies and what I've prioritized going back to see. One of the few films that made the Filmspotting cut that I haven't seen, for example, was Chungking Express, a movie I believe I'd love if I could get my hands on it. I tried to watch it last year for Asian Audient, but could not borrow or rent it from anywhere, and didn't feel it warranted going to the lengths of purchasing it. So I've still got some work cut out for me.

But in early April of 2018, as random a time as any other, this is how I feel about that great decade, and I'm sticking to it.