I recently discovered a marvelous waste of time. It's a website called "Flickchart", and it's right up my alley.
I've always wished I could compile an accurate list of things like my favorite movies or albums or songs, and Flickchart is the closest I've come to doing that so far, at least for movies.
Here's how Flickchart works. Once you've signed up and created a user name and password, you simply start ranking movies you've seen. And it's much easier to rank them on Flickchart than it is on imdb.com, the Internet Movie Database. On imdb, you just give each movie a number ranking between 1 and 10. For instance, I gave "The Shawshank Redemtpion" a 10, and I gave "The Howling Part 2" a 1. On Flickchart, they give you the names of two movies, and you simply choose which one you like better.
Let's say that the first two movies that come up are "Star Wars" and "On the Waterfront". If you've seen both movies, you click on the movie you think was better. Or you click on the one you'd prefer to see again, regardless of which one has better artistic content. How you decide is up to you. If you haven't seen "On the Waterfront", you click the button under it that says "Haven't Seen It", and Flickchart will provide you with a different movie to rank against "Star Wars". If you haven't seen "Star Wars", it's the same procedure. You click the button "Haven't Seen It" under "Star Wars". If you haven't seen either movie, click the button that says "Haven't Seen Either" and they'll give you an entirely new matchup.
After ranking movies for an hour or so, you'll have a pretty good list going of your favorite and not-so-favorite movies. It won't necessarily be accurate at first. When I was first ranking movies, "Forrest Gump" came up against "Caddyshack 2". "Caddyshack 2" had already been a loser against several other movies, so it was near the bottom of my list. After I gave the nod to "Forrest Gump", it was added to the list, but it was also near the bottom and only one space above "Caddyshack 2". The only way to solve this problem is to continue ranking movies. The more movies you rank, the more accurate your list will become. And the same movies do turn up over and over so you can rank them against different parts of the list.
Now I will reveal to you my current top 20. But before I do, I need to tell you that the list is still far from complete, so it's not 100 percent correct. And I also would like to remind you that no single person on earth will have the same list as you. In other words, there are going to be some movies in my top 20 that you probably can't stand. Similarly, your list of favorites will probably contain movies I don't like.
Some movies ranked higher because of the experience I had while seeing them for the first time. Maybe it was during a good date. Or maybe I saw what Roger Ebert referred to as "a good screening", meaning that when a large audience is responding positively to a movie, you as a part of the audience may tend to respond the same way, even though your opinion of the movie might have differed greatly had you seen it alone or with a friend who likes to constantly complain.
That having been said, here's my current top 20 list.
1. Field of Dreams
2. Dogma
3. Major League
4. The Blues Brothers
5. Forrest Gump
6. Sleepless in Seattle
7. All the President's Men
8. Groundhog Day
9. Trading Places
10. 50 First Dates
11. The Sting
12. Tombstone
13. The Shawshank Redemption
14. Shakespeare in Love
15. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
16. While You Were Sleeping
17. Jeremiah Johnson
18. Il Postino
19. A Christmas Story
20. Real Genius
Great list, isn't it? No? You want to know why I haven't included your all-time favorite movie?
It's probably at number 21.
