The Hedgehog and the Fox or: How Not To Be Distracted By Faye Dunaway On Your Quest For Flickchart Enlightenment

Chad Hoolihan

Having no affiliation with any spiritual or philosophical movements, Chad instead attempts to find meaning through watching movies.  He also enjoys  watching birds fight over food in supermarket parking lots.

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4 Responses

  1. johnmason says:

    I like this. You bring up some reasons why I’ve gone and created myself a second account (the genesis of which I’ve attempted to chronicle for the blog). Of course, I didn’t have the guts to delete my nearly 70,000 rankings, so I had to create a second account…but we’ll see if I wind up deleting one when I’m through.

    I’ve also been noticing that there are certain “benchmark” films on my new list, too (another subject I’ve been thinking to bring up in the blog). If any movie can’t beat Saw, for example, then I basically consider it pretty terrible, while a little further down the list may be the ones I think are total crap.

    It’s an interesting experiment, I’m glad I’ve done it, and I’m starting to get the “Big Picture” too.

    Nice article.

  2. KingofPain says:

    I should clarify that when I said “rankings”, I actually was referring to my movie list which numbered over 2000. I had a lot more rankings than just 2000.

    After watching Bonnie and Clyde, I kind of freaked out. I thought “How well do I really know all thse movies on my list? Are they just a bunch of strangers loitering around?” Now I’m only ranking movies I have a clear recollection of. I’m going through and rewatching a bunch of movies just to be sure.

    That “benchmark” idea needs some exploring, I figure. That wasn’t the main focus of the article, so I didn’t say much about it. I figure that the bigger a list gets, the more benchmarks it needs to keep the other movies in line. I’m not as concerned about movies I dislike, but I definitely want to keep movies I enjoy in proper order. I touched on a few different ideas that could be expanded on, probably.

    But, yeah, just going through a bunch of matchups with no unifying vision didn’t work out too good. My old movie list was pretty unorganized after the first 150 movies, and there were some movies that didn’t belong as high as I had them. I just nuked the list and started over fresh. At least I know that my current list is more accurate. I’m not adding any movies that aren’t checked out properly. I need to have a clear memory of each one.

    This previous article (http://blogrp.flickchart.com/index.php/i-know-i-saw-that-movie-but/) deals with vaguely remembered movies and benchmarks. What Derek Armstrong suggests is using half-forgotten movies as guides for seperating the good from the bad. Like, if you can’t remember much about a movie, but know that it’s better or worse than another movie, at least it can be used as benchmark in that regard. Personally, I’m doing away with half-forgotten movies altogether.

  3. I think I’m in a similar position as you, in that whilst I’ve seen more films than the total I have in my Flickchart, I’m not comfortable ranking them because I have such a hazy recollection of them. My judgment is almost certainly clouded by various factors.

    I’m certain that if I were to watch the films I haven’t ranked but have seen again, that they wouldn’t fall into the position they may if I simply ranked them now without watching them again as a refresher. Make sense.

  4. KingofPain says:

    I’ve seen roughly 3,000 movies during my lifetime. The problem I have is that my perspective on movie watching has changed over the years. What I liked ten years ago is not necessarily what I like now. I’ve probably watched about 1,500 movies just in the last five years, and my tastes have changed considerably.

    Using Flickchart totally altered the way I look at every movie. Now I have to consider what each ranking means in the big scheme of things. On a regular top movie list, there’s no sense of the relationship between each film. On a Flickchart list, you actually have to consider what a movie’s place on the list actually means.

    So, my changing tastes combined with the discovery of Flickchart requires an entirely new way of looking at the movies I’ve seen. Even though I watched The Last Starfighter a thousand times as a kid, I can’t really say what I feel about it now. Unless I get around to watching it again, it may just be lost to time. The post-Flickchart era is a brave new world. Some movies will have to be left behind.