Flickcharting with James Bond
Flickchart continues to attract new members and it occurs to me that perhaps a nice catch-up introduction is in order. Since this is the 50th year of James Bond and Skyfall is now in theaters, we’ll use 007 to illustrate the different ways you can Flickchart.
It’s a safe assumption that if you’re here, you already understand that Flickchart presents two movies from which you choose and that you can request a replacement for either movie if you haven’t seen the movie(s) at hand. Did you know you can filter your pool of movies, though?
Select the By Studio/Franchise filter in the top menu bar.
Scroll through the plentiful options until you find James Bond. Click once and voilà! You are now ranking only the movies that are part of the James Bond franchise. For Bond completists out there, you’ll be happy to know that Flickchart’s James Bond franchise filter includes all 22 Eon-produced films to date (Skyfall will be added once it opens this November), both early versions of Casino Royale (1954 and 1967) and Never Say Never Again.
Now that you’ve filtered to just the James Bond movies, you’ll find it’s much easier to really begin to reflect on what makes a good Bond movie. For instance, if we were just having a conversation about this, you might instinctively say, “Well, a good Bond movie has Sean Connery in it.”
What if Flickchart presents you with Diamonds Are Forever vs. The Spy Who Loved Me? Ah, yes. A “weak” Connery versus what many (including Flickcharters) consider Roger Moore’s best outing as 007. Still certain that Connery > Not Connery?
For those who want to take their Flickcharting to an even more specific level, you can customize your own filter. It’s pretty easy to do, and there are myriad combination possibilities. Start by choosing the Charts link at the top of the screen.
See that “Build a Custom Chart” menu? It’s pretty self-explanatory. Let’s say you wanted to rank the Best James Bond Movies of the 1960s Starring Sean Connery. This way, you throw out the 1967 Casino Royale and exclude On Her Majesty’s Secret Service because it starred George Lazenby as Bond. You’re also excluding Diamonds Are Forever and Never Say Never Again by confining your Connery Bond chart to the Sixties. No harm there, I should think.
At the top of your custom filtered chart, you’ll find you can share the Top 5 to Facebook, or you can choose to rank this customized list. Choose this option and you’ll be whisked back to ranking movies only from the pool you’ve just isolated. Granted, this is a pretty small selection of just five movies, but you can easily see how you can create new ideas of other custom charts to generate with larger selections.
The default presentation is to show you the filtered movies as they appear on the Global Top Movies chart. You can also choose to see where the movies fall on your personal Flickchart. A relatively recent and nifty filtering option, though, lets you generate a chart of specific Flickcharters’ data. Say you’ve got your friends to join Flickchart and you want to see how you as a group view the Bond series. Simply choose friends and select the Flickchart user name for everyone whose data you want to include. Find out who actually thinks Die Another Day is better than From Russia with Love. (Seriously: Find this out so we can expel them from Flickchart.)
There are only two drawbacks to filtered rankings. The first is what we call “unnatural clustering.” Because you’re only ranking James Bond movies of the 1960s starring Sean Connery, if the five movies are pretty scattered on your Flickchart but in the course of your ranking them against one another you keep finding yourself choosing one over the next, you could wind up with some or even all of them in one small cluster on your overall Flickchart. This bothers some users because those five movies would not organically wind up together like that. You can of course re-rank those films and allow them to go up against the rest of your Flickchart and “de-cluster.”
The other drawback to custom filters is that they’re crazy addictive. It’s like lacing your Flickchart cocaine with custom filter meth. You may never stop thinking of various combinations and never leave your keyboard again.
JAMES BOND WILL RETURN TO FLICKCHART: THE BLOG
Great article and how-to, Travis! I keep forgetting that some of this functionality exists and then spend too much time going through each ranking. Heh.
Thanks, Jon. It’s pretty encouraging to me to know that even a Flickcharting pro like you benefited from this piece!