Flickchartism: To achieve a perfect chart, you need a perfect philosophy

David Conrad

David is the author of AKIRA KUROSAWA AND MODERN JAPAN. He has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin and loves period pieces, classics, and arthouse films. www.facebook.com/DavidConradAuthor/

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10 Responses

  1. Follow That Bird is in my top five… I think this article was written for me ;)

  2. Sam Raffield says:

    Nostalgia favorite beats a critical favorite every time. If I have fond memories of it, that beats any kind of positive reception.

  3. Luan Marcel says:

    Any idea when the new version of Flickchart will arrive?

  4. Mike Seaman says:

    I am in the middle of a whole chart individual re-rank (currently sits at 1973) after a few years of random charting and a few chart nukes (even couple different accounts in hopes to bring purity). Finally I have settled on a method that I track with excel. I rate every movie on a dual 10 scale (whole and half numbers), one being entertainment (attachment, etc), the other being perceived artistic and/or historical value. The totals are combined. Ties are decided by the entertainment column (my judgment there is, this is my personal chart, not one created for professional or scholarly purposes). Ties from that point can get more messy, usually I ask myself do I want watch it again? That question is highly subjective and can be swayed by mood, but it is the best I have come up with.

    The biggest problem: Honesty. I can catch myself lasping into a default mode and “genre” films and comedies can lose ground there.

    I think after I complete my re-rank (I am in the 600s) I will shore up the chart further by looking at it by year to see if it makes sense and adjusting from there.

    tl;dr – I am Mike and I’m addicted to flickchart

    • David Conrad says:

      “Ties from that point can get more messy, usually I ask myself do I want watch it again? That question is highly subjective and can be swayed by mood, but it is the best I have come up with.”

      I’m finding that attachment can also be swayed by mood, but I think “want to watch again” would sway more dramatically for me. I’m hoping that the attachment sway will be fairly small, but that hope may be mere wishful thinking.

      “The biggest problem: Honesty.”

      ABSOLUTELY. It’s a killer, even when you’re really, really trying. And when you’ve messed it up, weird blockages develop in the chart and it takes a lot of work to fix.

      With your score-based system, I’d be afraid that my scores would fluctuate a lot from day to day. A 4 becoming a 6, a 6 becoming an 8, and then back again.

  5. David Pawlowski says:

    I look at each film in any matchup from three vantage points: Which do I find more entertaining/rewatchable, which do I admire more from a artistic standpoint, which one is more important to me personally. From there it’s basically a best out of three kind of deal.

    • David Conrad says:

      I like that, it agrees with my feeling that all three of those things are equally valid and important (and separate), but what about ties?

    • David Pawlowski says:

      Well if say I can’t decide which movie I admire more than I usually give preference to the film which is has more personal importance for me. So generally speaking personal importance> entertainment value> artistic merit. It’s not a perfect system though.