Using Flickchart to Create Your Own Movie Challenge

Automated recommendations are a fairly common feature on most movie websites. Sometimes these are based on each individual movie, like IMDb, while others base them on all the movies you’ve watched and rated thus far, like Netflix.

Getting movie recommendations from Flickchart is a bit different. There may not be a “See Recommendations For This Movie” option (yet!), but there are genre pages and, better yet, the global chart, where all the users of Flickchart’s tastes and opinions are aggregated.

Two years ago, in February, I decided to use the global chart to create a movie challenge for myself. I wanted to watch a bunch of movies in the romance genre, which seemed appropriate for February. I had toyed around with using other famous curated lists, but I’d watched a lot of those movies already, and they all seemed to have the same lists.

I’m not complaining that Casablanca was on all their lists, but I wanted something I hadn’t seen yet. That’s why I was drawn to the Flickchart global charts for two primary reasons: It had a good balance of serious artsy films with just-pure-fun films, and I could quickly look up only the ones I hadn’t seen yet with the “Unseen” filter.

Thus, my Flickchart-generated “28 Days of Romance” movie challenge was born. Every day in February, I looked up my “top unseen” romance movie according to Flickchart and then found a place to stream it or download it.

The challenge turned out to be a tremendous amount of fun. I especially loved the huge variety of movies. With the global charts as my guide, I watched classics I should have seen already (like La Strada), silly crowd-pleasing favorites (like Better Off Dead), and a few I didn’t know anything about (like A Matter of Life and Death). Using Flickchart to generate my movie recommendations turned out to be an incredibly successful strategy.

This year I’m doing it again, and I invite all of you to join me if you’d like to. I’ll be aiming for 28 of them, one every day of the month, but you can watch as many or as few as you like. I’ll also be focusing on the broad Romance category and watching my top 28 unseen from that list, but there are also seven “Romance” subcategories with their own Flickchart filters: Romantic Adventure, Romantic Comedy, Romantic Drama, Romantic Epic, Romantic Fantasy, Romantic Mystery, and Musical Romance. If one of those sounds more to your liking, go for it. You can even mix genres and years and watch your top unseen Musical Romances of the 1940s or Romantic Fantasy Movies of the 1980s. Mix and match until you find a list you’re excited to jump into.

At the end of each week, I’ll post a blog recapping what I watched that week and what I thought of them. If you join in, you can share with us what you watched in the comments. Narrow down your List of Shame with this Flickchart-centric challenge and discover some great new movies!

I’ll be kicking things off on Sunday by watching Three Colors: Blue, which sits at #450 on the global charts. What is your top unseen romance?