Unfiltered: Organic Lists vs. Filtered Lists of Documentaries

Derek Armstrong

Derek is a film critic, currently writing for the Australian film website ReelGood as well as his personal blog, The Audient.

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5 Responses

  1. Interesting, Derek.  After taking stock of the differences, do you find that your Flickchart needs more tweaking or do you feel that it has properly graded your organic list?  Or, more broadly, how do you *feel* about the disparity between the two lists?

  2. no errol morris? no herzog? do you really like documentaries… or just nice film posters? 

  3. Derek Armstrong says:

    Travis – I think the Flickchart list is probably closer to being correct. As I said, I could account for the big difference in how I rated Religulous, based on a change in my feelings toward a film. But the similarities ultimately make me feel good about two things: 1) that looking at a list of my documentaries, I’m able to accurately determine the ones I like best, and 2) my Flickchart rankings back that up. Then again, I guess you could say each of those two things provides validation to the other, so they could both be wrong.

    As Murray seems to think, seeing as how he thinks I’m a philistine. ;-)

    I’ve actually seen three Morris documentaries and one Herzog documentary. The Herzog doc was Grizzly Man, and though I found it fascinating, I had enough concerns with it that I don’t think of it as highly as I could. As for Morris’ films, I’ve seen The Fog of War, Mr. Death and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. I think each film is a wonderful success in terms of style, but I’m not sure if I engaged with them beyond that as much as I engaged with the other films I’ve included here. What can I say. Taste is a funny thing.

    Besides, attacking your core argument, I didn’t say I “liked” documentaries, although I do. I just said I’m a person who has watched some documentaries and was interested in ranking them.