Choose Wisely

February 16, 2022 12:06 PM

It's a simple concept: Given a choice between two random movies, which one do you like best? That's the driving force behind Flickchart, an addictive review site for movie lovers. Faced with two posters, click the one for the title you prefer (weeding out the ones you haven't seen). Good! Now do it again. And again. And again. With each new face-off, Flickchart perfects a growing list of your favorite films -- and there can be no ties. This leads to some difficult dilemmas: Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark? Citizen Kane or The Godfather? WALL-E or Spirited Away? But you needn't struggle alone -- Flickchart is also social. By drawing on the data of tens of thousands of fellow users, you can create remarkably specific lists: Martin Scorsese's Best Period Films. The Best Road Movies of the 1980s. The Worst Movies of All Time. If you rank enough films, you can generate interesting personalized charts, like "Your Favorite Musicals" or "The Best Movies You Haven't Seen." These filters carry over to the ranking system, letting you judge nothing but Horror movies or 1960s movies or unranked movies or movies from your top 100. You can also comment on popular match-ups, lending your voice to contentious debates like Ghostbusters vs. Back to the Future or Jaws vs. Predator. Not a movie fan? Don't worry. Flickchart will be expanding into books, games, and music soon at some point. Until then, you can give your own data sets the Flickchart treatment using this tool from Gwern Branwen.

Note: Don't mind the sign-up wall -- registration is only required to rank your own movies, and the process is easy: just enter a username, password, and email address (no confirmation), and you can start ranking right away. If you don't want to sign up, you can still use the site's non-personalized tools, including the best-of lists, the custom chart-builder, and all the articles and features on the official blog, such as movie reviews, top 10 lists, and Reel Rumbles. But I recommend registering -- it takes only a few seconds, requires no personal information, and the rankings and other personalized features it enables make it totally worth it.

posted by Rhaomi (43 comments total)

[This updated post part of #DoublesJubilee!]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:07 PM on February 16, 2022

It really really REALLY needs a "saw them both and hate them both" button! But this is SO FUN!
posted by cooker girl at 12:35 PM on February 16, 2022 [8 favorites]

Oh blimey! I have been wanting a Bradley-Terry ranking thing for years but don’t have the maths or coding to create one. Thanks for posting!
posted by stanf at 12:55 PM on February 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Holy crap, I haven't been to Flickchart in years. I signed up in 2010 and did nothing but input movies and rank them for like six months straight, then kinda forgot about the site. Nice to see it's still going strong.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 1:10 PM on February 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

cooker girl:
It really really REALLY needs a "saw them both and hate them both" button!

Agreed, but I just click "Haven't Seen Either" so it stops offering them up and I can pretend that I never lost those hours of my life to such dreck.
posted by indexy at 1:11 PM on February 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

My work filter blocks flickchart for 'illegal downloads'?
posted by box at 1:19 PM on February 16, 2022

Why do the posters keep changing... and why are there ones like this for Raiders of the Lost Ark?
https://i.imgur.com/EEXgbjD.png
posted by Laura in Canada at 1:19 PM on February 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

I've been voting based on what I would prefer to watch next if I had to choose, trying to set aside which movie is actually objectively better, or which I've seen more, etc. Which results in weird decisions like choosing Green Lantern over Children of Men. I stand by my process, though.
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 1:24 PM on February 16, 2022 [6 favorites]

Making me choose between Legally Blonde and Dirty Dancing is really unfair.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:25 PM on February 16, 2022 [6 favorites]

This is a great concept and fun but my main takeaway is that there are a huge number of movies I haven't seen. On most of the pairings I haven't seen at least one of them.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 1:26 PM on February 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

> Making me choose between Legally Blonde and Dirty Dancing is really unfair.

This is exactly how I felt about The Craft vs In the Mouth of Madness. Oof. I chose The Craft because it's what I'd watch right now
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 1:34 PM on February 16, 2022

Adobe or Macromedia hosted a site in the 90s that used "collaborative filtering" (right around when Wired made a big deal about it) and I spent HOURS at work ranking every movie I could think of (you gave titles a number of stars) and had this incredible database of movies that I had seen. Then the site went offline and I lost all that. I hadn't known about this site in the past so it's new to me today, in 2022. Busily ranking shit, but not sure the kind of movies I watch these days are showing up? Do they have current movies? [Edit - I searched to CODA (2021) and there it is!]
posted by stevil at 1:52 PM on February 16, 2022

This looks like exactly what I was hinting at in this AskMe. I'll need to spend some time looking at how Flickchart (and maybe Gwern Branwen's Resorter) purports to generate overall rankings.
posted by one for the books at 2:02 PM on February 16, 2022

LOL. I clicked and my username/password still worked. I would bet I signed up for that in ... 2010.

I don't think I kept at it though. It has my favorite movie as Wayne's World which is ... not right.
posted by chavenet at 3:03 PM on February 16, 2022

I too signed up for this site on the first time it was featured On The Blue, and it was a great thing to pass the time on boring morning shifts at the Theatre where me and the rest of the movie nerds would spend the day just ranking movies in between showings of whatever people were deciding to go see on a Wednesday afternoon circa 2010. My problem with it is that I'll inevitably get to some combo of two movies, where it almost seems impossible to judge one movie better over another for whatever criteria.
FOr example, right now I'm sitting on Grease vs Avengers: EndGame
posted by WeX Majors at 3:07 PM on February 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Grease
posted by chavenet at 3:11 PM on February 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

See, that was easy.
posted by chavenet at 3:11 PM on February 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

Wow. I must have signed up for this and completely forgotten, even though apparently, I have ranked 1400 movies????? {It says "Citizen Kane" is my favorite, but it must not have asked me about "The Exterminating Angel"]
posted by acrasis at 3:20 PM on February 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

A. I can see the appeal. I was given Young Frankenstein (overrated), Titanic (only really any good when the ship is sinking) and Casablanca (maybe the best movie of all time) for my first choice. But I can see how others may choose differently, so hooray for a fun argument.

B. except one must sign up to partake and sorry, DATA, I'm not telling you my fave movies. In fact it's a well known trick to pull on someone. Ask them their five favourite movies and they'll tell you more about themselves than they could possibly imagine.

C. I am enjoying this discussion.
posted by philip-random at 4:06 PM on February 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

My main takeaway is that I have seen a lot of mediocre movies, and many of my favorites aren't showing up. It looks like I can search for favorites and rank them, so I guess I'll go search for Breaking Away
posted by mecran01 at 4:26 PM on February 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Young Frankenstein (overrated)

I BEG your pardon!!
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:39 PM on February 16, 2022 [8 favorites]

Making me choose between Legally Blonde and Dirty Dancing is really unfair.

Princess Bride and Wall-E. : /
posted by Glinn at 5:40 PM on February 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Faced with two posters, click the one for the title you prefer

Wait, isn't this exactly how Facebook began?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:24 PM on February 16, 2022

Man, this site is really invested in what I think about Kevin Smith films.
posted by zompist at 7:39 PM on February 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Awesome, you have a top twenty! Now, it's likely that The Big Lebowsky is not your favorite movie of all time, so let's rerank it

Haha! Just got this little pop up message on the site. "Well, actually, flickchart ..."
posted by Zumbador at 7:50 PM on February 16, 2022

Memento vs. Airplane!
posted by bendy at 8:50 PM on February 16, 2022

Is that when you developed your thinking problem?
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:06 PM on February 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

(I know, Memento was about memory, not thinking...I claim "artistic license")
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:07 PM on February 16, 2022

I feel like this would be a great fit for music, because it could have links to the two songs and make you choose

Also, I'm most excited about the algorithm! I made a really crappy version of exactly this for the exact same reason, but sort of gave up when it came to all the refinements that it needed...pretty excited that somebody took it all the way!
posted by wooh at 11:55 PM on February 16, 2022

The odd thing is that it turns out there's a lot of films that I haven't seen, but my brain decides I basically kind of have seen, because of cultural osmosis.

I've not seen Jerry Maguire (for example) but I have seen that one bit about showing people money so much that my brain decided I had seen it, but didn't like it as much as Catch me if you can.

Only after I had made that choice did I realise, that I have never actually seen it.

And this keeps happening.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 1:41 AM on February 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

I think I have the wrong Harry Potter movie in my list, because I have only seen the first one, but I also don't recall the order they come in. When the first HP movie showed up on my list - Chamber of Secrets - it seemed like it might be the first one so I didn't mark it as unseen. But I am ride or die on that decision, so now whenever a different HP movie shows up, I say I haven't seen it. Have I seen Chamber of Secrets? Does it even matter? Any Harry Potter movie is going to rank about the same in my final list anyway.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:00 AM on February 17, 2022

@Rhaomi Thanks for pulling this out of the MetaFilter archive!

We do constantly receive the question of "what about games, tv, music, etc." and our answer is still, "Yes! We want to do it!" but it is and continues to be a monumental amount of work!

We are closer now than we've ever been on an entirely new tech stack - both on the frontend and backend, and the database (web technologies have changed a lot since 2009!).

We're still a 2-man operation and rely solely on user donations and banner ads to pay our server costs. We feel very fortunate to have our community of a quarter-million film fans worldwide ranking movies and debating their favorites!

We are excited to bring out revamped Flickchart 2.0 out of hiding as soon as we can and we're ready. Hoping this will be our year! Thanks for featuring us and checking out Flickchart!
posted by Zampa at 5:17 AM on February 17, 2022 [15 favorites]

I could do this for hours. Makes me nostalgic for hot or not...
posted by sophrontic at 9:47 AM on February 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Is that when you developed your thinking problem?

In retrospect that sounds like I'm being insulting, which is not what I intended. I was trying to make a joke, riffing on Ted Striker's "drinking problem" running gag in Airplane! along with the "thinking" (actually memory, I admit I was stretching) theme of Memento. I apologize if I offended bendy or anyone else.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:46 AM on February 17, 2022

I'm curious, Zampa -- how does the site deal with conflicting votes? Or does it avoid them? Because say I vote Mean Girls as better than Clueless, Cluesless as better than Legally Blonde and Legally Blonde as better than Mean Girls -- what happens then?
posted by jacquilynne at 11:56 AM on February 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

It really really REALLY needs a "saw them both and hate them both" button! But this is SO FUN!
posted by cooker girl at 4:35 PM on February 16 [7 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]

O but those are the BEST ONES. Such a miserably, deliciously infuriating dilemma.
posted by MiraK at 12:12 PM on February 17, 2022

I'm curious, Zampa -- how does the site deal with conflicting votes?

Transitivity errs on whatever you most recent ranking is, since it represents your most recent decision. Your opinion "of the now" is given the highest weight and considered most accurate.

I can say on our new upcoming system, transitivity is dealt with in a more historically significant way; for example, we keep track of all the films Mean Girls, Clueless, and Legally Blonde have each independently beaten every other movie on your chart in addition to how they've beaten each other to ultimately calculate each film's ranking on your chart. We can also determine a degree of accuracy of a movie's ranking based on how often and what other films a movie has been ranked against.

In short, it'll be much more accurate!
posted by Zampa at 12:21 PM on February 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

After ten minutes No Country For Old Men is #1 (not exactly wrong I guess), and I have been conflating Donnie Darko (meh) with Donnie Brasco (woo!), but yes, this is fun!

Edit: Also lol I haven't seen The Magnificent Seven
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:16 PM on February 17, 2022

Thanks for stopping by again, Zampa! I will say that, while I'm a bit bummed the expansion has been delayed for so long, I still make Flickchart my very first stop after seeing any movie now. It's a great way to keep track, and I love the feature where you can compare lists with a friend to find the best movies neither have seen. I really can't wait to do the same thing with other media (and curious to see how that would work -- I'm in the process of setting up gwern's tool and am wrestling with the question of ranking songs vs. albums vs. artists, say, or episodes vs. seasons vs. shows.)

In case you're open to suggestions, I've always wanted to see some sort of "bizarro mode" toggle focused on the bottom of your list where you have to pick your *least* favorite movie to move it further down. Could be a fun way to get people thinking about The Worst movies, and help sort out the lower depths of people's lists better!
posted by Rhaomi at 3:54 PM on February 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

It wants me to choose between The Lion King (1994) or Batman (1989). Darn, I'm going to have to think about this awhile...
posted by riruro at 4:03 PM on February 17, 2022

I made my husband do this sort of pairwise ranking to decide on our child's name. It was a lot less sophisticated, just pairing up all of our potential names, and then choosing which we prefer of each pair. Most total wins is the winner!

That is to say, I like this sort of ranking system.
posted by that girl at 6:13 PM on February 17, 2022

I signed up and rated 100 films and it only ever showed me big studio dreck. It would be nice to start off with wildly different options like Clueless vs Kwaidan at the start so it could guess my tastes better. On second thought, I'm not sure whether I would pick Clueless or Kwaidan given the choice.
posted by PatchesPal at 7:50 AM on February 18, 2022

I reckon it starts with the most popular movies because people will skip it if they started with more obscure titles. FWIW, in addition to ranking just your list of a portion of it, you can also rank by "Studio/Franchise" using the dropdown above the main window, which is a little misleading since it also includes dozens of critics' lists, magazine best-of's, various awards show winners, etc. If you can find a category more to your taste you can improve your experience a lot that way.

Also, I'll note for new users that the default mode is initially geared towards quickly filling out your list of movies, but not actually that good for ranking -- all new movies (which is most of them at the beginning) get inserted in the middle of your list on first ranking. The more movies you have, the more likely you'll be asked to re-judge one that's already there and potentially reshuffle it, but once you have a decent amount you can switch to ranking only movies on your list and get it sorted a lot faster. You can also curate your list more slowly by searching for a movie in the top-right and adding it manually -- this starts a process of comparing it to your median title, then the median one in that half, etc., until it finds the right spot. This is a lot more accurate but understandably isn't used as the default.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:34 AM on February 18, 2022