Charting My New Addiction

I've recently discovered a totally awesome web site. If you're a fan of movies, this will upend your world... as in, to a degree where I should probably be warning you away from the site rather than guiding you to it.

It's FlickChart.com. You set up an account, and the rest is simple. It shows you two movies, side by side. Click the one you like better. Two more movies. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat. It tabulates all your choices, and bit by bit builds your own personal favorite movies list.

I've been in the process of rebuilding my own top 100 movies list, so needless to say, this web site is exactly what the doctor ordered. And it's crazy addictive. They have a mobile-phone-optimized version of the site, and that's become my new replacement for Angry Birds. Instead of pulling out my phone for a game when I have a few spare moments, I rank movies.

The thing is, FlickChart does make for a really good game. Over a recent lunch hour at work, my friends and I just sat there discussing movies as it presented matchup after matchup. Most of the time, the choices feel like no-brainers. But occasionally you get a really fun and difficult one -- two movies you love desperately. Or two horrible movies; you'd gladly never see either of them again. But you must always pick one.

It can take a long time to really smooth out your favorite movies list into something that feels accurate. For example, the first two movies it ever showed me were two I found average at best. Still, I had to pick one. And thus, "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" became my supposedly #1 favorite movie for a long, long time.

Fortunately, you can take the reins a bit more to smooth things out. You can enter movies by name to incorporate them into your list. You can click on a movie already in your list to re-rank it in a "lightning round" comparison against several other movies on your list.

And the filters options are pretty amazing. You can have it display only movies from your list (or parts of your list). Movies with certain actors, from certain genres, from certain years or decades, and more. When you mark that you haven't seen a movie, it puts it on a separate list that's ranked in order by the votes of the site's entire user base. Basically, it's an ordered list you can use for your Netflix queue.

Hey, did I mention that at the touch of a button, you can add movies to your Netflix queue?

You can also compare your lists with those of friends also using the site. If you start, and want to connect with me, send me a friend invite -- my user name is the same as the name before the ".blogspot.com" in my blog's address.

If you'll excuse me now, I'm going back to my newest addiction.