lazysupper

Last week I signed up for Flickchart, a new social network movie site. While it concedes that IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes are good sources for movie information, Flickchart is far, far superior when it comes to ranking films.

Flickchart provides a superior strategy for rating movies by taking any two films, presenting them to the user, and asking “Which is better?” By always using this direct comparison, we are able to efficiently calculate the best-liked movies by our user base, and combine their choices into a sitewide list that accurately judges what the “Greatest Movies of All Time” really are.

It sounds good. In theory. In practice however, I think their database and algorithms could use some tweaking. For example, their genres (see above image) are askew. Can Rain Man and Three Kings really be considered science fiction?

Also, it does not allow you to choose two specific films to compare. For example, I know what my favorite films are and which I like better than others. I know that Shawshank Redemption, Goodfellas, and Star Wars/Empire are tops in my book, and rank them above “my Flickchart #1″ Good Will Hunting. Also, regardless of how hot I think Jessica Alba is, Into The Blue does not belong in my Top 25. It also tells me Spider-Man 2 is my least favorite film, which is not even close. Worse than The Karate Kid III? Really? But in all fairness, their system requires each movie to be ranked multiple times against other titles in your collection to get more “accurate” results.

While they do have a some non-Hollywood films to choose from, I searched for a great number of “foreign” films to no avail. There were some “coming soon” messages for many of them not currently in the database, so that appears to be a temporary situation.

Another (presumably temporary) problem they have is server capacity. More often than not either the sign in does absolutely nothing or ends up getting this:

Server Error

Whoops! Looks like either the servers are melting,
or you have been a participant in the
biggest interdimensional cross-rip since
the Tunguska blast of 1909!

But there’s of course good stuff about Flickchart. The simple, clean UI allows you to quickly add films that you’ve seen (but wouldn’t think of adding) by pulling random films out of the database to compare. I can’t imagine ever thinking to add the JCVD/Dennis Rodman buddy flick Double Team, but ya, seen it. You can also choose to only compare movies not on your list, or your top 20, 50, 100, 250 or whole list.

One feature that’s cool (and somewhat depressing) is that it tallies up the running times of all the movies you’ve seen. So you can see just how much time you’ve spent/wasted watching films. Thanks to easily adding random and forgotten movies so quickly, I managed to rack up a list of 667 movies in no time at all. Much quicker than the “49 days, 10 hours, 29 minutes spent watching movies” it tells me I’ve achieved.

UPDATE: Two specific films can be compared by entering their ID’s into the following URL format: http://www.flickchart.com/MovieID1/vs/MovieID2. Thanks to Nathan from Flickchart (see comment below). Hopefully this can be added as an option in the future.

Tagged as: movies, tech, web

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