Moviesuck and Timesuck
Rotten Tomatoes recently put out a list of the 100 worst reviewed movies of the last decade. It seems that I’ve (luckily) seen only two of the hundred worst–The New Guy and Alone in the Dark. I saw The New Guy (2002), starring DJ Qualls, presumably because of Elvis Mitchell’s New York Times review (which upon second look doesn’t look all that positive). Perhaps, I was game for this movie solely based on the appearances of Eliza Dushku and Zooey Deschanel.
As for Alone in the Dark (2005), I was fully aware of what I was getting into. My initial introduction to Uwe Boll, this movie’s awfulness was its main selling point. Tara Reid as an archaeologist…I mean, c’mon.
If those are the worst, what are the best? Thanks to a recent Filmspotting podcast, I was introduced to the Flickchart site. The site asks you to rank movies that you’ve seen. To do this, you are given two movie titles and asked to pick which one is your favorite. This binary system is easy for some matchups (say, Casablanca versus The New Guy), but a lot more difficult for others (say, two seemingly really good movies from vastly different eras and/or genres). WARNING: This website is a major timesuck. You will lose many minutes that can never be recovered. But for slightly OCD movie nerds, its a fun site to play around with. So far, after only 237 rankings, my Top 5 Movies of All Time are:
1. ET: The Extra Terrestrial
2. Contact
3. Dogma
4. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
5. Die Hard
I truly enjoy all five of those movies. But, I wouldn’t necessarily place any of them in my Top 5. I guess I have some more ranking to do…
I discovered the site a few days ago, too, through someone’s twitter post. I can’t remember whose. After 175 rankings, here is where it ranks my top 5:
1# Hero
2# Gladiator
3# The Matrix
4# Cloverfield
5# Return of the Jedi
Really? No. I do like all those films, but they are most certainly not in my actual top 5. I admit that clicking on all those movie posters was a fun way to kill 30 minutes. I had a really hard time choosing sometimes! It also put Contactin my top 10.
And films that actually are in my top 20 or so are languishing around # 60-90 just because they haven’t been given a chance to compete with Hero or Gladiator yet. At least WALL-E is at #8 right now. It’s not in my “real” top 10, but it’s certainly the best film on my Flickchart top 10 right now.