When you love someone you want to share things with them you know they’ll enjoy. Even if that means you risk hurting them. And if you love movies friend, I love you too. That’s why I’m going to tell you about http://www.flickchart.com.

Remember in The Social Network when Zuckerberg makes “Facemash?” For those he missed the movie what he does is take two freshmen girls, put them side by side on a web page, then asks you to click on which one you think is hotter. Flickchart does that with movies. You can search movies by genre, title, decade, and then rank each new selection against your list.

Some advice:

  1. If you have an addictive personality, this is going to consume you for a few days.
  2. If you have problems picking one movie over another, or one type of movie over another (IE Anchorman vs. Schindler’s List) make a rule for yourself like, “which movie do you feel more for?”
  3. Pick with your heart

My rankings are still a work in progress, but I learned a few things about myself I didn’t know. For one, I really love Training Day. I knew I liked it, but it wasn’t until I had to mash it up against other movies that I realized how much.

When you start getting serious, you might find yourself gaming the system. What the ranking system seems to do is pick the same movie posiition from the list to figure out where new movies belong. I call it the feel-good movie barrier. Mine was 2009’s Star Trek. It seems like there should be a more random way to do it. You shouldn’t be forced to test movies against position 21 every time in order to determine if something should belong in the top 20. Fortunately, the site has features that allows you to mashup the top 50 or 100 as often as you like.

It consumed my life for a day and a night. And now I give it to you. Feel free to add me as a friend on the site. I love looking at people’s top 20s.