Windows Phone Thoughts: Movie Reviews in Hand: Leonard Maltin Movie Guide 1.0 Review

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Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Movie Reviews in Hand: Leonard Maltin Movie Guide 1.0 Review

Posted by Jordan Rosenwald in "SOFTWARE" @ 11:00 AM


What Makes Ya Think You're So Funky?
The short answer is features and lots of them. Here’s a quick and dirty list of all the features. We’ll go more in depth below.
  • 21349 film entries, 5201 director entries and 30595 cast entries;
  • Highly searchable movie finder;
  • Concise movie reviews;
  • Ability to pull up the filmography for actors or directors;
  • Personal movie manager for keeping track of your movie collection/wish list;
  • Constantly updated list of movie events;
  • Just about everything kept up to date through ActiveSync.
Shhh. The Movie Is About To Start.
The main interface lists all of the movies in alphabetical order and has a look up area that searches the movie database as you type the title. There’s also a button for the Film Finder as well as one for the Movie Manager and Movie Events, all of which we’ll visit later.

By clicking on a movie, you’re taken to a screen that gives the title, director, year of release, production country, running time, MPAA rating, an indicator that tells you if the movie is black and white or color, an indicator telling you what formats the movie has been released in, a star rating assigned by Leonard Maltin and his abridged review, as well as a separate tab which lists the stars of the film.


Figure 1: The main interface.

At first, the movie screen seems pretty plain and boring. However, there’s a lot to click on, which might not be immediately evident. Clicking on the director’s name gives you the ability to bring up the director’s entire filmography. Clicking on the line that contains the year released, country of production and running time, lets you bring up a filmography of the country. Clicking on the MPAA rating gives an explanation of the rating system. In the middle of the screen may, or may not, be several icons which reveal screen format, color or black and white, the medium the movie has been released in and what awards the movie won, including the year. Clicking on the star rating on the right explains the star rating system. Finally, and most impressively, clicking on the actors/actresses brings up a list, by selecting one of them, a filmography of that actor or actress is brought up. The down side of this is that the filmographies are limited to the movies in the database, which in turn is limited to only the movies that Leonard Maltin reviewed.


Figure 2: Viewing filmographies.

Finding What You’re Looking For
With over 20,000 movies in the database, finding exactly what you want is a daunting task. To help with that, the Guide has an incredibly flexible search function. Every aspect of a film’s detail can be queried. It offers such flexibility as being able to search for movies with a certain star rating or higher (or lower for that matter). Genre selections are checkboxes so you can search for any movies that are fantasy and/or crime, for example. Every actor, actress and director is listed much like the built-in Contacts application for you to select any and all that you want to search for. You can search for movies by their MPAA rating, media format, awards the movie won. The list goes on and on. A fantastic feature for not only finding the movie you want, but also fantastic for finding movies you might not know existed.


Figure 3: Incredible search possibilities.

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