By John Ottini

Attention all movie buffs - Leonard Maltin’s 2005 Movie Guide, the ultimate guide to movies and videos is now available right on your favorite Pocket PC. Thanks to the folks at Landware, Inc. you are just one or two taps from having access to over 20,000 films at your finger (stylus) tip(s). This guide is just a wealth of information, covering everything from movie ratings and concise (though opinionated) plot summary reviews to very technical (and to some of us - dry) film details such as media type, screen processes and sound quality. Whatever your movie viewing expertise, this software will provide you with the tools you need to make good movie viewing choices or at the very least, allow you impress you friends with your newly acquired knowledge about films, actors and directors. 

It All Begins with the Movie Viewing Guide

The Movie Viewing Guide is your entry screen into the world of movies and consists of a List View, a Detail View and the excellent - Film Finder View. List View (as the name implies) allows you to display a listing of movie titles with information such as Year (released), Rating (1-4 Stars or Bomb!) or both. You can display All or just a user defined selection (using a custom search) of the movies available in the database. You can also choose among prepackaged popular film lists available by Decade (1930s, 40s, etc), Genre (Action, Crime, Western etc) or maybe just the Most Popular Films based on votes by 1,000’ s of moviegoers. If you know the name of the movie and want to find it quickly, then use the Look Up function (Fig 1) or if you want to perform a more complex search based on multiple criteria then Film Finder (Fig 2 & 3) is your best bet. Film Finder allows you to search by Title, Year, Rating, Genre, Director, Actor /Actress, Award Winners or by any combination of the aforementioned criteria.

Fig 1 – Using the Look Up function to find a movie

Fig 2 – Using Film Finder for multi-criteria search.

Tapping on any movie title brings you to the Detail View, (Fig 4) which consists of a brief plot summary and review of the movie along with information about the who directed the movie, what Genre it falls into, MPAA Rating (PG13, R etc), Screen Format, Film Stock (BW or Color), Media availability (DVD, VHS, Laserdisc) and Award Nominations. If you tap on the Starring tab you can find out the names of all the actors & actresses who appear in the film and (better yet) tapping on the body of the Starring screen, provide you with a pull down menu, which allows you to create a Filmography for any of the actors on the list. (Fig 5) This feature alone is pretty awesome and can keep you amused for long periods of time.  

Fig 3 – The Viewing Guide with a list of Clint  

Fig 4 – Detail View with plot summary

Fig 5 – Creating a Filmography for your favorite Actor or Actresses.

The Movie Manager (Fig 6) portion of this software is great tool for managing all of the DVD or VHS tapes you own in your collection or simply a way of keeping track of all your movie rentals. The Manger gives you the option to create and manage multiple film lists, add new titles, sort or filter the lists and if you are renting, it’s great for keeping track of rental status and return dates.

                      Fig 6 – Creating a list of movies for my collector buy list.

The final component is the Movie Events Calendar, which allows you to automatically download (using ActiveSync) information on the latest Film Premieres, Movie Festivals and DVD releases whenever you go online.  

Registered users can receive free (or later for a nominal fee) film database updates (current Revision 43) downloaded from the Landware, Inc. website at www.landware.com. Please contact the folks at Landware for more specific details on there update policy and price.  

What’s there not to like?

Generally, I really enjoy using this software but as a reviewer I would be remiss in not warning you about a few things that you need to know about the Movie Guide.   

• The capsule reviews and movie summaries are based on the subjective view(s) of the film critic. If you are looking for an objective plot outline, without the critic’s opinionated comments, you will not find it here. For an example of what I’m talking about See (Fig 2) - Pale Rider capsule. Be aware that you may be put off by some of the critic’s opinions.
   
• When searching for movies using Genre as the criteria, remember that the Genre may or may not be what you think it is? For example a custom search using Clint Eastwood (Starring) and Westerns (Genre) manages to exclude two films -The Outlaw Jose Wales and The Beguiled. (See Fig 3). I would have considered both of these Westerns, but this guide considers them as Action and Drama, respectively. Just something to keep in mind when searching by Genre!
   
• I did find one little technical problem caused by using this software.  For some reason the Movie Guide deactivates the automatic Word Completion function on my PPC 2002 Dell Axim. The only way to reactivate it was by performing a soft reset, which may or may not be a nuisance to you. I don’t know if this happens on a PPC running Windows Mobile 2003 – in any case, this is a minor annoyance that should be easily corrected on future versions.

Where can I get the 2005 Movie Guide?

A 14 day trial version is available for download from the Landware, Inc. website at www.landware.com Try it and Buy it.  The downloadable purchase price is $19.95 and a CD version is available for $24.95  

The Movie Guide requires a whooping 3.6M of Ram, but fortunately it fully supports removable expansion card media, which I highly recommend. It is available for Pocket PC 2002 or 2003, requires Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000 or XP and ActiveSync 3.5 or later.

John Ottini is a Pocket PC magazine Contributing Writer and the Moderator of the NEC MobilePro – HPC Forum at www.pocketpcmag.com/forum .  

You can reach him at jdo55fl@lycos.com