Improvements in the review archives!
Monday, December 15th, 2008I am pleased to announce that the archive of my movie reviews (now well north of 2,300 entries) has been revamped to be more searchable, sortable, and time-waste-able than ever before!
You access the Archives under the Movie Reviews tab, and there you’ll find four columns: Movie Title, Rating, Grade, and Date. (That’s the date it was released, not the date I reviewed it.) The default setting is to list them alphabetically by title, but you can click any of the other three labels to sort them that way. Click the label again and it’ll list them in reverse order.
The new improvement is that if you mouse-over a heading, a little arrow will appear at the right-hand side of the column. Click that arrow and new options will be presented to you.
Under Movie Title, you can type in a particular word and have the database call up only the titles that contain that word. Under Rating, you can select one or more ratings (G, PG, etc.) and have it only show those films; the Grade filter does the same thing for the grades (A-F) that I give. Under Date, you can have it show only films released in the last 30 days, or from any of the years 1999-2008, or from pre-1999. And then, of course, you can re-sort the results however you like by clicking the appropriate column.
Furthermore, you can narrow down the results even more by selecting additional options from the other labels. After bringing up, say, only the films released in 2006, you can go under Rating and ask to only see those rated PG or G, and then of those see only the ones that got a B+ or better. Or you could ask how many films from 2004-2007 had the word “Girl” in the title. Or you could see how many F grades I’ve given to R-rated films since 2001. The possibilities are endless!
Thanks to my webbrother Jeff for implementing the new system. A similar scheme has been set up with the “Snide Remarks” columns, and with the individual actor and director pages that you get when you click on a person’s name in a movie review.
Finally, as a matter of housekeeping, I recently went through and fixed the release dates, where necessary, so that they reflect when the films were first released in the United States. In the old days, I went by when the films opened where I lived (Salt Lake City until mid-2005, Portland after that); that system was left over from when I wrote the reviews for a newspaper and we published them when they opened locally, which (in the case of independent, art house, and Oscar-bait films) was often a few weeks after they opened in New York and L.A. Now that I exist only on the Internet, there’s no reason to provide “local” release dates, so I’ve retrofitted the reviews appropriately. None of this matters to you, probably, but I wanted it on the record.
