Rating: 
Summary: Very Comprehensive
Review: This is a very comprehensive book. The movies are rated from four bones to woof!. Each movie comes with a distription of the plot as well as complete cast and production personel. The book is divided into sections. One section is the catagory section which groups the movies into every catagory and topic conceivable, such as; school daze, dates from Hell and modern cowboys as well as places such as Minnesota, San Francisco and Florida. Obviously a movie can fit more than one catagory. There is an awards section that lists all of the major awards given such as the Oscars and Golden globes and the Independent Spirit Awards. the list also includes the razzies, for the worst in Hollywood. There is also an actor, director and cinemotograoher section. since the book is comprehsive it is quite large and expensive. I recomend the Leonard Maltin Book. He writes thoruogh reviews and has a cast and director index and the book is less expensive.
Rating: 
Summary: The best movie guide out at the moment
Review: This is the best movie guide available today, not so much because of its reviews (they're as generally reliable but opinionated as any other guide) but because of the massive amount of indexes, which go way beyond other guides. Definitely worth purchasing as a physical companion of sorts to the online Internet Movie Database (imdb.com).
Rating:
Summary: lots of info and fun too
Review: This movie guide seems to have info on a whole lot of movies. The reviews are not especially long or in-depth (they're about two paragraphs for most movies, longer for major or important films), but they give you enough info to know what the movie is like and I find that MOST of the time I agree with what they have to say. There may be some movies it doesn't cover, but I spent some time trying to think of ones that wouldn't be in it, and it wasn't easy.But, to me the best part of this book is that it's fun to read. The bad movies get slammed in a creative fashion (in one movie, they "ride the one joke premise like a rented Ferrari"), and there are jokes, etc. And in addition to indexes of actors, directors, etc., they have a list of categories, some of which are pretty specific and some of which are entertaining, like "Korean War", "Farming", "Phobias", "Stolen from Europe" (American remakes of European films), "Tennis", "Venice", "Scared 'Chuteless" (Skydiving without one piece of important equipment), etc. I also have the electronic version (for the Palm handheld) made by pocketsensei.com, which is nice because the actual paper book is the size of phone book and not too portable. The Palm version, of course, fits in your pocket, and I take my Palm with me most of the time, so I can refer to it while I am in Blockbuster or at Best Buy to buy a video or whatever. (You can read the back of the DVD box, but since 100% of them say the movie is awesome, that's pretty worthless.)
Rating: 
Summary: Size Is Not Enough!
Review: True to its boast, the "Videohound Golden Movie Retriever 2004" contains at least 6000 more reviews than any of its competitors. However, those 6000 reviews seem to be almost all at the bottom end of the ratings spectrum, the films rated at two "bones" or less. Above this abysmal rating the distribution of bones is close to that of Maltin's stars. Despite the greater number of reviews, in practical terms the Videohound guide appears to be less comprehensive. In my own extensive collection of more than 1500 theatrically-released feature films, which contains all film genres and is fairly uniform in distribution for the past 80 years, a greater percentage is reviewed by the Maltin and Halliwell guides (each with only about 19,000 reviews) than by the Videohound guide (about 25,000 reviews). This result was a surprise to this writer. Which brings us to the reviews themselves. Many of these are of very high quality: focused, accurate and insightful. But all too many are limited to an overlong recital of the plot in much too much detail, and this even for films in which the plot is not the most important aspect. In these last cases, the review often shows a lack of comprehension on the part of the reviewer. Occasionally, the review even contains blatant "inaccuracies," which makes one suspect that the reviewer either watched the film inattentively while engaged in some other activity or did not watch it at all. Sometimes the description of the film is inconsistent with the rating. Can these have come from two different reviewers? The unsuitability of at least one reviewer to his task is plainly showed by the comment "highly regarded although low budget." Of the five comprehensive English-language film guides (Maltin, Halliwell, Time Out, Martin-Porter, and Videohound), Videohound is solidly in fifth place (in sixth place if we include Jean Tulard's "Guide des films" (in French) in the competition). After careful and detailed studies of all of these guides, Maltin seems to be the most useful overall and has the most consistent, best distributed and most reliable ratings; Halliwell has the most complete film data (but lumps most films in the "zero stars" ranking); and Time Out has the most revealing and insightful capsule reviews (but gives no numerical ratings at all). The Martin-Porter guide may be appealing to families with small children, because it gives details on the MPAA ratings, although this writer finds it often low-brow. There is no special area for which this writer recommends the Videohound guide, except perhaps the silliness of some of the film lists in the appendices. My choice for a single guide is clearly Maltin. If you are willing to buy two guides, then my recommendation is Maltin + Time Out. There have been times (not often) when I have needed data that were to be found only in the Halliwell guide. And, of course, a cinephile's life is barely worth living without Roger Ebert's movie yearbooks or Ephraim Katz' Film Encyclopedia.
|
