14 DAY TRIAL // I must confess I have always been a movie fan. I enjoy at any time a good production, particularly if they are as little linked to Hollywood as possible. I discovered Asian cinema, re-discovered the European one. Well, there are lots of things to be seen out there where cinema is concerned.
I also admit I'm addicted to specialized sites that rate, grade, review cinema and TV productions. I almost never watch something without reading a short summary or review, information about the cast or the director. Who can say no to Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts, right?
Lately, since I've started to forget about movies I have seen before, I thought of putting up my own movie database in which to store information about all the movies I've seen. This should allow me to quickly search through movie names, actors, directors, years of release, keep track of evolutions in actors' and directors' performances, movie sequels, TV shows or series, add comments of my own and so on.
Power of habit, I assume, I directly went to search through software releases to see if anyone thought of fulfilling my recently discovered needs. Not surprisingly, someone did.
Two Tails developed a multi-featured freeware tool allowing people to keep several databases with information about movies, documentaries, clips, TV series and shows or whatever. I was sincerely impressed by the simplicity and ease of use of Simple Movie Database (well-put name). It creates simply structured .mdb databases in which you will store information about movies you've seen. You can enter the production's name and director, release year, performing actors, genre, length, reviews and comments and rate it from 1 to 10 golden stars.
Simple Movie Database allows you to create several databases in which you can add movies. To add a movie, you must load a database and then press the ADD button. Then, you'll be required to fill in a form with information about a production. You can just note the things you know, there's no need to fill in all the fields. You can later add information by searching the movie and editing it.
There are various search options for when you need to find a movie in a database. Type in words or just letters to search in each movie field and the program will filter the records to suite your needs.
When a database is loaded, you can either see a list of all the records filling all the window space or you can choose to see the list in the top half and see detailed information about the selected movie in the bottom half. To do that, just check "Show movie information". The shown list of movies can be sorted by any field ascending or descending with a simple click on the field's name. If you need to list your entries, you can choose to export the entire database to html format. Simple Movie Database will automatically generate an html file listing all of your movies (showing hole or partial information for each filed) that you can easily print.
The Good
Simple Movie Database is really very easy to use and you can create several movie databases in which you can store a reasonable amount of information about cinema or TV productions. It's also free, so why not use it? The interface is very nice, intuitive and friendly.
The Bad
"The bad" is perhaps saying too much, but I would have liked to be able to store a little more information about movies, such as a small summary, a picture or two...things like that.
The Truth
Simple Movie Database is an easy to use movie manager, and it's for free! You needn't have any knowledge of databases and it works fine. It has a printer-friendly html-export option, if you want to list your databases.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
