Introducing the New Decent Films!

Welcome to the new Decent Films Guide, now in the process of being completely redesigned and rebuilt, with enhanced visual design and functionality.

Improvements in the design include more efficient and flexible use of screen real estate, with a multi-column layout that brings review content to the top of the page. Improvements in functionality include powerful search features allowing users to browse reviews by one or more of range of criteria, including ratings, genres, filmmakers, year of release, etc.

The front-end layout and design, as with previous iterations of Decent Films, is my own work. For the back-end functionality, I gladly acknowledge my indebtedness to the technical expertise and generosity of Simeon, a West Coast developer whose content management system, blueCMS, has made the new Decent Films possible.

What’s New

Among the biggest changes affecting the site are the following:

Search options. No longer are reviews accessible only via hard-coded title links on index pages. No more browsing through all the titles beginning with “S” scanning for Strictly Ballroom or Support Your Local Sheriff.

If you know the name of the film you want, just type all or part of it into the search field in the header above. Even better, if you don’t have a particular film in mind, use the search options on the new reviews page to find just the sort of film or review you’re looking for.

Get recommendations by genre or category, from “animated” to “Western.” Find all films rated “A” or four stars, or starring Harrison Ford. Or if you’re in a mood for snarky reviews ripping a film apart, look for films rated “D” or below. You can also do complex searches using multiple criteria: Find all foreign films with positive moral-spiritual content, or all silent films appropriate for kids and up.

Blog-style “Recent” view. If you haven’t checked the site in a few weeks and wonder what you missed, hit the “Recent” link in the header above. It will display all recent additions starting with the most recent.

Review / ratings display. Change always takes getting used to, and I’m sure that the old “meter-style” ratings tables at the top of each review, with sliding arrows indicating just how good or bad a particular rating is, will be missed by some readers. Certainly that layout had its advantages; it provided instant, unambiguous context clarifying the value of each rating (and when you have four different ratings, explanations are a good thing).

That said, my feeling is that the new layout, featuring a simplified ratings display in the right column, is a vast improvement.

Actually, the old meter ratings tables are still there; they’ve just been relocated from the ratings page to the “About this rating” pop-up windows. (Ideally, these tables should be redesigned to reflect the new color scheme, but there’s only so much I can do at one go.)

The advantages of moving the ratings tables off the main review page are many. To begin with, it allows the review text to start at the top of the page, where it belongs. The old layout pushed the review text well “below the fold,” forcing the user to scroll a whole screen just in order to begin reading. Frankly, this put too much emphasis on the rating and not enough on the review. Ratings are ancillary to reviews, not the other way around (see About ratings for more). The new layout keeps the ratings prominently visible in the right column without letting it literally overwhelm the review.

Long-time readers who have come to know and rely on the Decent Films ratings already know how the ratings work; they don’t need complicated tables to know what a B-plus or two-and-a-half star rating means. (Actually, new readers generally don’t need that either; it’s really only the moral-spiritual value and age-appropropriateness ratings that need clarification. See below for more info.) For these readers, the tables were simply wasted vertical space to be scrolled past to get to the review.

At the same time, the new layout is also friendlier to new readers, since it offers the opportunity to plunge directly into a review rather than being immediately confronted with a complex ratings display that one must either immediately study or else deliberately bypass. New readers will find it easier to read a review or two, and later on if they wish take a minute to figure out the ratings system. (And when they’re ready to do so, the old “meter” tables are still there in pop-ups.)

For all readers, the new layout is less confrontational and more interactive. Rather than simply informing the reader that a particular film is, say, “problematic,” and putting the burden on him to scroll to find out why, it puts the emphasis on considering and discussing the film.

Changes in the age-appropropriateness and moral-spiritual value ratings. As mentioned above, most readers have a pretty good idea without being told what a B-plus or three-star rating means. (There’s some ambiguity about how high the stars go, but that’s resolved by new star graphics that show clearly how many stars out of four a given film gets. Anyway, the headers for each rating still indicate the rating scale in a parenthetical note, e.g., “0-4 stars.”)

The potentially confusing ratings were always the moral-spiritual value rating and the age-appropropriateness rating (formerly known as the appropriate audience rating). How good or bad is a +1 or a -2? What does K or T mean?

The new design clears up the appropriate-audience rating simply by allowing enough room for whole phrases — “Kids & up,” “Teens & Up,” “Adults,” “No one” — rather than relying on cryptic abbreviations like “K,” “T,” “A,” and “Ø.” The asterisked ratings (e.g., “Teens & up*”) will still throw newcomers at first, but the explanation is readily available under the “About this rating” link. (Anyway, the general idea that an asterisk implies some sort of qualification or reservation is widely understood.)

That leaves the moral-spiritual value rating. Having worked with this rating for over five years, I can’t think of a better approach than using positive and negative numbers to suggest positive and negative moral-spiritual content. The only question is what scale is going to be most helpful to readers.

Since the site’s inception, I’ve rated films for moral-spiritual content on a scale of +2 to -2, with half-points. After five years of giving out ratings like “+1.5/-.5,” I’m inclined to think that the half-points were a mistake. They’re just too complicated. Yes, the star system uses half-stars, but then the star system doesn’t include both positive and negative stars, let alone at the same time.

To simplify the system, I recalibrated the scale from +2/-2 to +4/-4, with no half-points. Thus, a +1.5/-.5 film will now be rated +3/-1, which I’m sure everyone will find much easier in the long run, though it will take some getting used to at first. The scale of 4 also has the advantage of corresponding to the star ratings system; both scales are obviously arbitrary, but it’s nice at least to have some symmetry between them.