Name that country

[CosmicMonkey]

Yeah.... huh?

I don't think djross is being miserable or self-righteous at all.

Anyways, I still think there should be a language tag regardless, since I think it's a lot more useful for finding films, and I think that generally people tend to think of films by language more than by country. e.g. when people talk about Italian films, they don't usually talk about The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, but rather as films actually made in the Italian language.

(Although, there are films that contain multiple spoken languages and even with a a language tag, the problem we have country tags might also be a problem. For example, will The Godfather be tagged as an Italian-language film just because of the scenes set in Sicily? But anyways, that's a problem for later and I'm getting distracted.)


A solution to this problem, that would almost certainly work at clarifying country of origin in a clear and reasonable way, but might be too complicated to practically be implemented would be some sort of points system. For example, here in Canada the Canadian Government currently uses the following point system to determine whether a film or TV show counts as a "Canadian Production."

Director (2 pts.)
Screenwriter (2 pts.)
First and Second Lead Performers (performer or voice) (1 pt. each)
Production Designer (1 pt.)
Director of Photography (1 pt.)
Music Composer (1 pt.)
Picture Editor (1 pt.)

A Film needs to get a minimum of 6 points to be considered "Canadian."

So I don't know, maybe we could institute a criticker version of this? 3 points for each director listed, 2 points for each writer, and 1 point for each actor listed on criticker? Any country or countries that get atleast 33% of the total maximum possible number of points is listed as the country of origin. And the criticker pages for each filmmaker already include what country they're from, so this is something that could conceivably be coded into the criticker system.

[VinegarBob]

I mean, it's not that big of a deal I guess, and there are various solutions I'm sure and some are more complicated to implement than others, but as a general rule I think the simple method is usually the best.

If I just watched a film and everyone was speaking French, well then it was a French film. Easy. And that would cover like 95% of cases. That's fine by me. So I think a 'language' filter would be the most effective solution, and would seem to be the simplest to implement. I don't know much about the technology behind this though so maybe I'm wrong about that, but it's hard to imagine a system more useless to me than the one that's in place right now for what I was trying to do.

[BadCosmonaut]

I would make a category called "Primary spoken language" instead of "Language". Otherwise some pedants will want to list as many languages as possible per film, even if only a few lines are spoken in the non primary language. Better yet, only allow 1 language to be listed per film without admin approval for more. Admins would need to decide where to draw the line on adding a second language, but I'm sure that could be figured out later.

I think this would be an incredibly helpful category to have on criticker, since the country category fails to provide this kind of filter. This is a filter I would frequently use.

[BadCosmonaut]

I was wondering if this feature was being considered or worked on. Specifically, a language filter where 99.9% of movies are tagged with only 1 language (the main one used). Every time I dig through countries in the database, I remember how the country tag doesn't work in the way I'm trying to use it.

[BadCosmonaut]

The language problem seems like it's going to be solved by allowing 1 language per film to be marked as the "primary" language, and I was thinking that same solution could also solve the country problem described in this thread, meaning that for movies that have more than 1 country listed, 1 country could be marked as the "primary" country. That way we'd be able to drill down into both/either the primary language and/or the primary country of a film.