When I sit down for a long haul flight, one of the first things I typically do (while the flight is still boarding) is scan the available movies on the IFE, and then look them up on IMDB while I still have connectivity - basically I'm looking for guidance about which are the good movies, and which ones I should skip.

It seemed to me there should be an easier way of doing this, so last weekend I wrote a web app to do it for me. Some background - I'm in the software business, but it's been many years since I actually wrote code for a living ... so I do little projects like this to do something that I need, and also just to keep myself current with technology. That's a long way of saying that it's very basic (only works for AC) and there could well be bugs in it ... but for now it seems to be functional, and it may be useful to some people here, so I'm sharing.

It's very simple; enter the start & end cities, and your email address. The app will churn for a minute or so, reading the movies off the Air Canada web site, and looking up the ratings and descriptions from IMDB. It will sort all the movies by their IMDB rating, and send you an email with all the info. I did it that way so I'd have an email with me in-flight, when there's no connectivity.

This is not a software development forum so I don't want to discuss the implementation here ... and I don't have much time to do more work on it anyway; if you have any questions or suggestions feel free to PM me, but there are no warranties - the best you can likely hope for is a complete refund of what you paid for it

Anyway, if it does work for you, then you're more than welcome to use it - just go here: http://viewflight.appspot.com/

Edit: This detail is mentioned later in the thread, but in response to a PM I'll highlight it here. You can now also get the movie listings by sending an email (which works in China, etc). Simply send an email to [email protected], with a subject of the airport codes for your departure & arrival cities, and optionally the number of movie plots you want to see. The email body is ignored.

Example subject lines:
YYZ FRA
SYD YVR 100