Saturday, January 3, 1998

Movie Reviews – The Genres

Back when my movie reviews were published on the 8sails web site, each page had a spot for a genre and a sub-genre. Movies began with one of five genre designations:

  • Action
  • Comedy
  • Drama
  • Documentary
  • Horror

Sub-genres were more extensive. Comedies tended to go without a sub-genre, while horror movies (which I know a bit more about) had several standard sub-categories. And the sub-genres were also a little fluid. For example, most ghost movies (such as Poltergeist) were part of the horror genre, but a movie such as Ghostbusters would be designated a ghost comedy.

The designations were mostly for record-keeping purposes, so I could keep track of how many movies I watched in the various categories. And because of the way the web pages were structured, each movie got only one genre and only one sub-genre.

I’ve continued this practice for the blog entries here, at least in part because the set includes more than a few movies that I don’t remember well enough to try to re-classify in any way. And I don’t want to assign tons of extra tags. For example, every movie in the Disney princess pantheon could accurately be tagged as a comedy, a drama, an animation, a fantasy movie and a musical.

Though I understand it’s better SEO to pile tons of tags on everything, I prefer the simpler legacy of the old site’s two-tag system.

As with my opening remarks about ratings, these thoughts weren’t originally written in 1998. I put them here at the beginning of the blog because that makes them easier to find. And anyone reading the blog from start to finish may appreciate beginning with a few general notes to explain why things are set up as they are.

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