What this site is about, who I am, and how to find everything!
As you can tell from the title above, this tab is going to describe the site and how to navigate and explore while knowing exactly what to expect. First, though, it's about me!
Who am I?
I'm Miles Barber, an engineering student in New York City who decided to watch each and every theatrically released Disney animated film, so I could truly say that I've seen them all. I also wanted to write short reviews of them and eventually rank them. I started over the winter break of my freshman year of college (I just call the date January 1st, for simplicity). About twenty Disney films in, I decided I wanted to share my reviews to generate some sort of conversation about movies. I googled "website builder" and clicked on the first link, Wix. I spent most of my spring semester working on this site, which may have resulted in some grades a little below the norm. This is the result! I intend to be an engineer when I graduate, but I also want to turn my hobby into something professional as well.
About this site
The various tabs will be discussed in detail.
Home
This tab features a list of everything I ever post. If something happens on this site (if I post a review, add something to a list, or just discuss future plans) you can find a link to it on the home page along with the date it happened. Hopefully this makes it easier to follow what's going on throughout the course of the year. Posts can be identified based on their backgrounds. If a post has a dark red box behind it, it's a movie review. If a post has a dark blue box behind it, it's news. If a post has a light blue box behind it, it's a soundtrack review. If a post has a purple box behind it, it's one of the other categories (which are much less frequently visited and updated).
About
Self-explanatory. You are here.
Site News
This tab describes what I'm currently focusing on with the website. My first focus is Disney, where I will be attempting to dish out every single review of every single movie ever released by Walt Disney Animation. Afterwards, I may decide that, given an imminent Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I may wish to review all of the Star Wars movies. This is just another way to keep you guys up-to-date on what is to be expected from the site.
Rating Criteria
This tab is my rating criteria, or the system I use to rate my movies. If you jump into a review and suddenly are not sure where all of these points are coming from, read the rating criteria!
Movie Reviews
This tab contains every single one of my published movie reviews. They are sorted into categories to condense the otherwise mile-long page. Not that having miles of movie reviews is a bad thing, but you wouldn't want to wait that long for all of the information to load. The categories are sorted into animation and live action, with many categories under those titles, mostly having to do with franchises. I decided against sorting by genre because most movies fit into multiple genres. A category must have at least five potential movie reviews to be created. This is aimed to minimize the number of categories by excluding trilogies and those pesky trilogies with a fourth film for the sake of more money (Hunger Games). Sorry to those Lord of the Rings fans. You know I'm a fan from the cover of the homepage, but there are only three movies in your franchise. Luckily, I can just title your category "middle-earth" because then you'll have six movies in your franchise and that is more than enough! The remaining films (ones that don't fit into any category) are put into a "general" category under both animation and live-action. When I post reviews, I tend to follow a format which has the title, the final score, a poster with a minimal amount of text on it, and then the review. Important to note are that the reviews are pretty relative, by which I mean that I review movies "for what they are". Movies may sometimes get the same score even if one is definitely better than the other on many levels. Just remember that this is all just my opinion, nothing more.
Soundtrack Reviews
As a lover of movie music, I had to include a tab on movie soundtracks. This tab will include reviews of soundtracks I really enjoy. It's unlikely that I will post any reviews of soundtracks I don't enjoy because, well, why would I? Be sure to check this one out because it will have a few great recommendations and the title of my movie soundtracks playlist on spotify.
Lists
This tab includes lists of movies. These come in two categories: lists by genre and rankings. At the end of the Disney run, I fully expect to compile a ranking of every single Disney movie. If I decide to watch every single James Bond film or every single MCU movie, I fully expect to rank them. It's a fun addition to reviewing the movies. I rank films whose franchises hold at least ten films. The pictures on the lists hold links to the reviews, so, if you ever question a rank, you can easily find the review and find out why it ended up where it did. Lists by genre have to do with recommendations I have for people searching for films of a particular genre. Most of these recommendations won't have reviews simply because I have watched far more films than I have written reviews. That shouldn't disuade me from deciding to put together lists of good action movies though. I've seen plenty of action movies. I don't have to review every single one of them to tell you which I think are good. This tab will also feature a list of all reviews, so you can browse through my reviews with ease and read reviews for movies you'd be interested in hearing about.
Anticipated
This tab will probably be the least used, because it will contain a list of five or so films per year that I am anticipating the most. At the end of the year, I will talk about those movies and what I thought about them to go along with the next year's anticipated films list.
Awards
This tab will get used toward the end of the year into the beginning of the next year and will talk about and predict the nominees and winners of the biggest film award platform: the oscars. While I know some of you may dislike these awards shows, I think it's fun to see who will win vs. who should win. It's also a good way to particularly praise certain films.