Genres

There are many type of film genres and a limitless way to categorize movies. For this particular subject there are only a few general genres that are going to be defined. The first genre, my personal favorite, is comedy. These are simply movies that are intended to make you laugh. Comedy can be dry and mellow like a lot of British comedies or wild and crazy such as slapstick comedies like Ace Ventura. Here is a trailer of one of my personal favorites--Ricky Bobby; which, by the way, won an ESPY award for best sport film.


Drama can be defined as any situation or series of events having vividly-emotional conflicting results. When one thinks of dram they think of the emotional acting that goes along with the drama. For these emotional reasons movies awards like best acting and movie traditionally go to movies that fit into the drama category i.e. Ray or Schindler's list.

Action movies are usually the films with the big budgets that get a lot of OO and Awws. These movies are also huge money producers as many people are intrigued by the flashy effects and latest in computer graphics. Michael Bay has become the director most known for his action films. His latest accomplishment, Transformers, became a world wide hit that has already been slated for a trilogy with the sequel set for release most likely in the summer of 2009 but more realistically the summer of 2010. Bay turned a lovable child's toy/cartoon into a big budget film that had audiences of all ages captivated everywhere. The one fallback of action flicks is that awards, besides best effects, typically do not follow this genre of film. This trend however might be coming to an end with last year's success of No Country for Old Men and the potential of The Dark Knight to win multiple awards.

Adventure films usually involve danger, risks or chance with typically a high amount of fantasy. Adventure could go along with action and vice-versa. These movies could be go along with comedy or drama also. Adventure is more of a sub-category that an actual category in itself. A perfect example of this genre is The Lord of The Rings trilogy. One of the tag-lines for these movies says,"You will find adventure, or adventure will find you." The entire trilogy is centered around the quest of returning the Ring of Power back to the place of its' birth.

A horror movie is basically a film that is intended to scare you. These movies differ from other genres as the main point of these, usually, as there is a killer who is trying to murder a group of people. A main killer is usually the plot of these genres i.e. Friday the 13th, Halloween, Scream etc. There is however a select few exceptions such as Alien and Predator. These two movies could fall under the category of horror-action.

A few more genres with a quick synopsis of each:

Animation are movies that are drawn either by hand or more recently drawn through computer animation. Older animation was created by thousands of drawnings done by hand like Snow White; while now animation is created using hundreds of computers to render characters, backgrounds, camera angles, textures, etc. i.e. Toy Story. These are also not always children's movies sometimes animation can be geared towards older viewers especially recently with the animation giants like the Simpsons, Family guy and my personal favorite Southpark.

Documentary: Films that document a certain crisis or event happening in the world. There are no actors but real people: example being An Inconvenient Truth

Musical: Films that have many songs and dance numbers throughout an example being The sound of Music, or Sweeny Todd.

Western: Movies set in old western times depicting cowboys versus bad guys.

Family: Films that are appropriate for the entire family to view.