Marvellous Movie Time!!

The blogging world is full of cool people. Now and then, you happen upon someone with whom you really connect. George (Nebular) is one of those people. He runs an awesome blog called CineMarvellous! where he offers sharp, concise movie reviews. George lives in Europe, so I doubt we’ll ever meet in person. But if we did, we’d talk movies for hours, because we share the same taste in films.

I asked George to share a bit about himself, his former Rotten Tomatoes journal, and how he came to us here in the blogging world…

Hey there, Alex’s army!


When Alex asked me to do this self-introduction I was as thrilled as I was anxious, because I’ve never done anything like this before. At first I was like – OMG, so many people will read this! Am I interesting enough not to bore them all to death?! J But then I thought – What the hell, I’m doing it. It will be fun!


First things first, my name is George, and I’m a cinephile coming from a small country in south-eastern Europe. Being obsessed with movies since young age, and working as a video store manager for a long time, movies have always been a huge part of my life. I’ve been writing reviews since 2004, and though I’m just a regular guy who has huge passion for film and cinema in general, I’ve always wanted to be a professional critic.


So, it all began 7 years ago, when I came across the Rotten Tomatoes site by a lucky accident. My first reaction was WOW! I found all this fresh/rotten thing to be pretty cool, and I was so impressed by its editors’ creativity and imaginativeness, that I’ve started to visit the site regularly, spending hours a day on reading critics reviews and stuff. Soon after, I became a part of the RT community, and started my own RT journal called “A Journal Made of Bricks” /because of the bricky pattern I used as a background/. I knew it sounds ridiculous, but at the same time, I kinda liked because it was unusual and unique.


Sadly though, my English was pretty poor at that time, and my reviews were extremely short and mostly consisted of simple, lame sentences like “The cast was great.”; “The visuals were amazing.”; “The story sucks” and things like that - there was nothing insightful, or original, or even remotely witty about those reviews. LOL. However, after a year of regular writing, my English has improved vastly, and I got better and better at reviewing movies. I’ve posted every single day, made hundreds of new friends, got thousands of visitors, and as a result of all this, my journal became hugely popular - I was in a complete shock when I found out that it has reached No. 12 on RT’s ‘TOP 25 Most-Visited Journals Ever’ list, and remained there for a long time. My journal even appeared on the main page of RT for about a week /I’ve got a screenshot to prove it ;)/.


However, in 2008 the guys from RT screwed up pretty much everything, by changing completely the interface design of the web site, which made it unusable for most users, plus, it was full of annoying bugs. A year later, I said goodbye to Rotten Tomatoes, and joined Blogger. In August 2009, I ran a movie blog, called CineMarvellous! (Check it out, and I hope you guys like it). It covers all the genres of film, from martial arts and horror movies to art-house drama, animations and recent sci-fi blockbusters. In the beginning, I’ve started with more detailed movie reviews, but last year I’ve changed the course and began to write brief and to-the-point reviews, because of my busyness, and because I realized that almost nobody likes to read long and tiresome movie reviews. I bet you don’t either. J So far, my blog has been visited over 63,000 times by more than 11,000 unique visitors from 135 different countries. I’m truly grateful to Blogger for giving me the opportunity to write and post reviews for free, and to all my blog buddies, readers and visitors, who make blogging worth it.


Besides RT and Blogger, I’ve done some writing for a local lifestyle magazine called “My Life”. Last year, they’ve contacted me and asked me to do an article for their St. Valentine’s issue – a list that features the ten greatest love stories in history of cinema. To be honest, I’ve struggled a bit with it, simply because romantic movies have never been my cup of tea, /I’m more into horror, sci-fi, fantasy and martial arts/, but I decided to do it nevertheless. The editor in chief loved it, and that’s how I got published for the very first time. J Furthermore, I’ve done some paid reviews, and won several awards, including 2010 TOP MOVIE REVIEW BLOG, which I consider a great achievement.

Thanks for sharing, George!

Now, my awesome army – go visit CineMarvellous! and see how a pro really reviews movies.

And my wife and I are taking off for a few days, so everyone have a safe Memorial Day weekend!