Do you really want to see this movie?

I hate to waste my time and money on movies that suck!  When I was a teenager, there were a few movies that I looked forwards to seeing, spent the money for the movie and popcorn, only to walk out after the first 10 minutes (“The Barbarian Brothers” is a prime example).  Back then, I was defenseless against such movies and ofter got crushed with disappointment!

Today, life is different because of my secret weapon (drumroll …) IMDB.com, yep that’s right the website IMBD.com – “Internet Movie Database” is my secret weapon to combat movies that suck, whether they are new original sucky movies or lesser quality remakes of the older movies.

It has saved me from re-made movies like “When Day The Earth Stood Still” and “The Pink Panther” etc… 

So how does it work, you might ask? 

Well it’s really simple, just type the movie that your thinking of seeing, and it will pop up facts about it and a ranking from 1 to 10 on how people like you and I feel about the movie.  This is one example where the we (the masses) rule!

The one drawback (an one I consider worth taking) is that often times it’s best to wait at least a week after the movie has been released before going to see it.  That way, the movie has a more accurate rating!

So what prompted me to write this?  My kids want to see “The Karate Kid” remake, but it only has a present rating of 4.6 (as a comparison, the sucky movie “The Barbarian Brother” is rated at 4.1)? 

The older version of “The Karate Kid” has almost a 7.0 rating!  So why are we going to see a much lower quality version of the film instead of just borrowing the original from the library and watching that version instead?… The kids and wife, that’s why! 

Since my wife and kids want to go, we’re going to an old fashion drive-in theater that is close by (cool experience with a decent movie).  So here we go to watch a sucky remake instead of borrowing the original and watching an decent film.  The best feature of the original was the chemistry between Daniel-san and Myagi.  Shoot they don’t even have Myagi in the remake… instead the character is Jackie Chan playing Mr. Hans (or something like that)?  Shoot, what made the original a good film was the portray of those two characters, not another action film… 

Thanks for listening to my rant!  Now you know one of my favorite weapons to combat wasting money and time on bad movies. 

Do you have any secret frugal weapons?

-MR

Update:  Okay, I’m back from the Drive-In, and as I expected the story wasn’t as good as the original.  I think the rating is pretty accurate, it might float up to closert to a 5.0…  The acting was just okay, and some scenes didn’t really transition well…  The original “The Karate Kid” was definitely better…