In my opinion, movies cost way too much nowadays. Seriously, if you take two people to a movie, you might as well buy the DVD. So usually I just wait until movies hit the dollar theater now. If I do see a regular priced movie, I try and see it at the early bird showing so I only have to pay five bucks for it. Here are a couple of movies I’ve seen recently at the dollar theater and early bird showings.

G.I. Joe

Saw this one at the dollar theater. It was entertaining for a buck. Sure it was cheesy and fakey, but it’s a movie based on some action figures. What did you expect? I was into Transformers and Star Wars as a kid, myself, not G.I. Joe, so I didn’t know who any of the characters were.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Also a dollar theater viewing. Usually when I go see a movie at a dollar theater, I’m not too picky because of how cheap the tickets are. But for this Harry Potter movie, I wish I had my dollar and two hours back. Man, this movie sucked. I stopped reading the Harry Potter books after the fourth one because I got tired of them. They’re decent enough kids books, but Harry Potter himself is such an unlikable character and a dork and the writing style makes me think of a Scooby Doo cartoon anyway. I probably should’ve read the book before going to see this movie, though, because I had NO IDEA what the heck was going on! Way too confusing and I didn’t understand it. I don’t know if I’ll go see any more new Harry Potter movies now.

Astro Boy

This was an early bird movie viewing, so it cost me five bucks. As an Astro Boy fan (mainly because Mega Man was heavily inspired by him), I was really looking forward to this movie. But I was very disappointed with the final outcome. Mainly because they changed the storyline so much. I won’t go into details, but hardly anything is like the original. Usually I don’t mind it when comic book movies get the storylines changed, because usually the comic book story wouldn’t work on the big screen. But the original Astro Boy story was good enough for three different cartoons, so why couldn’t it have worked for the movie? The extra characters just didn’t fit. And plus, while the previews made it look like they would use Tezuka’s art style more, the actual movie certainly didn’t. It’s a shame since the last CG film Imagi worked on was the TMNT movie was pretty close to the source material. Astro did shoot machine guns out of his butt in the movie, though.

What’s funny is that in the theater in the seats in front of us was a little girl and her mom (or a relative or caregiver). The little girl must’ve not been to too many movies before this, because each time something bad happened to Astro, she would cower and whimper and her mom would have to comfort her and assure her that Astro Boy was going to be OK. Which is fine, we need more people in this world who are sensitive to stuff like that. At the end of the movie, on the way out I overheard that little girl say to her mom, “That was a BOY movie! They need to make more GIRL movies!” I thought that was kind of cute.

If you want to watch a GOOD Astro Boy, check out the 2003 DVD box set of the anime. It was a Saturday morning cartoon, but had movie quality animation! I hear they made a new Astro Boy game based on the new movie, but it was also published by D3, the same folks who brought us the technically brilliant and amazing game Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad. And if you couldn’t tell, that last sentience was ripe with sarcasm. So if you want to play a GOOD Astro Boy video game, try Astro Boy: Omega Factor on the GBA. It’s one of the few Treasure games I actually like, and it’s basically a love letter to all things Tezuka, as every main character from his comics appear in the game somewhere. Even Kimba the Lion!

And that’s all the movies I saw recently. I was thinking about going to see District 9 at the dollar theater, but I may rent it instead. Or maybe not. You see, the local mom and pop movie rental place that I like to go to just closed down. I was very sad. Back in the NES and SNES days, I could rent games there for a buck. Needless to say, I rented a lot of games. They also had arcade games there for a time, so I got familiar with a lot of SNK titles back then. I could rent movies at Blockbuster, but I hate them, and online services like Netflix don’t have one to one personal movie recommendations from the owner. So I don’t know what I’ll do. Try to catch more movies at the dollar theater, I guess. I just like supporting local businesses when I can. We’ll miss you, Pay Less Video/Flicks!

And that’s all for now! Later! –Cary

Tags: Movies with Children