by Gary Maclean

Created on: August 11, 2009   Last Updated: June 03, 2011

You would like to know if the movie you are about to spend $6.50, or more, per ticket on or the pay per view movie you are about to rent for $4.99 for the evening, is any good before you spend your money on it, right? Why waste money on something you will have wished you would have waited for until it became a television freebie? Well, good is not the same for everybody. What I like, you may find disgusting and vice versa. There are ways, perhaps not foolproof, but, there are ways that are helpful enough to tell you if the movie is worth your time or not. We have found a few simple tricks to help us decide which ones to buy or rent. 

1) TIME: The very first cut you subject any movie to is how long does it last? Strange as it may seem, it works! 100 minutes plus is our threshold for a good movie. If a studio cannot put at least 100 minutes into a movie then it just isn't going to work. This has been successful over and over for us. Almost all of the time a 100+ minute film will be a good one. The one most important thing you can do for your movie watching enjoyment is to make certain any movie you select is at least 100 minutes long. This is not to say the longer the better, some very long ones may drag on forever. That 100 minute mark though is critical. So critical that we have even gotten to the point where we simply do not watch anything less than that, regardless of who, what, where or when. 

2) GENRE: Once you have sorted out the 100 minute plus movies, cut them again for type of movie. My wife and I had to come to grips with each others' preferences. What we want is a film we can sit down together, with each other, and comfortably watch. We went through many painful minutes eliminating different types of films until we came up with what we feel is our list of most entertaining genres. We like adventure, where new things are always being discovered, but not necessarily action/adventure where half of the movie consists of the big chase scene. Comedy is always a welcome addition to our film watching schedule. Drama is perhaps both of our most favorite genre. Epics and historical films that end up being glorified documentaries draw us both in. Fortunately for me, my wife enjoys a good Sci-Fi every once in a while. So we try to keep our movie picks within that small circle of types of movie and we seem to end up with exactly what we want. 

3) ACTORS / ACTRESSES: More than likely all we need is length of movie and genre,

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