BORING and ARTIFICIAL. The emperor has no clothes.

Rating: 1/10 (24 March 2015)

This is the only movie review I have ever written on IMDb.
I watched Casablanca witch high hopes. I KNEW I was going to love this movie after hearing for years how it's "the best" and what an amazing, moving, love story it portrays. I was very excited and ready to be swept off my rear end by this classic everyone adores.
Casablanca is one of the movies I disliked the most. Actually I think it's my number one most disliked movie. It's not that I don't like old movies or I have a short attention span. I've seen Gone with the wind multiple times and love it. One of my favorite movies is a *1951 Indian, BLACK AND WHITE, ROMANCE* (!!!) movie, I've also seen that numerous times. Casablanca is as boring and plain as a movie can get. It's 102 minutes of nothing interesting happening AT ALL. Gone with the wind is a slow movie that needs patience to watch but lots of interesting things happen, there is a traceable story line and the characters are not plain and one-dimensional like in Casablanca. What happens in this movie? Is there anything interesting happening at all that anybody can point out to? I don't think so.
It's just 102 minutes of random boring people talking about random boring stuff. When I read good reviews of Casablanca I have never seen or heard anyone point out to anything interesting actually happening in this movie. Just how pretty Ingrid was, how cool Bogart was, how well done the movie is, how impeccable the acting is, silly meaningless quotes like "here's looking at you kid" and just that it's a "timeless classic". I just think this whole Casablanca thing is a gimmick and a case of "the emperor's clothes". There is nothing to be well acted or well done because there is nothing happening during the whole movie. I think it would be way more interesting to just film random conversations between random people in bars.
And the love story between the two main protagonists has to be the least believable I've ever seen. I enjoy and get emotionally moved very much by a love story, it doesn't even need to be very good. I cry when I read Hans Christian Andersen's "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" for eff's sake. There is absolutely zero chemistry between the two main actors. Their "love story" is completely artificial, superficial and there is zero emotion portrayed. They seem to be acquaintances at best, not even friends, not to mention lovers. I've seen better simulated "attraction" or "love" in porn dialogues than in Casablanca. No, forget that, I can detect more love and attraction when two butterflies dance together or I see rabbits mating. I'm not even kidding or exaggerating.
This movie made me feel nothing at all, absolutely nothing except boredom. It's unique in this particularity. There is no other movie I can remember that made me feel NOTHING AT ALL. Bad movies at least amuse me. Casablanca is completely devoid of any emotion. Casablanca is the cinematic equivalent of a mouthful of sand. There was no character I could empathize with in the slightest way as there were no real, humane characters to empathize with. Just artificiality.
I'm completely mesmerized about how can people adore this movie so much. It's boring, plain, bone-dry, story-less and features the least believable love stories I have ever seen.
Excuse me, I'm not a connoisseur like you Casablanca lovers, but I have common sense. And common sense tells me a movie doesn't have to be necessarily very "entertaining" but it needs to be ENJOYABLE, reasonably ENGAGING and just in the least to have some INTERESTING things happening. Casablanca has none of this things in the slightest.
Please leave aside your love for this movie, imagine for one minute you don't know who Ingrid and Bogart were and this movie was completely unknown. You've never heard a thing about this movie your entire life and you just watch it not knowing anything about it or the actors. Would you enjoy it? I guarantee you would be bored out of your mind. That is why it is not a "TIMELESS" classic. Here's two movies I would consider timeless classics: Papillon and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Not this bore fest.
I would give Casablanca a negative rating if I could.