If only more people voted...

Rating: 5/10 (16 May 2006)

There is one principle in politics which roughly says that the bigger a lie is,the easier it can be swallowed by a great number of people: I think that this can also be extended to films, that is to say that sometimes a film is so bad that it appears like a masterpiece to a great number of viewers: Oldboy, (and, in my opinion, 'The Shining' as well)illustrates this to a degree I have never seen before: what do we have in this film? 1)the movie is filmed like an below-average MTV-clip all along, something that, I do not doubt it, might be viewed as 'great cinema art' by some people, but, in my opinion, only denotes bad direction. 2) this film is full of totally and extremely distasteful violence and gore,added for 'shock-value, something that, I suppose, can certainly seem 'extremely impressive and audacious'to some people, but only left me and very probably other viewers as well with an impression of extreme boredom and reinforced my feeling that this denoted the total vacuity and senselessness of this film. 3)The plot, which I will not reveal here (I will leave it to the 'appreciation' of future viewers), is of a poverty many B-grade TV-movies would be jealous of. 4) And, of course, last but not least, the film got a prize at the Cannes film festival. So, what we do finally get here is a perfect 'screen of smoke'generated in order to prevent the viewer to see what lies beneath. There is, however, one thing that I noticed which greatly reassured me: the fact that the comments of the users who disliked the movie were found useful by a far greater number of people than the comments of the people who liked it: taking this into account, we get a far more accurate perception of the general feeling of the audience, a fact which is, unfortunately not reflected in the overall user rating, a user rating which would have been significantly different and maybe have sent 'Oldboy' out of the IMDb top 250, a better deserved place.
So, If I have a wish , this can be summarized in four words:
NEXT TIME, PLEASE VOTE!!!