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Apparently, I’m the only one who likes this better than Oldboy.
IMO Oldboy has worse plotting. It isn’t as poetic, beautiful or appealing. It’s overuse of stylization and gore didn’t seem to be of any use to the story beside adding shock value and thrills.

But Lady Vengeance is in a totally different department, violence, when shown, is used to add to the story, not for it’s own sake. The cinematography, pacing and editing are superior in several levels.

So is the characters and plot. From what I remember, Oldboy had a one dimensional main character, differing from Lady, which had a very ambiguous protagonist.

It deals with more than only revenge, it deals with the duality of man, redemption, motherhood, virtue and many other themes.

After reading some real bad reviews I went on to rent The Village thinking it wouldn’t be any good. I was wrong.
This clever drama, with it’s atmosphere, symbolism and purposely stilted acting, was a nice and cozy surprise. Yep, there are a few flaws on the script, some scenes could obviously have been done differently.
What I think is the reason for the negative reviews is that people were expecting an horror movie, mainly because of the way it was advertised back when it came out, and got an atmospheric, slow-moving, drama with an undergoing mystery and a few horror/thriller elements.
As for me, who wasn’t expecting any of that, I saw it as it truly is: a deeply symbolical character-study with great score, acting and hardly-noticeable social/political commentary.

Has some real good acting and a neat score. But the plot is so predictable, ordinary, cliché-ridden and unappealing that the whole movie is just thriller with no surprises, thrills, or anything that comes close to entertaining.

1 – I cried more than I ever did with a movie
2 – Don Cheadle is outstanding
3 – It makes you lose faith in humanity and then restores it in a 2-hour-span
4 – It deals with an important event that needs to be remembered and never repeated

1 – It deals with a lot of universal themes, like redemption, regret, friendship, family values and so on
2 – It has much more depth than most action flicks out there
3 – The acting is simply breathtaking
4 – It relies a lot more on dialog than pointless action scenes
5 – It’s fun
6 – It lets some space for interpretation
7 – Russell Crowe’s character is not a walking cliche

I still can’t believe this show was nominated for best drama at the Emmys. There’s too many characters and too little character development, I didn’t even care about all the deaths in the finale, in fact, they could have killed off everyone and I still wouldn’t have dropped a tear. The plot twists are not surprising at all, answers to the mysteries were given before you realized that you wanted them solved, the dialogs are boring and the acting is mostly poor. It doesn’t even work as an action series, there’s no good battles and the final one was laughably boring and anticlimactic. I mean, if they can’t make the characters interesting why not put some car chases and exploding buildings? If Michal Bay can do it, why can’t they? The reason I watched the entire season is that I was waiting for some improvement but it just got worst and wost. I definitely won’t bother watching season two.

Wow. The lyrics are just…amazing.

I know some dialogs are corny and cheesy, specially the best friends thing, but it wasn’t bad enough to bother me. And I know everyone is saying that the script is bad because there’s way too many coincidences and characters and I agree. But this film is suppose to entertain and I was entertained.

Much worse than I expected, really. The hype is as big as the disappointment. I went to the movies hoping to be entertained but I founded myself bored and just kept looking at my watch for every 2 minutes. The dialogs are awfully written and the characters are not appealing. By the middle of it I was already sick of seeing Leonidas screaming, blood splitting and man fighting and that’s all the movie is about and, once you get tired of it, there’s nothing left to be enjoyed.