Audition is seen by some as a great example of "extreme" cinema, but I found it to be almost entirely boring, and even when it finally starts to pay off, kinda "been-there-done-that." The premise is a good one. Ryo (Shigeharu Aoyama) is a businessman who, egged on by his TV-producer friend, decides to "audition" for a new wife by staging a faux-casting call for a non-existent reality show. He ends up casting Eihi (Asami Yamazaki), a shy and downbeat woman with a mysterious past. Of course, she ends up being a total psycho, and as you'd expect, a bloodbath ensues. Unfortunately, it takes seemingly hours to get to that twist, by which time you've sat there watching a completely banal romance movie. Now, I admire that Miike would bother to bolster his red herring to the extent that his gruesome horror flick, for almost its entirety, seems like a Lifetime movie, but the shaggy dog in this case is so shaggy that when the twist finally transpired, I didn't care in the least. There's a fine line between underground subversion and flat-out lameness. Audition may be artful, but as with too much art (especially cinema), I just didn't give a shit. Here I am now, entertain me, you know?
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