Confusing film review

Let it be said once more: writing serves only one purpose and that is to be read. With this in mind one should try and "read" the film review of Con Air in your Saturday, Aug. 2 issue.

Personally I'm not a native speaker of the English language but mine is good enough to be able to read, understand and sometimes even enjoy most English and American modern writers.

A film review like this one, written in a paper that is not only meant for native speakers, should be accessible to someone with my skills. If reading such a review means that I need to keep a dictionary on my breakfast table, I think that the writer misses the point.

Mind you, I was interested to know what someone else thought about the film, having seen it myself. But after some paragraphs -- struggling with words like "brandishing a truckload of moral algorithms", "rambunctious" and "potboiler premise" -- I was totally confused.

But I didn't give up. Yet for words such as "loquacious", "smugness" and "lock horns", my Oxford Dictionary remained silent. I counted some 35 words and word groups that were unknown to me.

When I stumbled toward the end I read: "And when he doth speaketh, his wit matches his aura." Hey reader, are you still there?

A quick survey among some Anglo-Saxons proved my point: they knew some of the words, after some severe thinking, but even they did not know or did not remember most of them.

The question is of course: Why? A display of word skills, see how many difficult words I know? Fine, I still learn and pick up new words. But a film review in a morning paper doesn't seem to be the right place for that. Perhaps it would be better to write a novel.

I'm sure that many readers that morning turned away from this review after the first paragraph or so. When I finished it (after almost one hour of hard work) I still didn't know if the writer liked the film or not.

Well, I know I did. And I also think it deserved an understandable review.

HENRI AUDIER

Jakarta