I like foreign films.  Half of the stuff Netflix sends me is from Japan.  Korea.  China.  So why, when this film arrived was I slightly let down when I found out it was from India?  Have I seen Indian movies I haven’t liked before?  Or maybe I just haven’t been exposed to Indian films period - good or bad.

 I guess this was as good a film to start with as any.  The story wasn’t overly appealing to me - sticking a kid in the worst possible situation seems like too easy of a way to build empathy for a character.  The film was beautiful though.  And I know virtually nothing about India or about how Ghandi was perceived by his Indian contemporaries, so that made the film interesting.

At the beginning of this movie the antagonist acts so ridiculous that I was tempted to stop the DVD. His conversations seemed so unrealistic that it went beyond the standard overly dramatic 1951 fare that I am used to. But then, just as I was about to turn off the DVD, I realized it wasn’t insane dialogue because the movie was made in 1951, but because the character was, well, insane. And he quickly went from being annoying to being one of the more interesting villains I have seen in a suspense film. I’m glad I stuck with it too, because the final fight seen on a merry-go-round was worth the wait.

Who would have ever thought that Disney would allow one of its animated characters to check out the ass of his female costar? I guess that shows you how much power Brad Bird has at this point, because that was only one of a dozen moments meant for adults in this movie. The moments, although probably completely unnoticed by children, reassured me that Bird had a higher goal in the making of this movie other than just creating lovable rat Happy Meal toys. Which is a good thing, since the rats aren’t that lovable. Okay, maybe they’re a little bit lovable, but they’re definitely not cute. When they swarm across the kitchen en masse, I had flashbacks to similar real life rat sightings during my Peace Corps days. Cute or not though, they me moved to tears by the end…just like that adorable talking baby pig did when he herded those sheep a few years ago.

Never has following the plot of such a chonologically-misaligned film been easier.  I didn’t really like the Tommy Lee Jones character, or most of the others for that matter, but I did like the story after Tommy kidnaps the border patrol agent.

This movie consists of two essentially independent stories.  If it were cut into its separate halves, I’d probably recommend watching the second one.  The first?  Not so much.  The first has a great female lead who, unfortunately, is given virtually nothing to say as camera whips around frantically in an attempt to recreate the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong.  When someone is talking its more likely to be the male lead whose story seemed uniquely uninspired.  When he asks a store clerk, “Why must pineapple have an expiration date,” the fact that he’s really talking about the expiration date of his relationship is so blatant that I felt like a little kid whom the director didn’t trust to draw my own understanding of what was being said.

The second story was better, but that may only be because I’m a sucker for cute, eccentric, short-haired women.  Quentin Tarantino even says in his post-movie commentary, “I’ve never met someone who didn’t fall in love with Faye Wong after seeing this movie.”  So, maybe the second half was better than the first, but maybe not.  I was so caught up in Faye’s story that the other characters seemed ancillary.  So Faye becomes to this movie what French Fries are to food in Pittsburgh.  If you want people to like what you’re making, you either make it good, or you stick something you know everyone likes (french fries) in it.

This movie left me wishing that I was alive in 1953, if only so that I could use the same hip slang that the characters used. But there’s no way people actually spoke like that back then either - it was way too cool. I think what really happened was that the writer…cared.  About what the characters said.  Its like watching The West Wing now. As the characters are speaking, you think, “Wow, thats well written.” Except half of the time in The West Wing they just trick you into thinking the dialogue is intelligent by having the characters walk while they’re talking. And everyone knows that walking makes anything you say sound erudite. But the characters in Pickup on South Street barely walked at all, so you know it was high quality.

You can only imagine how dissappointed I was to learn, upon receiving this DVD, that it did not involve Michael Richards in a split-personality role. That might have been the only thing that could have saved the movie though.

I think this won a bunch of Academy Awards. And I should know by now not to trust anything the Academy has to say, but it also came highly recommended from a friend. Of course that friend is from Japan - the country that thinks Train Man is a cinematic masterpiece - so I should have taken his advice with a grain of salt.

The truth is that I sat through the first fifteen minutes of this movie desperately trying to like it. Then came the breakfast scene, when Dustin Hoffman tries to cook breakfast (sans wife) and fails miserably. I saw that scene coming a mile away. And if that weren’t bad enough, they had to replay the entire scene at the end of the movie, this time with father and son working in tandem to efficiently cook the world’s best French toast. Okay, okay, I get it - they both grew as individuals without their mom to rely on!

The only good parts of the movie were when the two ex-spouses were disturbed by how much the court case was affecting this person that they used to love.

Recommended viewers:

1. Kids who need the subtle hint that their parents might not be together much longer
2. People who liked The Story of Us (surely there’s one or two of you out there)
3. Dad’s who don’t know how to cook French toast

This is one of those movies that makes me wish I was a more intelligent movie-goer.  All I got was quality, instead of the big ending I was hoping for.

Recently I’ve been thinking that I need to cancel NetFlix. There’s just way too many movies to choose from. I need the mainstream homogeneity of Blockbuster. See, everytime I use Netflix, I end up putting all these foreign and (too) independent of movies in my queue. Then I get them, don’t want to watch them, and have to wait 3 days for something else.

So, I guess by now you can tell that I didn’t really like Waking Life. The rotoscoping was interesting at a lot of different points. But I felt that the movie’s dialogue should have been the focus of my attention, and that was really difficult to do because of the nature of the animation. Some of the conversations were interesting. Lots of others - not so much. I knew vaguely what I was getting into when I rented this one, but had incorrectly hoped there would be a thread of a plot to tie the whole thing together. No such luck.