One of the reasons we love foreign film is the inventiveness, the excitement you feel when you're discovering a kind of movie you've never seen before. But subtitles alone don't make art. Even foreign film often follows a crowd-pleasing formula that sucks all the life right out of it. Here are the worst offenders--world films we love to hate.
1. Amélie
Watching Jean-Pierre Jeunet's relentlessly upbeat confection "Amélie" (starring the irrepressible Audrey Tautou) is like taking a sticky shower in honey, like eating a never-ending bowl of filling comfort food, like drowning in a lake of Grand Manier, like visiting EuroDisney after a full frontal lobotomy.
2. Life is Beautiful
Roberto Begnini clowns his way through the Holocaust in this utterly offensive farce, which takes the suffering of millions as the background for its hackneyed story. As antidote, we recommend Alain Resnais' "Night and Fog."
3. Whale Rider
This celebrated piece of formula filmmaking doesn't have a single surprise in it. Niki Caro's "Whale Rider" unfolds as a succession of rote scenes in which characters speak the subtext and are helped in their emoting by a cushy synthesizer soundtrack--and the whales are 100% CGI fakery.
4. Billy Elliot
Can working-class lad Billy overcome the vicissitudes of his working-class environment and become a professional ballet dancer? You betcha. Nobody will have their imaginations stretched by this dull and criminally harmless movie. Shock! It's ok for boys to dance ballet! Thanks to Billy Elliot, audiences everywhere can now congratulate themselves on being more enlightened than Billy's coal-mining father.
5. Chocolat
Juliette Binoche speaks beautiful French, yes. But in the French town of "Chocolat," everyone seems to speak English - with zee accent. Oh, how the musical theme swells. And Johnny Depp is positively ridiculous as Binoche's long-haired lover.6. Cinema Paradiso
We'll confess that we loved this movie dearly for a while--before we realized how manipulative, derivative, and all-out sentimental it is. If you really want to wallow in tears, get the director's cut, now 200 minutes longer.
7. Blue
Julliette Binoche (making her second appearance on this list) suffers artfully in the first part of Kieslowski's acclaimed "Three Colors" trilogy. You see, her husband died and now she has only music (classical) to soothe her pain -- which gets so bad she has to rub her knuckles against a wall. Oh, the suffering!8. Il Postino
Check out the studio's tag line for this one: "Dreams do come true." Need we say anything more? This film is too long, too sentimental, and yes, the postman (acclaimed Italian actor Massimo Troisi) gets the girl--thanks to Pablo Neruda's poetry. At least the beach looks great and the girl (Maria Grazia Cucinotta) is beautiful.9. Fat Girl
Now that we've dealt with the worst offenders in the category "crowd pleaser," here's the opposite extreme: a movie that ends with the main characters raped and slaughtered just to prove some abstract point. The horrified scream that Marcy let out echoes through the Walter Reade theater to this day.
10. Hero
This wildly successful martial arts adventure by former art house darling Zhang Yimou is so beautifully photographed that the perfection strangles the film. A confusing story surrounds the repetitive fights, and the beauty becomes mindnumbing.
