Night On Earth

Uh, I don't get it. My friend tells me he has this movie with him that his pal recommended he watch. Said it's a great movie about taxi drivers and twelve minutes. That was all he knew about the film. Basically the film takes place in 5 different cities around the world, each city has a short film dedicated to it and/or the taxi ride we witness taking place in said city.

We turn this thing on - ragging the hell out of Winona Rider because she's a horrible actress. It was painful to watch her on screen "acting" she looked like she was acting. Unacceptable. I thought Gena Rowlands sharing the scenes with her would save my sanity, but even she was intolerable. I decided her performance was an attempt to evoke Katerine Hepburn or Lauren Bacall. It was awkward. We'll always have "The Notebook", Gena.

That piece was set in..Los Angeles. The other cities were Paris, Helsinki, New York, and one other city..who cares. The only reason I continued watching was to see Helsinki on film since I was there recently, and then there was a German character in the New York piece, and I always like hearing German in movies - the German character by the way was supposed to have been a circus clown in East Germany, to prove this he pulls out two little plastic flutes and plays them simultaneously with both hands. What the hell? Am I supposed to think that's what I would see in an East German circus? An old man playing two little flutes? What does that say? What does that prove?

I read the boards at IMDB (love that place) some hated the movie, others rave it's the best thing they'd ever seen..such intricacy, subtleness, the span of the human condition, how people communicate. Right. What I did like about this movie was how it showcased the streets of each city, sort of the way you would experience a city if you were riding in a cab there in the middle of the night. So, yeah, I guess maybe that was the point of the film - in some ways - so, kudos to the direction of the driving.
To each their own. I'd take Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarettes" over this movie any day.