The Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet, 2003) D-

This movie is so awful, so painful, so poorly executed that it's almost indescribable. I sat there for 80 minutes just waiting for something interesting to happen or for a plot point to be explained and carried out and couldn't believe it when absolutely none of that happened. The film gets points for trying something different- almost no dialogue is spoken during the course of the movie- but there needed to be songs or title cards or something that shaped the plot and spelled out what was happening. The Triplets of Belleville is about a bicyclist who is kidnapped and his grandmother who, with the help of a group of elderly musical sisters, track him down and rescue him, but we are never told why the bicyclist is kidnapped or how the grandmother knows who the kidnapper is when she sees him in the nightclub. And that preposterous car chase at the end made me want to stab toothpicks in my eyes and lick a frogsicle; I understand it's a cartoon but those cars flipped over way too easily and the escape was nearly anti-climactic. After witnessing this horrific mess of a film, I can't believe this was so widely acclaimed back in 2003- more proof that sometimes movie critics are pretentious jerk-offs.