get real. how could you take a cute, lively, colorful little children's film gem and extract something so talky, tedious, pretentious and dreary out of it? well they did and it doesn't work.i mean this movie really stunk. i grew up watching the original 'Red Balloon' and i always loved and enjoyed it. especially when i was very little i was delighted by it and i remember it being one of the first movies i ever cried during (the other was 'Snow White', but i think i was crying because i was scared sh--less). the original balloon was a sensitive, lovely little film with a timely message. not 'Flight'. it's just a big pretentious dud full of hot air and a message that is overly complicated and lost. that's NOT 'The Red Balloon'.how can you take a film that has such wonderful simplicity and turn it into something so unnecessarily complicated? as far as film making goes 'Flight' misses the point of the original's approach. the original film was told visually and with no real dialogue. this film was so dialogue driven and full of talk that i became glassy-eyed and detached. no real feeling here at all. you shouldn't make 'The Red Ballon' so cerebral. it loses all impact.i wish i could say i fell asleep during this, but i sat through the whole boring thing until the end. whatever message this film is supposed to have just got lost in all the talky tedium. yeeesh! it's supposed to based on a kid's classic. lighten up.

I found this movie astonishingly long and drawn out. While I thought some of the interplay was interesting and pleasant, it was for the most part aimless. The film just seemed to be a series of random conversations of every day French people and a mother that hardly spends time with her son. Nothing particularly interesting or exciting really happens. No profound insight or wisdom is ever really reviled. Nothing is really explained to the audience. The actual balloon only makes a rare appearance. I didn't find this film to be unpleasant, but it was lingering and somewhat pointless.

Hou Hsaio Hsien's "The Flight of the Red Balloon" is a tribute of sorts to 1956's "The Red Balloon," probably the most well known and widely seen short film of all time. That movie told the simple but lyrical tale of a young boy who is followed around the streets of Paris by a helium-filled balloon that seems to have a life and mind of its own. But if you go into this new film expecting anything close to a remake of the first one, you will be supremely disappointed."The Flight of the Red Balloon" is also set in Paris and it does feature a balloon and a boy - but that's about as far as the comparisons go between the two movies. What "The Flight of the Red Balloon" fails to capture is that special spirit of wonder, magic and imagination that has so enchanted "Red Balloon" aficionados for generations. Instead, we're stuck with a mind-numbingly tedious story involving a single mother (Juliette Binoche), her somewhat soporific son (Simon Iteanu), and a Chinese filmmaker (Fang Song) who serves as the boy's nanny and who wants to make a movie of her own modeled after "The Red Balloon." For long stretches of time, the title character doesn't even appear in the film, and you may find yourself wanting to holler "Bring on the balloon!" every time these self-absorbed characters launch into yet another of their eternal gabfests. In fact, when the balloon does make one of its infrequent appearances, all it does is hover around the edges of the scene to no discernible point or purpose. Too bad these nonstop blatherers didn't yield more of their screen time to the balloon.

Somewhere the highly regarded Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien had the idea of paying homage to the 1956 classic Albert Lamorisse film THE RED BALLOON, a tender story of a child's interaction with a nearly animate floating balloon, and while there is indeed an short introduction of a small boy addressing an errant red balloon floating in Paris, the 'homage' stops there. What follows is an overly long, frustratingly impromptu series of scenes that lack cohesion and resolution. THE FLIGHT OF THE RED BALLOON (Le Voyage du balloon rouge) is a prolonged (113 minutes) series of scenes that stutter along with the same sort of wandering course of the occasionally visible red balloon to present moments in the life of a disheveled, frumpy, single mother Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) whose income depends on her fascination and obsession with Chinese marionette presentations for which she supplies the backstage voice for all of the characters. Her absent 'husband/boyfriend' has left her to write in Montreal while Suzanne must care for her young son Simon (Simon Iteanu) with the help of a newly hired Taiwanese photographer nanny Song (Fang Song) while her daughter resides in Brussels. This disheveled household is further complicated by the freeloading Marc (Hippolyte Girardot), the friend of her absentee 'husband', by Simon's piano lessons taught by Anna (Anna Sigalevitch), and by impossible conflicting schedules for marionette performances, partially relieved by Song's quiet ability to take Simon on adventures outside the confines of the cluttered little space they all call home. The only quieting element of this film is the occasional appearance of the 'guardian angel' red balloon, which seems to be a symbol for defining the real world of Simon and the illusory world he craves. The dialogue as written by Hou and François Margolin is choppy and the camera work and constant meandering piano music seem extemporaneous: there are few resolutions to the individual stories that are only hinted. Juliette Binoche is a solid actress able to make the most of a minimal script and horrendous costuming and makeup: her moments of being the voice of marionettes are magical. But this Red Balloon just doesn't take flight in the context of this homage. As with the rest of the film the balloon just floats off at the end. The viewer needs a lot of patience with this film! Grady Harp