...did a hilarious parody of this. "You've got to follow your balloon," in which the balloon leads David Cross to a craps game, a liquor store, and eventually a strip club.

I am so hot for David Cross! I loved him in Ghost World, also.

The key word here is "once"; as in, "I saw this movie once."

At our elementary school they showed us movies in the cafeteria every friday after lunch. At least once a month we had to sit through The Red Balloon. The artiness of it was completely lost on us SoCal kids. It got to where we had the tin that the movie spool came in memorized so we knew before they even put it on the reel that we were going to have to sit through the goddam Red Balloon again.

But maybe there was a sinister subliminal logic in this; I love foreign films now and the author's description of this movie makes me think it's worth a re-look-see. Then again, maybe I'll just go get one of my knitting needles and plunge it into my eyes, thereby insuring that I will never never never again have to sit through The Goddam Red Balloon!

"nearly wordless..."

Ah, if only this were so. The problem was that there was only one word: Balloon, repeated ad naseum. And Pascal's accent gave it that annoying nasal ring, as if a silent 'g' lurked just before the 'n'.

My recollections of the movie are more like Mermaid's: on rainy days we'd watch movies during recess and there was about a 50/50 split between Warren Miller's Skiing the Outter Limits (please, please, please) and the Red Balloon (can't we just sit silently with our heads on our desks?).

In retrospect, though, I don't recall minding the Red Ballon.

That may just be my own wierdness, though-- I didn't mind The New Kids On the Block as a teenager, either. Probably the only teenager in my city who didn't love 'em or hate 'em.