My neighbour and I watched Broken Flowers on Friday night. We'd been planning to see it since the beginning of August, and had been anticipating it for some time before that.

Now that I've seen it, I kinda wish I hadn't.

It's not that it was terrible, or that Bill Murray was awful in it. It was just . . . meh. Nothing really happens, and there were too many pauses in the film to reflect on that fact.

Basically, the premise is this: A reclusive middle-aged man receives an anonymous letter from a former lover claiming that he fathered a son. The reclusive middle-aged man's neighbour convinces him to visit five ex-lovers to see if he can figure out which one wrote the letter.

We see montage after montage of the reclusive middle-aged man getting on and off planes, in and out of Ford Tauruses, and driving up and down the same tree-lined highways. Why? What's so special about these trees? Why is he taking a plane to these locations if they're all along the same stretch of highway?

The movie was also incredibly quiet and was full of giant pauses between scenes, where we faded out, waited three seconds, then started the next scene. During these pauses, I could hear the people in the back row of the theatre eating their popcorn, the guy at the end of the row crinkling a wrapper, the woman up front clearing her throat. My own pop sounded like it was part of the soundtrack when I slid my straw through the lid of my drink.

The ending enjoyed the distinction of being the only unexpected moment in the entire movie, as it happened seemingly during the middle of a scene.

The writer and director of the movie is apparently a Big Man, and I appear to be alone in my opinion, but I'm standing by it.

Especially now that I've seen The Constant Gardener. But more on that later.