i think this post is about me seeing garden state

i just saw garden state for the first time this weekend. i liked it, and it reminded me of a foreign film for some reason. it's hard to explain why, exactly, sort of this mix of the composition of the shots, the timing of the cuts, the way sound is used, pretty much the way the whole film is assembled - the germans have a word describing the effect of the sum of all the parts of a creative work, but i dont know what that word is, cause it's really long and in german, so i wasn't even going to mention it, but i guess it's too late for that now - reminded me of a foreign film.
i like foreign films. there isn't one that i haven't been able to fall asleep during. some of them, i've managed to fall asleep to during the opening credits and sleep straight through to the end. i must have watched 'wings of desire' almost a dozen times by now - i even own it - and there are still large chunks of that movie which i've never actually seen. but i love it.
it makes me wonder why american movies are so different than foreign movies, and what it is that i actually like about them. after all, foreign isn't a country. theres no reason they should all have the same effect. but theres something in their, whatever that german word is, that sets them apart. one of the only genres that america really excels at is the action movie. im talking about the balls to the wall, die hard kind of action movie. like 'die hard'. isnt that funny. guns and car chases and rock em sock em robots. sure, china has their kung fu movies, but kung fu is a subset of the action genre. if you have see a straight up action flick made in china, you mostly spend the whole time wondering why all those chinese guys are using guns when they could just break out the karate. i know, that's such a cultural misconception. not every chinese guy knows karate.
but its that straight up 'couldnt care less' kind of attitude that american action movie heroes has that makes it a good action movie. asian heroes always have that honor or tradition holding them back; if you had a japanese guy acting like bruce willis in die hard, you'd think he wasn't raised right; yet for some reason, to have bruce willis act like that, it makes you think that he was.
so maybe america is good at making action movies, and the rest of the world is good at making every other kind of movie. or maybe its cause we only see the best of foreign films that come out, since they need to become hits in their own country first before being picked up by distributers, whereas here we gotta watch every piece of crap that comes out. right, tim?