![]() ![]() The nostalgic appropriation of Paris in Amelie has enchanted, concerned or angered the viewers, and become one of the most critically discussed elements of the film. It’s crammed with banal clunkers such as : There have been three more films – A Very Long Engagement which bored me to death, Micmacs which is brilliant and The Young and Prodigious T S Spivet which is everything Amelie-haters say about Amelie – avoid, avoid.Īlas, we have the usual film studies lecturerspeak here. Any fans of Gus Viseur or Tony Murena will lap this stuff up. In keeping with the retro visual style is the lush accordion waltz soundtrack by this composer who was a new name to me. The fairydust is mixed with ground glass. Underneath the fairydust is a borderline-deranged passive aggressive type. She does this by stealth and in so doing reveals herself to have psychopathic tendencies – she has no qualms in breaking into neighbours’ apartments and stealing stuff once she conceives of an idea of improve someone’s life all normal rules of behaviour go out the window. I can’t deny that – but I would say that a large amount of the movie is taken up with Amelie trying to fix other people’s problems (thus avoiding fixing her own). At the end – oh, spoiler! – they chug off into the Montmartrian sunset, literally, on a white Lambretta. (This is Amelie criticising old movies for not being realistic - she's got some nerve)Īll right, so what we got – cute shy loner girl meets cute shy loner boy in a manner that redefined the words convoluted and contrived. So are you one of those guys who only like Battleship Potemkin and Last year at Marienbad? No, I hate those too. What? You dare to admit to hating The Green Mile AND The Shawshank Redemption AND Vertigo ? Yes, that’s me. It’s true my movie taste is all over the place. (Amelie unwittingly phones a sex shop to speak to one of their assistants but they mistake the nature of the call.) (Leaving aside Italian nunsploitation movies, of course. So am I really saying that Ram is nearly as good as Abbey Road ? If there is a guilty movie pleasure this is it. The more I think about this movie the sillier it is, but when I watch it that’s a different thing. Jeunet deliberately removed all the graffiti and litter from his exteriors by digital means. The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye. ![]() “By the end of the movie you just want to reach into the screen and choke her” says AmomyBP. “A big fat dollop of saccharine fairy floss” says tombur1 on IMDB. And now you could see that Caro was the Lennon and Jeunet the McCartney.Īs you no doubt know, Amelie is cutesy, fey, whimsical, a romantic comedy with no possible relation to real life, all goldenhued and cloying, which rhymes with annoying, and I expect has made more than a few people thwow up into their handbags. But hey, with a big paycheck he could do what he wanted to do now, which was Amelie. ![]() Yeah, he sold out to Hollywood, and it didn’t work out. Then Caro left to do something else and Jeunet’s next movie was the bad Alien film Alien : Resurrection. ![]() It gave me the creeps but I like that kind of creeps.) So Jeunet and Caro had by now typed themselves as steampunk surrealists. (Not many other people liked it but I don’t care. Hard to believe, this second film is much weirder and much better, one of my top ten movies. Two guys Jeunet and Carot made Delicatessen in 1991 which is an all time favourite of mine, then followed it up with The City of Lost Children four years later. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |