skipsizemore

Let me start by saying all of the negative things that I have to say, just to get them out of the way. First, I agree with the last reviewer that there is perhaps a bit too much sex in the film. If they would strike about three scenes, this would be a movie that (like The Princess Bride) I could recommend to absolutely anyone, even my mother or my pastor, with total confidence. Only one of the sex-related scenes really adds humor and advances the story (a couple make love in a public restroom, causing things to bounce around outside, a replay of a scene from the equally marvelous Delicatessen, by the same director).

Secondly, the film really does rely too much on voice-over narration. Sometimes what the narrator is saying is obvious, sometimes it's just a quick way to move us on to the next scene. Sometimes, admittedly, it works very well. But in a film that does such a wonderful job of telling the story in a creative way (using talking photographs and a gesturing statue, for example), it seems to me that more could have been done to spare us the voice-over in may places. If I had wanted a book on tape I would've rented one!

Now that said, this really is a marvelous gem of a film. The quirky humor is at times laugh-out-loud funny, and the story keeps one guessing. Unlike the last reviewer, I was not bothered by the dangling story lines; it seemed to me that these were just vignettes designed to draw me in to the world of Amelie. It would have been very "Hollywood" to tie them all up in a neat package in the last ten minutes of the film.

Visually, too, the film is stunning. Everything one sees is carefully placed to be evocative and stylized. Most of the colors are washed-out, so that every once in a while a bright object will catch the eye at a strategic moment.

All of the minor characters are fun, well-scripted and used to good effect in advancing the story. But the character of Amelie really makes or breaks the film. If, like me and most others, you find her to be charming, beautiful, and sweet, you'll probably love the film. If she reminds you of someone who used to make fun of you in high school, it'll be a long two hours.

9/10

If you like Amelie, I would certainly recommend that you check out Delicatessen. It's much darker, and somewhat hard to find, but the humor is just as wild and the visuals even more striking.

I had high hopes for this film, but I'm sorry to say that I found it to be sad and ugly. Most of the movie consists of long, explicit dialogues about the sexual exploits and chemical habits of the leading male characters, who seem to be little more than moronic schoolboys with no apparent motive to do anything other than to devote themselves to the pursuit of every depravity they can think of. Some of the scenes in which they actually pursue their wretched pleasures are so vulgar that I would probably be censored if I attempted to describe them here. Sex is reduced to an act of elimination, and words are chiefly useful to describe one's last or next or best act.

In a vain attempt to give the film "meaning", voiceover narration is jarringly superimposed over the soundtrack to tell us about the terrible fates or hidden pasts of the characters on the screen. These interludes do little more than force an extra helping of bathos and morbidity onto an already very depressing picture. The final scene, too, is contrived and cheap, too little and too late to rescue the viewer from the banality of the previous 100 or so minutes.

If there seemed to be any real joy or genuine pleasure to the lifestyle of the principal characters, the overall message would be "eat drink and be merry". As it is, though, the film comes across like an infomercial for suicide.

If you are the kind of viewer who must be shocked or titillated by a film in order to get anything out of it, then this might be a good film for you to see. I have not yet subjected myself to the film "Gummo", but I believe that much of what I have read about it applies to this film as well. So, if you liked "Gummo", you will probably like this one, too. I certainly couldn't recommend it to anyone I care about, though.

Through the Wire tells the story of three women convicted of federal crimes who were placed into a special high-security "jail within a jail" during the late 1980's. The women claim that they were mistreated-- victims of a government "brainwashing" experiment-- because of their radical political views. Though some of their claims seem to have some merit, the film fails to make a strong case for them. Relying almost entirely on the words of the women themselves, the film makes very little effort to substantiate or refute their accounts through interviews with authorities. Considering the near-universal tendency of prison inmates to exaggerate their plight (filing suits claiming that the food itself constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, for example), it is difficult to take the women's claims at face value. It doesn't help matters that the women express their extreme political views, at times resorting to outlandish hyperbole when discussing the U.S. and its "genocidal" policies. The women would have been better served by a more objective film that focussed on the better substantiated aspects of their stories, such as the extreme length of their sentences. This film won't convince anyone who isn't already convinced.