Cinema Nova, 01/04/2010
Status: Behind, but I did see three movies this week, so baby steps, folks, baby steps
When I undertook the craziness of seeing 120 movies in the cinema in a year, I assumed that it would up my exposure to quality independent and foreign language films. Turns out (so far at least), I’ve just gotten along to more crap mainstream stuff. Funny, innit, how things turn out different than you’d think.
My second foreign language film in three months was the French film Micmacs. I’ve always been a fan of director JEAN-PIERRE JEUNET (Amelie, City of Lost Children, Delicatessen). I think he has a wonderful visual approach and strikes a balance between highly stylized look and naturalistic (if quirky) warmth in the characters (Alien: Resurrection being the notably exceptional pile of poo in his back-catalogue). Micmacs is closest to Amelie in tone. Which I chalk up as no bad thing.
DANY BOON plays Bazil, a charmingly quirky outsider who gets a bullet in the brainpan as a bystander in a gang shooting. He loses his house and his job while recuperating. He is soon adopted by a group of charmingly quirky misfits, (including a found-object artist, a human calculator, a contortionist and a human cannonball, played by DOMINIQUE PINON, the distinctive-looking Jeunet favourite at far left of the above still) and Bazil finds new purpose: revengin’ on the manufacturers of the bullet that nearly killed him. With the help of his new friends he sets two arms manufacturers against each other in a charming quirky and insanely elaborate plot to bring them down.
It’s quirky, sure, but charmingly so.
