Amelie and In Praise of Good Movies

Originally written as a mail to my college egroups on July 12th...

I believe that good movies are also a way of vicarious living as are good books.
I saw "Amelie" which was I think the best foreign film in 2003. Fantastic
movie. The movie's about this French woman who is given to random acts to bring
happiness into other people's lives.
The movie kind of bears out my funda that life is one long series of "cheap
thrills", for want of better words in English.
The movie has a gentle pace like "Life is Beautiful(LIB)". This is noticeable as
old movies or movies with a retro theme tend to have a slow pace to recreate the
tempo of life in times gone by. See "Oh Brother Where Art Thou" starring George
Clooney to understand what I am saying, better. However I liked Amelie more. The
other common thing with LIB is the simplicity of the movie. You don't need to go
to the movie with some gyaan or having read the book to get it. For example, you
don't get all the funda about The Lord of the Rings if you see only the movie or
for that matter Harry Potter. No fault of the author, though. There's only about
2 hours to say so much. And I am an avowed fan of LOTR.

There are a couple of characters which touch your heart like that of Jack
Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, in Amelie.
There's the grocer's assistant Lucien, who handles artichokes like babies, and
says they have a heart too. There's the "glass man", a painter who keeps
painting a copy of the same Renoir painting for each of 20 years and never
leaves his house. And the actress playing Amelie is excellent in her portrayal.
And then there's Nina who's tries to judge Amelie's love in life by trying to
get him to complete proverbs (saying that her folks say that a man who knows a
lot of proverbs can't be bad). I love such old fashioned logic. One who delves
deeper into this can infer that anyone who knows proverbs (which paraphrase
uncommon wisdom) would also absorb wisdom from them and hence can't be bad.

And the style of narration in the movie is brilliant, with a touch of French
black humour. I think we should start watching the best movies in the foreign
category more frequently. The last movie of such a classification that I saw was
"No Man's Land" which is the most telling portrayal of war that I have seen and
remains to this day amongst my favourite movies.

I will stop raving here.

Please see the movie and tell me if you like it as much as I do. Also let me
know if you like my review. I am planning on doing this full time :)

And one final thing for French lovers, try and see how much French you can
understand without the subtitles.