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Amelie

Amelie

List Price: $19.99
Your Price: $14.99
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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Beautiful Film
Review: Visually stunning. Skillfully acted. Beautifully told.

A feel-good movie. A transforming movie. This is the way everyone should live their life.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Tautou shines in this incredible foreign film
Review: A friend of mine raved about this movie to me for months. They were in love with this film, so I decided I should rent it to see how it was.

I must say I am not a foreign film fan, to say the least, but I am so glad my friend encouraged me to give this one a try!

Amélie is simply wonderful; you would have to be of another species to not fall in love with this wonderfully charming film. After renting this movie and paying the late fees, I've decided to order this movie from amazon.com. This is a movie you can watch over and over again and truly appreciate. 5 stars for sure.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Wow.
Review: Simply amazing. A must-see for anyone who considers themself a "good" movie-watcher. ;)

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: See Amelie, go to Paris, enjoy life....!!!
Review: One of the best films I have ever seen and probably will see, it's a totally new experience. Enjoy seeing Paris locations that you would like to be there now.
The DVD is a great acquisition. - trustme -

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Learn French !
Review: I bought this DVD without seeing according to the reviews on this site and was not disappointed in the least! This movie made me feel so WARM INSIDE. It was excellent and the cinematography was beautiful. Audrey Tatou is mesmerizing. I have watched it so many times and upon my first viewing was a bit dismayed by having to read subtitles... (so I'm lazy) but they were'nt hard to follow at all. I've watched it so many times since then I am actually learning French. Albeit, the phrases are currently limited to certain subject matter as suicidal fish....

I recommend this movie to EVERYONE!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: ONE OF THE BEST MOVIES I HAVE EVER SEEN!
Review: I bought this movie two weeks ago on here, I got it last week without knowing anything about it-other than it was in French. I am glad I did! The setting, the characters and the story are wonderful. It is a great comedy and love story. I thought the subtitles were going to be hard to follow, but it was not at all. If you love a great story-Buy this movie!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: It charmed my socks off!
Review: On the morning Princess Di's death is announced to the world, a shy young waitress finds something that leads her to help other lonely people find happiness: a box of childhood treasures returned to a middle-aged man, a gnome sent on a tour of the world in hopes of inspiring her father to do the same, a hypochondriac cigarette lady and ex-boyfriend of a waitress at the Deux Moulins paired off. Opening with a series of quirky, unusual vignettes from Amélie's childhood, the story flits about the streets and places of Montmartre with a charme and douceuer that's never cloying. Pour les petits plaisirs de la vie sont les meilleures, non?

While I haven't seen any of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's previous work, I'm delighted to say that he's won himself a new fan. What caught my eye first was the Sepia tones that captured a very cozy, old-fashioned, and oh-so Parisian flavor, illuminating a magical, maybe improbable maybe not, fairytale quality to the proceedings. His use of color, I call to mind the lush, vibrant Reds in Amélie's apartment, was striking -- evocative of, say, Vincente Minnelli in making these cinematic images resemble still paintings come to life. I only wish Real Life looked half as wonderful. In Amélie's wondrous world of imaginings, life is like an exquisite chocolat - seemingly ordinary on the outside but full of joy and lightness and sweetness on the inside. Pictures talk, objects come to life, and even her television is a ongoing serial of her life, and what it can, or cannot, become depending on the choices she makes. And though the story may be old hat to some, the cinematography was inventive in its usage of animation, video camera, vintage footage, and torn up photographs.

In the title role, Audrey Tautou was absolutely wonderful. I love her face, it's multitude of expressions, her wide-eyed innocence countering the lives of innocents lost she tries to brighten. There's a fey, impish, beguiling quality to her. A pixie full of moxie, who finds joy in little things, tries to fix other people's lives but eventually finds that her own life needs fixing as well. And would it be blasphemy if I said that she was positively Audrey Hepburn-esque. The way she looked, especially the hair, had me thinking back to the days of Roman Holiday and Sabrina. I'd have to say that she, and Irene Jacob, are my two favorites of international cinema.

This film made me smile. It made me feel inexpressibly happy. It made me want to go outside and hug random people off the street. And this is why this film succeeds so well - and something like Pay it Forward does not. It does not give any pretense, or pretentious airs, of Making a Deep Philosophical Statement of Humanity to Win Oscars. Jeunet knows never to let the movie take itself seriously, moving with a grace and graciousness, elegance and effortlessness, that doesn't manipulate the audience's intelligence with propaganda disguised as cinema. Rather, it relies on the universality of the human spirit and life with all of its unexplainables, imperfections, and most importantly, miracles.

I'm a sucker for movies that have these kinds of whimsical idiosyncracies set against an anachronistic timescape. The last movie I enjoyed quite this much was Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums. Go watch this one.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Beautiful, enchanting
Review: I was sckeptical about loving this movie, because I'm not a big chick-flick fan. But when I saw this movie, I just fell in love all over again. This movie will not make you cry, but it will make you laugh out loud and will move your heart. This movie now tops my list of best movies ever! Beautiful cinematography and music as well. Vive la France!! C'est belle!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Wonderful Movie
Review: I'm not always a fan of French movies, but I thought Amelie was great! Amelie is the story of a troubled and lonely girl in Paris who, with the help of various people around her, begins to turn her life around. Although the movie has serious undertones, it is very comical - the writer uses simple satire to enhance the movie's entertainment value. Not only do I enjoy the storyline, but I also like the way it "looks" - each scene is colorful and fun (kind of like Moulin Rouge). Other than a couple sex scenes where there isn't much nudity, the film is also very clean. Definitely see Amelie if you're a fan of intelligent, well-written European films!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Cynical movie
Review: It's forever a sunny day in Paris of Amelie. The streets and subways are immaculately clean, with no urban problems of graffiti, cars, noise - or any of those darned people of color. The weirdoes that populate the beautiful subway are merely shy, handsome, eccentric guys that collect discarded photo booth pictures to ponder who the souls are.

I have no objections to fantasies, to optimistic tales that say, hey, life is wonderful. We have friends, sunsets, and puppy dogs. How can you not be thrilled to live? But the reality in the life of Amelie is whitewashed, computer generated and enhanced. The result is a cynical underlying underpinning. Amelie's world creators lack the depth to the see the glass as half-full and see joy in the mundane. Instead of seeing the silver lining to the cloud, this movie creates a beautiful fantasy cloud. Instead of seeing the glass as half full, it fills the glass to the top.

The movie begins with a wonderful 20-minute voice-over that gives a capsule of her life - from the suicidal goldfish episode to the ice-cold father who touched Amelie only during his heart-checkups. Later, she talks of the joys in noticing details in movies that she believes nobody else notices, like the bug in the background of an old black and white movie that enters the open lips of a woman about to kiss. She also talks of the small pleasures in her life, like skipping stones in the lake. She's had a couple boyfriends who failed to interest her. Amelie develops something of a Walter Mitty fantasy life.

It all reminds me of a certain person I once knew, and it is all to character.

But the movie goes downhill after the voice-over. She meets the quirky, handsome, eccentric boy through an elaborate game she devises ("follow les arrows ..."). In the end, she finally hooks up, they have an elaborately choreographed neck-kissing scene, and the next scene is of a naked Amelie and eccentric guy. Amelie is finally happy.

That's the happy ending. Instead of learning confidence or something worthwhile, or saying something insightful to the viewer, she has to be with a guy and have sex upon first meeting. It's trite, doesn't quite follow the character, and is a further distortion of reality.

I found this movie offensive, and I don't say that too often.


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