The City of Lost Children

Rating:
Summary: Artful fairy tale for adults.
Review: Remember the wonder of flipping through a great illustrated book when you were a child? That IS Jeunet's City of Lost Children.
Every character, every shot, everything about this movie is perfectly rendered and perfectly surreal. I've read some people comparing it to Wizard of Oz. It shares the same kind of unique vision that made Wizard great.
If you're trying to build a great DVD collection this is one to add. It holds up to repeated viewings because its so beautiful to look at. And you'll enjoy sharing it with others. If you're someone that doesn't like to read a movie, don't worry City of Lost Children isn't wordy at all. In fact I bet you could watch it without subtitles and still enjoy it very much.
A truly great film.

Rating:
Summary: A surreal journey to an imaginative world.
Review: Like the review before mine, this movie isn't just about effects. This movie is about what the effects do for the audience. In this movie you have a dark, fantastic city in a surreal and imaginative setting. You will find dozens of Santa Clauses, bands of children thieves, giant octopuses, several mad scientists, and a 10 year old girl who acts like an 18 year old gothic intellect.
The script and the story are so different; It is hard for me to find something bad about this movie. Mind you, rent it first. It seems to be an acquired taste.

Rating:
Summary: Great movie
Review: i really recommend this movie, it is visually AMAZING! i have only seen it once, but am trying to save up enough money to actually get it. i would have to say this is my favorite foreign film

Rating:
Summary: Poetic and beautiful
Review: Although I found it hard to traverse through it's convoluted story(s), I can get behind "The City of Lost Children" for two simple reasons: first, it has an abundance of Evil Santa imagery that appeals to the Scrooge/Grinch in me; and second, it's central conceit (that an evil scientist, prone to rapid aging, steals the pleasant dreams of innocent children, for that is his only life force... only he's so hideous that after seeing him, the children can only have nightmares) is at once bizarre, logical, nightmarish, and charming. I can always support a movie that embraces its own dichotomies and hypocrisies so readily.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's world, as many have said before me, is very much akin to Terry Gilliam's cinematic dream worlds. In that respect, he's not creating anything new. Both feature oppressive cityscapes, perpetually under the cover of darkness, wet with squalor and despair. They both have a fine sense of the underground rising, revolution in the sewers, and hope where no hope could ever grow. But where Gilliam can sometimes be cold and detached in his futuristic depictions, Jeunet gives his worlds a European sense of poeticism and beauty. The "City of Lost Children" is built on a solid foundation of just those two elements.

Only it's not your father's poetry, or your mother's beauty that interests Jeunet. The poetry comes in the form of science gone wrong, stretched to its limits. He has an obsession with complex chrome gadgetry, and novel inventions. Witness one scene, where a little girl, on her way to a secret lair, must traverse some steps. She soon realizes that each step is actually a large organ key, which in sequence plays a scale announcing her arrival. When she reaches the top, a mechanical eye, attached to a system of levers and pulleys, strains to see her. It's overcomplicated, which enhances the aesthetic beauty of the thing, and makes it frighteningly poetic. Jeunet also manages to concoct a scene wherein a single tear, through a series of Rube Goldbergian outcomes, causes a large boat to crash through a dock. It's not only a fascinating scene to watch, and deeply poetic, but it also says much about the circuitous nature of fate.

Beauty is a different story. Jeunet's concept of beauty is skewed: he is fascinated in conventionally ugly (or more accurately, eccentric looking) actors. His camera studies their faces, as if they were beautiful. In the end, they become beautiful. His point here is that most people can't see past the external to the internal, and are thus blinded by outward appearances. I suppose this is one of the reasons why the film has an abundance of cyclops imagery (a master scientist with a HAL-9000-esque single mechanical eye; the army of the night, who can only see through mechanical eyes of their own; and their vehicle, which is explicitly emblazoned with a large eye on the side, searching for young children to steal away). In the City of Lost Children, the two-eyed man is king.

See how Jeunet treats Ron Perlman, a gorilla of a man with a pronounced jaw and sloped forehead. He looks just as an illiterate circus strongman should. But bathed in Jeunet's camera, and armed with the character's innocence, he becomes something else entirely. How else could you justify his tender relationship with Miette, a precocious orphan girl? Same goes for Dominique Pinon, a Jeunet regular. Pinon plays seven cloned assistants to a mad scientist. His rubbery features and enlarged cranium are thus given more personality than they could have achieved on their own. The entire cast follows in this same line, transforming their inherent ugliness to a new kind of beauty.

This is further achieved through the way the city is photographed. What could have been grainy and dirty instead becomes warm and lush, autumnal colours rising out of scrap iron. Much of the credit should be given to cinematographer Darius Khondji, who got his start with Jeunet and did enough excellent work after that to allow me to say he is my favourite lens man working today.

"The City of Lost Children" requires some patience, for it's payoff is long in coming. Enjoy the lively visuals that Jeunet has given you in the meantime, and you'll get to the end nicely.

Rating:
Summary: A cure for boring cinema.
Review: A wonderful creation. If you are a real fan of film, be sure to see this as well as their other films (delicatessen!!!!). Beautiful scenes, mysterious plot, playful cinematografy. Quite a delight.

Rating:
Summary: Imagine Brazil, directed by Tim Burton...
Review: This is as good a description as I can think to fit the overall look and feel of this movie by Jeunet and Caro. It has brilliant cinematography: it's a movie that takes place in a very dark setting, which is essential for the dark purposes of the plot. The scenography was definitely one of the most amazing things of the movie, with a city by the water, where night never seems to go away... Then, there's the music, composed by maestro Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks and Lost Highway among his credits): sad and beautiful, to go with the tragedies of the characters. The acting: all the praise please be given to Judith Vittet who played little Miette, and Dominique Pinon who played the six cloned henchmen (he seems to be a favorite of Jeunet, since he also appeared in "Delicatessen," and more recently in "Alien Resurrection" and "Amelie").

The plot, however, is the reason why I gave the movie 4 stars alone. It's very convoluted in my opinion. Most people call the movie brilliant. I think a message in a movie doesn't have to be so criptic and hidden as to make it essentially inaccessible to most people. If you take some of the most brilliant directors of this genre, such as Terry Gilliam, you'll find that even they and their movies (take "Brazil," for example) are more accessible. In fact, even "Delicatessen," the previous movie by the directing couple from Belgium, was more accessible.

Rating:
Summary: Boring but Pretty
Review: This movie is absolutely beautiful. The cinematography, the colors, the fanciful sets. However, it is pretty boring. I didn't like it because it was too dark and hard to follow. I also didn't like the subtitles; it made it hard to see all of the beautiful sets. I don't recommend buying it but if you want to see what all the 5 star reviewers are raving about, go ahead and rent it. But get a second movie for when you turn this one off.

Rating:
Summary: Deceived
Review: I was deceived into buying this movie after seeing that many reviewers had given it five stars.Five stars! Not really! The movie is slow and the story doesn't make any sense. However. I gave it two stars beacuse at least the main characters' acting wasn't too bad.

Rating:
Summary: Makes Tim Burton look like an amateur!
Review: Every single aspect of this film is just amazing. I'm certainly not one to care at all about set design and costumes, but this film has such fascinating, mysterious and gorgeous production values that one can't help but fall in love with the movie, if for no other reason than physical attraction--if you will.
That aside, this esoteric and enigmatic film provides a wealth of adorable and sympathetic characters, namely One and Miette. Somewhat remniscent of Luc Besson's "Leon," in the respect of the fatherly/sexual attraction between the two lead characters, the film manages to take that ancient story and do something indescribable to it. The incoherent dialogue, the unanswered questions, and the concept of One being not so bright are also ideas that are becoming too common in film. Perhaps the awkward setting of the film is all that saves it from the "Seen that already" category.
Despite these cliches, however, and fits of screenwriting laziness, the film manages to place itself in a category on a different plane from all other films. Somehow there is an unidentifiable heart in the film. The power of the themes of innocence and protection and envy and love (in every sense of the word) is so intense and personable that one can not resist falling completely in love with the film and the characters of One and Miette.
As long as one can see past the eccentric style and mood of the film, he will find a truly heartwarming story that is propelled by truly problematic and frightening events, as opposed to the extremely American concept of cramming trite and inconsequential "twists" into love stories.

Rating:
Summary: You'll never stop watching it.
Review: This movie is one of those... When you watch it the first time you will watch it once again, and again...
The cast is fantastic. The music is simply the best. The set design and the effects are wonderful. The costumes...
(Please! It's Jean Paul Gaultier)
And the story don't let you go away...
One of my favorites. A very Classic.
Bravo!!! for Jeunet and Caro.