Amelie

2001 romantic comedy

Rating: 19/20 (Jen: 17/20)

Plot: An awkward, introspective waitress in Paris decides to become a good-deed doer, and after she gets the hang of that, she decides to help herself.

This little feel-good movie of the century seems impossible to not love. It's refreshing, like lemonade washing over you without any of the stickiness. Amelie is as cute as a peach, and Tautou just nails this quirky and lovable character. The direction is as flamboyant as you'd expect and want from something Jean-Pierre Jeunet had anything to do with, and although the surface of this story is as simple as it can possible be, its diversions are so much fun. This is definitely a case where the "Where the characters go" doesn't matter nearly as much as "How the characters get there," the latter keeping this movie fresh no matter how many times you watch the thing. Along the way, there's a tiny bit of animation, fun camera play, some narration, a lawn gnome, and a sex montage that is as much a whimsical treat as my favorite scene in Delicatessan. Oh, and I just love the music of Yann Tiersen here. Even though it wasn't written specifically for this movie, the music matches the visuals so well. Another of my favorite little things about this movie: Amelie and Nino don't have any face-to-face dialogue in this movie. There's just something so precious about that. Ah, precious! That's a good word to describe this one. It's almost a fragile little movie, so delicate that I fear somebody with big clumsy hands might come along and accidentally break the thing. This is definitely not a movie for people with big clumsy hands.

As far as I know, this is still my brother's favorite movie.

Big Nothing

2006 black comedy

Rating: 11/20 (Jen: 12/20)

Plot: Ross has lost his job as a teacher and is looking for a job to help support his police officer wife and his daughter. He gets a job at a call center but is fired before he finishes a single day of work. But he does meet Gus, a scam artist who has an idea to extract thousands of dollars from a reverend. Gus's girlfriend also helps out. Things don't go as planned, however, and the night spirals out of control.

You know how some movies trudge along and don't seem to go anywhere? Big Nothing is exactly the opposite of that. This movie goes everywhere, and that's not really a good thing. The pace is so quick that you have no time to catch a breath, and although there are some fun twists and turns along the way, most of this movie is just relentlessly stupid. There's a fifteen minute chunk of this movie that is really good. The timing between twists and the humor work. Beyond that, this is a mess, the movie falling to pieces like a radio-controlled airplane that you spent an hour putting together and finally flew for the first time with things going well at first until you decided to do a few barrel rolls and fancy maneuvering through the monkey bars and watched in dismay while the toy his a guy holding a picket sign and burst into flames. It's like a Coen brothers' movie without a script, almost to the point where I think somebody said, "Hey, I've got an idea. People like those Coen brothers. Let's make us a Coen brother movie!" I liked Simon Pegg and Jon Polito in this movie, but I didn't buy anything that David Schwimmer was doing. He's not really the greatest of actors, is he? The music in this movie also really annoyed me.