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I'm afraid I must be a detractor on this...I thought that the movie had a few very funny moments...but for the most part I thought it was a bunch of crap... It seemed to me that Amelie was nothing more than popcorn for the arthouse crowd...surrounding a rather boring love story with a buch of arthouse pretentiousness. The movie had a few great scenes and started off strong...but seemed to go nowhere after that. It boggs itself down in arthouse pretentiousness(seriously how much of that old B&W TV stuff did we need to see It seemed to me that it was masquerading to be deeper than it was. I was quite dissapointed in it. I'll say that it had potential though, ultimately it is a failure...to me anyway. 2/5 I love Audrey Tautou tho...and for a good Tautou movie watch Dirty Pretty Things.
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Jun 1, 2004 04:44
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Nearly everyone I know owns this DVD. This film is cinematic poison that crawls through your veins and slowly eats at the brain; a Big Lie for the only child. Amelie shows the viewer the world through a lens of adorable soft-focus whimsy, grasping desperately for any redeemable quality in its caricature of humanity and packing all it finds into a cannon aimed to strike the softest spots in the human psyche, causing instantaneous and fatal hemmoraging. Amelie is like the gentle myth of Santa or the Easter Bunny, a sugar-coated filter-tinted broken promise to be fed to the lonely, the dreaming, the disaffected mass whose very existence the film brushes away like dead leaves on the drive; in attempting to affirm all that is right, one must acknowledge all that is wrong. Heven help all who find the terrible shadow of the latter blackening out the former.
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Jun 1, 2004 19:45
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Very hard to get through the first 15 minutes, but after that, you start to feel comfortable with the ridiculous setting and are eager to see the rest of it. 4.5/5
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Aug 13, 2004 22:10
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Speaking french myself, I take an even greater pleasure in watching this movie. It's kind of reminiscent of the older works of Truffaut, while still being nothing else than a Jeunet film. Amazing. 5
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Aug 14, 2004 05:11
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I LOLed at the scene where the guy is marking the dildos. 5
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Aug 28, 2004 19:29
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This is one romantic comedy that I'm not embarassed about liking. The icing on the cake is the gorgeous cinematoraphy, quirky yet down-to-earth characters, a beautiful accordian score and Jeunet's always stellar production design. 5/5
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Aug 29, 2004 08:04
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spinflip fucked around with this message at 03:54 on Mar 17, 2010 |
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Sep 6, 2004 00:45
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She's so cute!!!! I can say too much, without saying enough on this one, so just watch it, and enjoy!
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Sep 6, 2004 06:14
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As much as I hate the phrase "feel-good movie!!", that's what comes to mind everytime I watch this wonderful French film. I kick myself for missing it when it was in the theaters; I was actually a theater employee at the time, and could have seen it free of charge any time I wanted, but I was an idiot and passed it up because I thought it didn't look interesting. This movie is just so bright and cheery; every shot is beautiful to look at. Audrey Tatou is perfectly cast as Amelie. It's filled with little moments that I just love; the vanishing lawn gnome, the discovery of the mysterious bald guy's secret, and Bredeatou finding the box Amelie left in the phone booth for him. I'm generally very pessimistic and critical when it comes to movies involving romance (  ), but I always let my guard down for this one.5/5
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Sep 6, 2004 09:45
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Everyone (who liked it) pretty much said everything I could say. I love this movie. I must say that "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not" is my favorite Audrey Tatou movie. But you can't go wrong with Amelie. Even my friend who says he hates the french and foriegn films liked it a lot. PS chicks dig it! A couple of people said it was pretentious. I don't see how it's pretentious so could someone explain? I'd give it a 5/5.
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Sep 6, 2004 23:32
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One of the best foreign films i've ever seen, how can you not love Amelie ? 5/5 Edit: It's Ah-me-li
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Sep 7, 2004 01:53
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Remember that scene in American Beauty where the kids are watching the video of the plastic bag aloft on a current of air, and speak about there being so much beauty in the world that it's hard to take sometimes? Or the montage at the end of that film where Kevin Spacey's character reflects on his life and takes joy in the simplest things (the rough texture of his grandmother's hands, or lying in the grass and watching the stars, or the sight of his daughter with a sparkler in a princess costume)? Now imagine an entire movie filled with moments like that. I've never gotten teary-eyed during a movie out of sheer joy, except during this movie and its ending montage Amelie and her new boyfriend on the motorbike. I actually felt a sense of loss when the credits began to roll and I realized that I would never again get to experience new adventures with these characters. This is what all art should be. It's not pretentious, I find it to be the opposite. In a world full of cinema where extraordinary people are always achieving extraordinary things in extraordinary settings, this movie has the balls to find joy in the life's tiniest treasures, the things most films would consider too mundane to commit to celluloid: a pair of wine glasses dancing on a tablecloth, a goldfish's suicide, finding shapes in the clouds, a traveling lawn gnome, a homeless man refusing alms because he doesn't work on Sundays, photobooths, haunted house rides, long lost letters, horses breaking free to run alongside the riders in the Tour de France, skipping stones, setting up unsuspecting couples, exacting well-planned revenge on bullies, helping a stranger to relive his childhood and reconnect with his grandson. In a world full of movies where the greatest thing a person can do is often saving the world from aliens or saving the country from some shadowy force of superevil, this film is brave enough to say that the most daring, rewarding and scary thing you can do is to just join the party, to run the human race, to risk falling in love. Yes, it's optimistic and romantic and passionate, but it's never saccharine. Much ado has been made about this movie being "feel good" and it is. It's heart candy; the true chicken soup for the soul. No one I've ever met that has given this film an honest chance has failed to be completely disarmed and swept into the lives of these quirky characters inhabiting an impossibly gorgeous Paris. Yet, for all of its visual flare and flash, it isn't ashamed to celebrate the real things that make real life so worth living. This is American Beauty without the morbid fascination with death and cynicism and spite. Both movies are on my short, short list of cinema favorites, but I have to say Amelie will be the DVD I wear out first. 5.5
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Sep 8, 2004 15:03
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Let me start out by saying that I despise most French films that make it to North America. More often than not, I find them so unbelievably self-important that they can't even be pretentious, because the inherent pretension they're aiming for makes the notion of pretension laughably cliche and unpretentious. Anyway, I was flipping through channels about a week ago and noticed Amelie on Starz. It was about half over, and I thought "I might as well find out why every 'smart' girl I have dated over the past couple years has owned this movie." Hell, I bought it for an ex-girlfriend, not even knowing what it was. So I watched. Initially, I thought "Jesus, they even have the cliched French music playing. Could this be any more trite?" I quickly realized that was the point. This isn't France. This is the idea of France. I get it! The next thing I noticed was the camerawork. "Gorgeous" doesn't begin to describe it. One of the nicest aspects I noticed was that it wasn't even trying to be so beautiful. It wasn't obvious that the director was saying "Well, I don't have much going for me, so I'll pretty it up and hope nobody notices." because that's not what he was doing at all. Story? If you take a cynical "I majored in lit" point of view, it isn't anything special. The implementation is, though. Telling a boy-meets-girl or "Pay It Forward" type of story is a cakewalk, and you can almost always see the linear story line in the first five minutes. With Amelie, it just wasn't obvious. As soon as the movie was over, I grabbed my keys and wallet, got in my car and went to Meijer (kind of like a Super Wal-Mart in the midwest). It was about 3 a.m., and I knew they had it. That's how much I liked it. After watching it in its entirety, I watched it with the commentary. Then I watched the extras. Then I posted a thread about it in FYAD. The next day, I bought the soundtrack. In retrospect, I wish I could have seen it at a theater. After reading reviews here and on IMDB, I can't help but think that the detractors simply don't "get" it. Either they're in the "If I wanted to read I'd get a book. This movie sucks!" crowd, or they're not able to understand a movie without Jerry Bruckheimer or James Cameron holding their hand every step of the way. The "obvious" things in Amelie were intentionally obvious. They weren't there because the director thought you were too dumb to get it. Implying such can only mean... well... you're too dumb to get it, and missed the point entirely. Best movie ever made? If I could get over my own pretentious "There's no social statement there... blah, blah, blah, blah..." I'd have to answer with a resounding "Yes." 5.5/5
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Sep 14, 2004 07:43
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A very very good movie, which has not the slightest ambition to say something heavy or important. The world could do with more of these movies. Also, BEAUTIFUL photography. 4.5
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Sep 17, 2004 22:36
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5/5 for this I watched it about a week ago, and the orgasm montage was one of the funniest things I had seen in years. I think this movie hits close to home for people who are socially isolated, so they'd probably appreciate it more. Also, the ending made me cry happily. 
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Feb 6, 2006 01:43
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I know this is a 9 year bump but there we go. Having just watched this film for the first time I have to say I am in love. The cinematography, the score, the sound effects, everything. I'm finding it hard to put my thoughts on this film into words as it is so beautiful and dream-like. 5.5/5
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Mar 14, 2013 13:36
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A gateway film for many, yet hundreds of classics viewed and years later, people will return to this world and become smitten all over again. The infectious charm and whimsy are surpassed only by how timeless AMELIE already is and is still becoming. 5/5
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Apr 6, 2013 23:58
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This is by far, and a very, very wide margin, my favorite movie in this genre. I would never have cared for the premise, but between the writing, the cinematography, the score, and everything, this is one of the few movies that got a tear out of me, based entirely on the execution. 5/5
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Dec 27, 2019 17:43
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