Amélie
Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain
2001 · Film · 122 min
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
At a tiny Parisian café, the adorable yet painfully shy Amélie accidentally discovers a gift for helping others. Soon Amelie is spending her days as a matchmaker, guardian angel, and all-around do-gooder. But when she bumps into a handsome stranger, will she find the courage to become the star of her very own love story?
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There’s a clear thread of human effort and presence from The Muppets to Space Jam to Dune that this Odyssey movie’s creators understood. People want Amelié, not Avengers. It’s fine to use so much CGI that your film can’t be re-exported in 4K (yes, that’s why) so long as you have people wearing stuff and standing in front of other stuff. It’s not fine to film your entire movie with mocap bodysuits on green backgrounds and having them perform to a tennis ball as co-actor that will be AI-generated from a dead actor later. I probably won’t watch the Odyssey but I will absolutely celebrate this aspect of it to others now that I know.
The criticism is that an aspect of the work is jarring. In my life, women feature. I can't think of any shared enterprise in which I have taken an interest where they do not. So for me it is jarring when in 3 separate short stories there are none. (Why? Is it a choice? Is it limited by author ability? Something else?) It damages the hell out of suspension of disbelief at the minimum.
The film Amélie "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain" is not a racist screed. In fact it is a hugely entertaining and charming movie I do not hesitate to recommend to just about anyone. Set in Monmatre, the homogeneity of the heritage of both the characters and extras is jarring because Monmatre is just not like that. If you know Monmatre noticing this will crash right through your suspension of disbelief in the story. You will recover. Still absolutely worth the watch.
Foundation is still worth the read despite the glaring and obvious fault.
Your assertion on whether the work is or is not misogynistic is something you can perhaps discuss with someone else. I am sure there are two schools of thought on the point, but it is not at all relevant to this criticism.
Maybe that helps you understand?
Reminds me of Amelie's revenge in the movie.
A E Van Vogt can hardly be called unheard of, the null A series is quite a cult classic. But yeah, the Space Beagle is not his most well-known work.
It always surprises me (although it shouldn't) how many underrated gems there are still in the world. And new ones are produced every day.
E.G: I still think QTMN will deserve a place as a classic sci-fi author among the great ones, for "there is no antimemetics division" alone. And yet despite a solid fan following, it has never exploded in popularity. It is 10 times better than the 3 body problems, which comparatively had stratospheric success.
In movies, "Amelie" has been a planetary success, but from the same author, the excellent "The city of the lost children" is practically unknown.
Even last month, a tv show named "Nero" came out on Netflix, and while not revolutionary, is clearly above most of the crap that regularly comes out. Yet, nobody talks about it.
Popularity is a cruel mistress.
We had photo booths back when I was a kid, 50 years ago. There's plenty of evidence in my mom's family photos that selfies/group selfies aren't new.
There's a photo booth as part of the plot in one of my favorite movies, Amélie.
It is named after Amélie Poulain - from the movie Amelie :)
They’re trying to create content solely to get people to sign up for and maintain an Amazon subscription, which means they have to fire as many arrows as possible into as many genres as possible. As with any DND weapon or spell, a spreadshot modifier reduces accuracy, impact, and/or to-hit percentage. So instead of producing content that they think deserves the light of day, they produce content to fill gaps in their spreadshot. That will automatically be less inspired, no matter how much they spend — and the more they spend, the less taxes they have to pay on their revenue. Thus a hundred million dollar adaptation that hits all the buttons with the same drab arrow that their spreadshot fires at every genre.
This leads to their unwillingness to risk alienating anyone by making good creative decisions. Endless cycles of focus groups and executive committee notes will ensure that the finished produce has maximized appeal at the cost of being polished and professional, because all of those reworks leave little time to get it right, and anything good has to be done in secret without execs realizing it and fucking it up. Disney, their elder, is quite familiar with this problem:
https://www.vulture.com/article/oral-history-of-lilo-and-stitch-a-hand-drawn-miracle.html
https://www.vulture.com/article/an-oral-history-of-disney-the-emperors-new-groove.html
If you watch, for example, The Substance (2024) or Amélie (2001) or Hackers (1995), and then watch any modern generic Amazon/Netflix streaming movie, you can usually see the difference immediately. One is laser-focused on being the work of art it chooses to be, with no regard whatsoever for whether it attracts or repels any single person, and in fact will make decisions that drive away some percentage of viewers for some reason other than genre mismatch. The other is more often like a child trying to play all the keys on the piano at once, in order to make the loudest noise possible in a room full of other children doing the same. (For contrast, consider Hulu’s exclusive movies; they somehow made a best-in-category time loop movie?!)
If your product isn’t driving some people away for being a poor fit for their needs, then your product is probably too generic. In a field where nearly everything is generic, that may seem like it’s fine; but it’ll cost you customer stickiness to get away with it, as they’ll walk away from you the instant something less generic is a viable option.
The Wind Rises. I love everything about it. Beautiful soundtrack, fun sound design, and a fascinating treatment of various topics from the ethics of engineering to the miracle of flight. The end scene completely wrecks me every time.
The Downfall is one of the best movies about being on the losing side of a war. It’s impressively accurate, and the acting is outstanding.
When I don’t know who I’m watching the movie with, I recommend Snatch or Amélie.
This is great -- all of these suggestions are new to me.
With more time to dredge my memory, I also remember really enjoying Amelie and a most (not all) of Hal Hartley's movies.
So I guess that boils down to "independent movies with interesting characters and/or dialogue"?
Thank you again!
She could write a movie from her story:
> On 31 August 1997, startled by the news of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, Amélie drops a plastic perfume-stopper, which dislodges a wall tile and accidentally reveals an old metal box which contains childhood memorabilia hidden by a boy who lived in her apartment decades earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%A9lie
> While filing, Craig discovers a small hidden door. He crawls through it into a tunnel and finds himself inside the mind of actor John Malkovich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_John_Malkovich
> A woman (credited as "M") mentions to her musician husband (credited as "C") that as a child, she moved residences frequently and took to hiding little notes wherever she lived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Ghost_Story
I don't fully disagree with you but my personal opinion is that people give too little credit to contemporary movements within Western art music. Their cultural force is significant, but it's clouded so it's not easy to make an accounting of it.
- First, I need to note that although serialism proper isn't so relevant today, when it comes to film music dominant styles in the last couple decades or so have been minimalism and neo-romanticism. Neo-romanticism is obviously self-explanatory and well-understood, but minimalism [1] is harder to deal with only because it's a contemporary and peculiar style, and it's also rather controversial within Western art music community (especially since the kind of minimalism I hear in film music is closer to the style of Glass and Richter, and not Reich, Adams; or not even Ligeti et al's similar works such as "Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley" (1976)). We can debate endlessly about the history of Western classical music, and I'm no art historian, but my personal opinion is that minimalism is a direct and clear response to serialism [2] which makes it a cultural heir. In art, we do see that things swing pretty far like a pendulum. What drives an artistic force in one direction can often be a previous force in the opposite. So, when you hear the soundtrack of something like Amelie (2001), in a way you do hear serialism, except in negative.
- Second, although the music of "the Second Viennese School" and later serialists (Boulez, Stockhausen) found no mass appeal, they did find sufficient amount of appeal within the music community. Serialism was practically the dominant style in early 20th century. Neo-romanticist composer David Diamond talks about his frustrations about this in this interview [3]. Given this, it's not true to state serialism has no cultural power, what's true is that most music produced today is one way or another post-serialist, in the sense that it's aware of its failed experiments and its merits. For example, music (film music/art music/whatever) today is not particularly contrapuntal, but composers are regularly, formally taught how to deal with counterpoint and it's considered a core skill for all composers. This makes composers skilled in this regard, but they consciously decide not to apply the full length of the skill. The same way painters are taught to draw like the old masters, but that kind of photographic realism doesn't have the same cultural relevance today in art. This still makes Bach (or old masters) culturally relevant today, albeit rather indirectly.
- You call that the rules were contrived but that is one particular interpretation of serialism, which is fair only because it's similar to how Schoenberg thought of it. However, if you look at other serialists such as Berg, Webern, Boulez and especially Carter, you'll see that the kind of "use each pitch once before using all others" silly rules are not taken any more seriously than you take counterpoint rules seriously while writing music (which was the source of disagreement between Boulez and his teacher Leibowitz [4]). Those rules are for practice. It's debatable, of course, what is "serialistic" about serialism (especially for later figures like Carter), but I think the core of the idea is for musical language to be comprehensive, and have a presentation of all possible forms of a given set of structures. Given this understanding, I don't think your statement "the rules were contrived rather than evolved" holds up. Within the tradition, there was the understanding that the way tonality evolves is that each composer comes and creates their own spin on the diatonic scale, all the way from Froberger to Bach to Chopin to Debussy we keep seeing this pattern again and again. Serialism has a will to go one step further and present all such possibilities in music. Again, I don't shy away from calling this, in many ways, a "failed experiment" but calling it "contrived" is not true.
[1] Example movies are countless, from Amelie (2001), The Shape of Water (2017), Blindness (2008) to Ladybird (2017) etc...
[2] Philip Glass talks about how his music is a response to Boulez scene (who is a late serialist composer) in this interview from 1976: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elAtF6UdefI
[3] https://crisismagazine.com/vault/americas-greatest-living-composer-an-interview-with-composer-david-diamond
[4] https://fugueforthought.de/2016/07/13/boulez-piano-sonata-no-1/
OMG I watched Requiem, and then Dancer in the Dark - and didn’t go back to the movies for 6 months! Since then I basically nope out of anything more stressful than Amélie.
The first part of this story is the plot of the beginning of the movie Amelie.
I'm sorry about the second part. I wish he'd done blood pressure monitoring at home.
Sorry, I was also thinking of the same director’s City of Lost Children, which is 1995 and still has a teal/orange aesthetic. (Apologies to the French for using the translated titles.)
It looks like City of Lost Children was graded by Yvan Lucas via an analog process called ENR. Subsequently, Amelie was the first digital coloring he did, and, since it was before LUTs, his analog experience was crucial.
https://www.digitalmediaworld.tv/post/2917-colourist-yvan-lucas-grades-through-three-decades-of-cinema-2
Amélie is from 2001, not 1995. Interestingly, it is one of the first films that was colour corrected completely digitally. This is also why the movie's colour palette is so striking. Not necessarily to everyone's taste, but I really found it to 'pop' in the cinema.
None of this is true, nor does it need to be. As my photography professor says, “digital is better, but I don’t want better.”
Roma is as beautiful as anything shot on film, Amelie from 1995 is as teal-orange medium-shot photo filter as anything on Netflix. The Crown is often beautiful because of impressive practical lighting effects.
[EDIT: Amelie is from 2001, I mixed up the date with the same director’s City of Lost Children from 1995]
For reference, I’m American but lived in Paris for awhile. I wouldn’t say The French Dispatch is indicative of American views of France, more a very specific, Brooklyn-based, literary industry one. Which is also what The New Yorker is. A movie like Amélie is probably more in line with the American fantasy version of France.
Sheesh, you're right. I own it on on DVD. And I'm positive I've streamed it in HD in the past, but according to Just Watch it's not currently available anywhere for streaming. Amazon.com has the Blu-ray for $15.64 from the "Amazon Global Store UK" but it's apparently the Region B locked version, so it wouldn't play on my U.S. Bluray player.
Meanwhile, there's a remux of the Blu-ray on usenet that took me 5 minutes to download. There, now I have it on my HTPC where no one can take it away from me, and I didn't have to wait 2-3 weeks for it to ship from the U.K. and rip it myself just to watch it.
Edit: I think I purchased Amélie on iTunes a few years ago but Apple makes it really inconvenient to search your purchase history. You can't do it on the web. You have to do it in this horrible window in the TV App (macOS) or Settings app (iOS) that makes use pick a year, then scroll through it, go back, pick the next year, etc. No search. It's almost as if they don't want you to know the movie went missing. Let's try a GDPR data export. I should know in days... :(
It's one of the primary responsibilities of the movie to set up a universe that is compelling and believable. The fact that it's live action imposes some constraints, but they can be creatively worked around.
Just a few movies that do this well that come to mind:
* Scott Pilgrim vs the World.
* Kick Ass.
* Ella Enchanted.
* Amelie.
* Thor: Ragnarok.
* Space Jam
* The Mask
Some of the films recommended in this thread..
- The Nice Guys
- I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
- Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
- Don't Worry
- He Won't Get Far on Foot
- The Favourite (2018)
- Druk (2020)
- Amélie
- The Lobster
- Turist (2014)
- Parasite
- El Hoyo (The Platform)
- Quo Vadis
- Aida?
- 200 Meters
- Luzzu
- El robo del siglo (The Heist of the Century)
- Knives Out
- Us
- Get Out
- "Tokyo Story" (1953, Yasujirō Ozu)
- Aleksei German's Hard to be A God
- Edward Yang's A Better Summer's Day
- Maren Ade's Toni Erdman
- Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love
- Wings of Desire
- Do the Right Thing
- Drugstore Cowboy
- Gates of Heaven
- Beauty and the Beast
- Life Is Sweet
I could not disagree more with the author. I think their argument should be debated on the merits, but it bears mentioning that the author is still in their twenties, and has only seen ~74 movies a year since 2010. That's ... not a lot of movies, by cinema snob standards (or even by prolific Netflix viewer standards).
1. One simply does not run out of great movies to watch after 700 movies, even if all 700 have been great. You have to be way, way more in to movies than that for that to happen. When your go-to examples of great movies are Eyes Wide Shut and Pulp Fiction (two great movies to be sure, but they have over 300k ratings each on IMDb), the problem is obvious: your selections are too mainstream. You can definitely run out of blockbusters that are also great movies very quickly. This author didn't name a single movie I haven't seen, and I'm nowhere close to having seen enough to join the cinema snob club.
2. "Every couple of days I curl up on the couch at 10pm, scroll through Amazon Prime video..." Yes. This is the problem. Their source for movies is an aggregator that makes money primarily through getting you to stay subscribed while reducing the cost of content acquisition as much as possible. Most of what's on Amazon prime is trash, low budget attempts at blockbusters, with a handful of rotating blockbuster films to grab your attention on the front page. Meanwhile, The Criterion Collection has released over a thousand films on DVD and Blu-ray. Get your media from better sources!
Note that I'm not blaming the author for this specifically. The media landscape sucks right now. Everything is fragmented and if you only have access to one or two sources it's easy to see how you could get the idea that prestige TV is where all the serious work goes nowadays.
3. "Most Stories are the Same. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are only six types of story." Doesn't this claim go precisely against the claim made earlier in the article that the books you read just get better and better as you read more?
4. I can't agree that David Lynch is a hack. I'd say this goes beyond a question of taste into a factually incorrect account of a director who is obviously very capable and knows what he's trying to do. Some movies are going to require more work to appreciate than others. Ironically, the essay itself complains about movies being too accessible! Likewise, Lost in Translation is not unrelatable simply because the main character is older than you are.
5. The idea that we can't make good comedies any more is laughable culture-war nonsense. The idea that adult comedy must utilize irreverence is silly, to begin with. The Favourite (2018), Druk (2020), Amélie, The Lobster, Turist (2014), etc etc are all good comedies that aren't unduly irreverent. It's also strange to see Superbad and The Hangover given as examples of comedy done right in an article about a supposed dearth of good movies.
Even if you want out-and-out comedies (instead of my suggested serious movies with comedic tones), there were plenty of those last decade too. I liked The Nice Guys, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Knives Out, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, and so on. Several of these are rather irreverent, I'd say. I guess if you're looking for more Hangover, they made Part III in 2013, less than a decade ago, and Jackass 4 is coming out later this year! I don't see what there is to complain about. (In the vein of low-brow comedy, there are some movies like Psycho Goreman and Mandy that are much more interesting than a lot of mainstream fare.)
6. Burnout is a thing. Maybe trying to write a review for every single movie you see can lead to enjoying them less, if you're not the kind of person who's wired to do that.
Movies with great impact on me:
1. Untouchable - must see
2. Gattaca - are we going there?
3. 1984 - must see
4. Idiocracy - initially looks like joke/stupid movie, but it's more real then we may want to agree
5. Life of others (made in Ge)
6. Amelie Poulain (made in Fr)
7. Turtles can fly (made in Ir)
8. Stalker - the russian original (3 parts) (made in Ru)
9. Metropolis
Other good movies:
Lost Horizon
The Bucket List
The Truman Show
Solaris 1972
Enemy at the Gates
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Tips for good movies in general: take countries one by one and search best ever movies from that country.
> You can but then it's a work to do for each language.
You make it sound like that's a bad thing. Once again, I'm not sure whether it is laziness or just learned helplessness.
> That's how science got reinvented in multiple places before virtually all papers start to be written in English and shared in international journals.
That's not why. It's because communication wasn't as global as it is today. And you seem to think that just because each nation/language has their own ecosystem that somehow the world will stop communicating with each other. You think english will cease to be the lingua franca of science. Nothing will really change except a lot of french people who wouldn't program in english would program in french. You can still program in english if you want. You can communicate in english. Your country would just have more options.
> Do you suggest adding a layer of dependencies and complexity to the build systems to preprocess the source code to make it compilable by GCC/clang/Visual?
No. Is there an added layer of dependencies and complexity to compiling languages in english?
> Just look at all the material in Chinese on Github that is just inaccessible to non-chinese speakers.
So translate it. What is with the helpless attitude? Do you feel helpless that russian literature is in russian and you can't read russian? No, you'd find a french translation of russian literature right? Would you rather 1.4 billion chinese be able to use the chinese material or would you rather the 1.4 billion learn english first?
> American are not exposed to French, German, Japanese, Chinese.
Sure, not as much, but that doesn't take away from my point. There would be far less american programmers if we had to learn another language to program. It's common sense.
Do you think more americans would watch Parasite or Amelie if we had to learn korean or french first? Or more watch the movies once those movies were subtitled/dubbed in english first?
All I'm saying is that porting the ecosystem into people's native languages would boost the numbers of programmers and advance technology. It won't take away from those like you who want to program in english and it certainly won't take away from dominance of the english language in international communication.
Just like you can watch an american movie without subs/dubs. But most of your countrymen can't. Would you be against subbing/dubbing of english language movies to disadvantage your countrymen? I doubt it.
> Many of the visitors come with a deeply romantic vision of Paris - the cobbled streets, as seen in the film Amelie, the beauty of French women or the high culture and art at the Louvre.
> The reality can come as a shock.
> An encounter with a rude taxi driver, or a Parisian waiter who shouts at customers who cannot speak fluent French, might be laughed off by those from other Western cultures.
> But for the Japanese - used to a more polite and helpful society in which voices are rarely raised in anger - the experience of their dream city turning into a nightmare can simply be too much.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6197921.stm
I don't buy this article's premise (that there is too much recycled, unoriginal content).
You could make this same argument for all forms of art (music, TV, theater). They can all be explained the same way: the barrier for entry has decreased.
Anyone can upload music to Soundcloud or a video to Youtube. Now there are whole albums/TV series/movies being produced on these content networks as a result of a kind of indie discovery that never existed before. This is wonderful!
The benefit of all of that discovery is the same drawback: that anyone (good or bad) can enter the market. That means in order to capture the "average" audience you have to water down and dilute what is popular to appease everyone. Most pop music is unmemorable. Most pop movies are unmemorable. BUT, they are good enough to capture a wide enough audience to convince them to pay for it.
That doesn't mean there isn't great film to be found. Or music. It just requires a bit more discovery than your local pop Top 40 radio station or whatever they're peddling in the box office.
There have been so many great films in the last 20 years with original stories. Here's a bunch that I just rattled off the top of my head without much thought:
Boyhood, Interstellar, Inception, Spirited Away, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Wall-E, The Intouchables (now called The Upside), Pan's Labyrinth, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Amelie, Slumdog Millionaire
>No, it's a problem of target audience. If you produce films for a Dutch audience, you have two options: either appeal to a sense of Dutch pride or history, or go for something so generic that a decent swath of the population will like it; otherwise you won't have enough of an audience to make a profit. This is what they do, so Dutch films are generally about about our navy in the 16th to 18th century, about WWII, a romcom or some adaptation of a Dutch Children's book. You cannot locally produce a film about something which lies outside of the realm of interest of most Dutch people; Hollywood can, since they have a larger audience, and therefore do have the ability to target niche markets.
Well, EU has 400 million people. One can very well create a movie that appeals to EU audiences. We have lots of shared sensibility and modern problems and history (and it doesn't have to be BS like "16th century dutch navy" or "17th century french villagers").
Movies like Blow Up or Dolce Vita or For a Fistful of Dollars etc where shown successfully all over Europe at one time (and we still have films by people like Lars Von Trier, Almodovar, and so on).
Just because you make something that has a Dutch or Swedish or French etc sensibility, it doesn't mean it can't have pan-European (or even global) appeal. Trainspotting is as British as it gets, for example, but hit Europe big, as did La Haine, La vita e bella, Amelie, and others.
Besides, not all movies have to be blockbusters and multi 100 million dollar productions. Even from the US, I'd rather have the chance to watch some Hal Hartley or Jarmusch, or Cronneburg, that barely pushed 5-10 million dollars in the box office than the nth repeatitive formulaic shit from Hollywood.
I think everyone is overestimating the importance of the "favorite movie" section of a dating profile.
Once a dating profile has been created it is RARELY edited in anything but photos.
No one was going back to put Amelie into their favorite movies. They just were filling out the BEAST LIST of requirements and personality tests, and quickly filled in that field with a non embarrassing movie they had seen recently.
I think this years most favorite movie was probably "GET OUT". But that shit will be a footnote except for film buffs in 3 or 4.
I'm a film buff and I think so. A lot of people don't seem to go out of their way to obtain films aside from looking at Netflix recommendations. Back when I used OkCupid I could tell when something older went on because it immediately got listed under "favorite movies" by a certain type of hipster ;)
(I distinctly remember how overnight everyone looooovveeed Amelie when it went up)
Sadly it's a lot harder to find new (or new to me) films serendipitously. With the closing of rental shops, the last bastion seems to be the DVD section at local libraries.
The problem with these online streaming services I face is that I try to use them mostly for one crucial purpose and that is recommendation - and they always fail to recommend anything that appeals to me. I want to find new songs, new artists that I would like. But these services never helped me with that.
I don't like rap, hip-hop, or metal. I mostly like rock, some pop etc but that too not too loud. I don't really know how much "not loud"; that's where I thought these recommendation engines would kick in. I have found couple of artists/songs that I just love on Bandcamp (awesome place). But Spotify, Apple Music (this one has been an utter disappointment for me), and many other streaming services that I've tried in my country just didn't cut it.
What have helped me over the years are films, blogs, tweets etc. Something random playing on a bus, or a film soundtrack, a TV show theme song. Like that song A Chi that I heard while watching The Best of Youth. It was in Italian and I didn't understand a word but I just instantly connected to it. I loved it. That German song from The Night Porter - from there I discovered Marlene Dietrich's Lili Marleen. Or Many a tears from October Sky, or that song from Twelve Monkeys. And there are some like Amélie (well, every tune is fabulous in this one) where I disconvered Guilty by Al Bowlly. A friend once, out of the blue, told me to check out Imagine Dragons and later I listenred to Demons like crazy; on repeat. Or a chance hearing of a tune in an Iranian film that was composed by an Iranian artist. It's the best song of melancholy I have ever heard and it doesn't have any lyrics.
I even found some nice ones on WCD before it was burnt down. I got there late; or rather started exploring late. Its recommendations were a lot better than the streaming serives, at least for me.
What I find surprising is that I benefit from recommendation services for books, films a lot, but for music I've never been able to find recommendation service that tries to find that nerve or even something close to it that is a person's musical taste and then recommends tunes around that. Maybe unlike books just the lyrics of a song aren't enough and it's very difficult to discern how a tune would sound good or boring to a listener. I've tried a lot and after some time I gave up. Maybe I was doing soemething wrong or I should try services that just to music recommendation, and not streaming maybe.
"Amélie" is by no means a small film, just take a look at Jean-Pierre Jeunet's other films' budget to get a sense of it. By small films I mean for example : - Sayônara by Kôji Fukada - Un avant-poste du progrès by Hugo Vieira da Silva - Psiconautas by Pedro Rivero and Alberto Vázquez Those are just 3 titles coming up from Allocine that launched this week in theaters. None of them will be on Netflix. Regarding the ticket price, it's indeed around 11-13 in big circuits, but around 7 in small independant theaters, so that's a reason more to encourage them.
I wonder how many are actually seen stateside. I know Amelie was a French film, but that's where my knowledge ends.
Have you considered looking towards foreign films, which may have a different way of telling a story? Some were popular in the US, like Amélie and Pan's Labyrinth, and of course there's the Academy Award winners and nominees for Best Foreign Language Film.
Less popular ones include those listed at http://the-artifice.com/best-foreign-films-last-15-years/ , like Run Lola Run/Lola rennt, Noi the Albino/Nói albínói, Moolaadé, Second Skin/Segunda Piel and The Celebration/Festen.
No Hollywood film has covered female genital mutilation, which is the topic of Moolaadé, and Festen is part of the Dogme 95 movement,"to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology."
There's also Russian Ark/Русский ковчег, which is a single, uninterrupted, 87-minute take through centuries of Russian history while going through the Winter Palace at the Hermitage Museum. Or any number of other lists of notable foreign films, like http://www.salon.com/2015/01/24/7_must_see_foreign_films_that_didnt_get_an_oscar_nod_partner/ or http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-foreign-language-films-decade-so-far .
Or how about a watching list? I'll start:
- "Happy People: A Year in the Taiga " http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1683876/
- "Oh Boy" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1954701/
- "American Beauty" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169547/
- "Amélie" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0211915/
So it's the same as the twist in the movie Amelie...
Amelie uses a lot of red and green. Jean-Pierre Jeunet made "City of Lost Children" which also has a strong red green palette. He also directed "Delicatessen" that used a chemical process to give the film a gold glow.
The teal-and-orange plague followed from DI[0]. Amélie predates the widespread use of DI, and DI's later compromission by the TaO plague. So it probably isn't the contrast, most of the movies from the time (and before it) would have similar non-TaO palettes (unless they were specifically going for it, as in Blade Runner)
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_intermediate
I absolutely love Amelie, and I hadn't realised that one of the reasons maybe because it is not just another orange/blue tinted movie.
For me Amelie is a movie I watch when I feel like there is no hope for humanity, it is the one movie that restores it just a little bit.
Funny to see Amelie there as a counter-example - it's pretty much my favourite movie, and one of the things I love about it is the autumnal quality of the light. Normally I wouldn't notice that kind of thing at all, perhaps it's the contrast with all the orange-and-blues (or maybe just the exceptional loveliness of the film itself)
This sort of work seems like it could go hand-on-hand with the recently reported Microsoft 3D Soundscape for blind people [1]
Taking images from a body worn camera it could provide a near real-time narrative of the scene. Maybe not to the same level of descriptive commentary from Amélie, but still potentially useful:
"There is a particularly memorable scene in the French movie “Amélie” in which the title character [...] sees an older man with a white cane waiting to cross a busy street. “Let me help you."
And they’re off, moving quickly through the neighborhood as Amélie provides a running commentary: The golden bust of a horse hanging over a shop is missing an ear; that laughing is the florist, who has crinkly eyes; there are lollipops in the bakery window. “Smell that! They’re giving out melon slices. We’re passing the park butcher, ham is 70 francs. Now the cheese shop — picadors are 12.90. Now we’re at the kiosk by the metro. I’ll leave you here. Bye!”
More likely, "glass, what am I looking at?", but still!
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8565298
>As far as being culturally closed, the US is at the top of the list. Just an example: even in Mongolia, people watch American movies.
Because we're arguably the best at making movies people enjoy. Turns out people love things like gangster movies and robots fighting. Maybe we should ask where is the french Transformers or the Greek Godfather?
We're also the best at software. Where is the Chinese Apple and Google? Where are their wonderful interfaces and search innovations?
Its incredible how an asset becomes a liability when it comes this type of politically correct thinking. Also you're playing up this "sophisticated foreigner" stereotype that just isn't true. Yes, the US is a bit more insular, but we produce tons of entertainment and in a language many understand as either their second or primary language. Most French people watch french movies. Most Greek people watch greek tv, etc. They'll see English/American imports that are noteworthy the same way your mom has an Amelie DVD. Its just we make so many more big-budget crowd friendly movies and have the marketing muscle and demand to push them onto the world.
>and get washed in a US point-of-view --political, historical, cultural etc)
Show me what wonderful enlightened country doesn't do this.
>They would be all over for protectionism and enforcing their local alternatives if that happened.
Meh. Half the things I own are foreign. No one is giving me grief about it.
" I can't watch films multiple times"
Really? None of them? There are many films I wouldn't watch again, but there are also some that I watch over and over. Just watched Amelie for the 10th time!
It really depends on what makes the movie great.. If it's the surprising storyline, rewatchability is low, but that doesn't make it a worse movie.
Sounds like you're burnt out. A form of depression (well to me). I've had it many times due to heavy/obsessive work towards something, eg a school assignment from start to due date and from morning to late only to get a B mark was a bit insulting. Anyhow, for each burn out, I could not simply get over it. I know it's temporary but can't break out of it sooner than later.
However, recently as of last year, I've started doing exercise every day, a consistent sleep pattern and my diet is pretty healthy. As for social links, I joined a Volleyball club. Despite being deaf, I get game challenges, exercise and a chance to chat a bit. Helps reduce the chance of burnout, or at least I feel fit.
If you're not feeling very motivated, do something that normally motivates you for a bit. Do you like the movies? Put in a movie, like Amelie for example. You are unlikely to laugh but it's a change of pace. Maybe play Starcraft 2?
Hope you recover soon.
Not all of Netflix is streaming is quite an understatement. Trying to find something worth watching that they stream is a task which conjures up memories of trips to the video store of yore.
(Although Amelie was very good.)
Things with interesting music, but without lyrics. Nine Inch Nails' "Ghosts I-IV" is a good start, as is the NIN ambient 'music' of the sound-track to the original Quake.
The Canadian indie label Constellation has a number of artists that make good coding music, including Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, and Do Make Say Think.
Other relevant artists include: Mogwai, Boards of Canada, Dirty Three, Explosions In The Sky, LCD Soundsystem, Monolake/Robert Henke, The Necks, Ratatat, The Flashbulb, The Samuel Jackson Five.
There's a few particularly good movie soundtracks I like, as well: Koyaanisqatsi, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, and Blade Runner.
Another good source of quiet, interesting, music is videogame soundtracks. I'm particularly fond of the soundtrack to Ōkami, and the OCRemix tributes to Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid, and Doom: http://ocremix.org/albums/?&offset=0&sort=nameasc
Amelie
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0211915/
Ok, startup idea:
Inspired by the lovely scene from the movie Amélie where the titular character takes a blind man by the hand and describes in detail how the town square looks.
Imagine an app. Blind user uses app to take a photo and instantly send an image to a mechanical Turk service which describes the photo and returns an audio file.
This could even be done without smartphones (albeit less seamlessly). Blind user takes a photo with a cameraphone and sends it to an MMS number. User then receives a call from a call center where an agent describes the photo.
Fight Club : A bit over the top, but works for me.
Cidade de Deus (City of God) : Overcoming adversity, based on real life story.
Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain (Amelie) : Beautiful movie about seeing the world in a different way. Love is worth fighting for. Don't be afraid to be eccentric.
Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives Of Others) : Even the harshest repressive regimes cannot re-educate and brainwash all the humanity out of people.
Das Boot : How I feel when I need to finish a project while the management throws "depth charges" (feature requests ;-) ) at me.
Hotel Rwanda : People are capable of both extreme violence and extreme kindness.
Zerkalo (The Mirror) by Tarkovksy : Nostalgia. Reminds me to keep connected to my parents and family. Eventually they'll be gone, with only dreams and memory fragments of them left.
I think it's just a question of perspective. I think an awful lot of stuff has changed the past 20 years. Think of the effect of Internet. Hell, right now I'm sitting in a Starbucks (also unexistent in 1990) in London, UK and sharing my thoughts real time with people all around the globe! How awesome is that! There are a lot more examples.
In terms of popular culture, musical genres such as boy bands of the 90's, drum and bass, goa, nu-metal have came and gone; some truly remarkable movies have been made, think of Forrest Gump, The Matrix, Amelie or Trainspotting.
More specifically my home country (where I don't live anymore unfortunately) has seen the end of communism and people had to grow used to a capitalist environment which affected every aspect of their lives.
And yes, believe me, you would look extremely silly if you've worn 90's style clothes so please don't.
> People say they don't see the point in the theater any more and I think thy're insane for not wanting to see a film the way it was meant to be seen.
Some films are meant to be seen on a huge screen, but some films aren't. Off the top of my head, '7 Pounds' doesn't need to be seen on a 30' screen to be appreciated. Films that are especially character-driven with little 'action' don't need to be seen on a huge screen (barring other things like shots of vast landscapes that set the tone for parts of the movie,etc).
I've seen Hero. There are films that make great use of color. Even looking at blockbusters like The Matrix, the mood of the film is set by the tone of the colors used and the lack of saturation throughout (and the 'lady in the red dress' scene wouldn't have made as much sense in b&w). Films like Amelie and (arguably it's spiritual successor.. though a tv series) Pushing Daisies also make great use of color (though it's much more in-your-face in Hero).
still a few more (some are in the works)
* Stargate
* "startup.com" - about the formation of 'govworks.com' i wonder what these guys think about Obama.
* Takedown - 'Kevin Mitnick's story'
* Serenity
* Star Trek: the Voyage Home
* The Last Starfighter
* Johnny Mnemonic
* Short Circuit 1 & 2
* Crest of the Stars (anime)
* Fahrenheit 451
* Equilibrium
* Batman (begins, dark night, the tim burten one)
* Edward Scissor Hands
* Space Balls
* Avalon ( http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/movie/decade/2000-current/avalon/#comments)
* LAIN: The Serial Experiments (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Dune
* Ender's Shadow (in the works)
* Ender's Game (in the works)
* Diamond Age (in the works for sci-fi, 'a young girls illustrated primer')
* The Arrival
* The Terminator 1,2,3
* The Sarah Conner Chronicles
* D.A.R.Y.L
* Flight of the Navigator
* Explorers
* AI
* Batteries Not Included
* Blade Runner
* IRobot
* Appleseed (anime)
* Bubble Gum Crisis (anime)
* Ergo Proxy (anime)
* Virtuosity
* Metropolis (all of them are good)
* The Last Exile (anime)
* Cherry 2000
* Robocop (this so hold up)
* Primmer
* Probe ( the TV series, it took me 3 months to find the copies of this Issac Asimov based TV series on ABC ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probe_(TV_series)
* Infest Wisely
* Logan's Run
* Planet of the Apes
* Star Trek: First Contact
* CQ ( if you get it, you'll get why this is a hacker movie , 'la resistance')
* Amelie
* 2046
* Trigun (anime)
* Escaflone (anime)
* Tank Girl
* Twelve Monkeys
* THX 1138
* Bicentennial Man
* The Philadelphia Experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philadelphia_Experiment_(film)
* Seaquest ( some episodes )
* Strange Days ( new yeas hacker style )
* Freejack