Micmacs is probably French for Joy

Actually it's supposed to translate to "shenanigans" or "shady dealings" or something loose and slangy like that (say other reviews/synopses; any French-speakers in the audience today?), but I kind of like my interpretation better. After all, how often can you walk into a movie theater and then leave absolutely sure that your eleven bucks went to the pursuit of pure joy and happiness? 'Cause that's kind of what seeing "Micmacs" was like for me. Here's the lowdown: director of "Amelie" has done himself an action movie, but a light/quirky/"Amelie"-esque action movie (his name is Jean-Pierre Jeunet for the curious). Danny Boon, the French comic actor, stars as a kind of aimless young dude who lost his father to a land mine explosion, and then suffers an accidental brain injury when a bullet from a drive-by ricochets and lodges itself in his skull, leaving him susceptible to sudden instant death. All of this goes down within minutes. After coming out of the injury-coma, our young dude, whose name is Bazil, finds himself without a home or possessions or really much of anything. His post-discovering-my-life-as-I-knew-it-is-gone walk of sadness leads him do a quirky old dude who lives in a junkyard and presides over a big and happy family of other oddballs, all of whom have special abilities (one makes mechanical contraptions, another is a contortionist). For a few minutes they live happily in their junkyard house, salvaging stuff and being pleasantly odd, until Bazil stumbles upon the offices of the corporations that made both the land mine AND the bullet in his skull, conveniently across the street from each other. Righteous anger brewing, Bazil kind of blindly strikes out to do something about the grave psycho-emotional injuries he's suffered from these corporations, each headed by a Bad Dude, and before you know it he's planning, with a little help from his friends, how to best set these two corporations/Bad Dudes against each other, to show them a lesson.

All of that isn't just me being weird with my storytelling or even taking creative editing liberties. All of that exposition really does happen in the first twenty-odd minutes, and at roughly that pace. Events slide smoothly into each other; long sequences of Bazil raging at his losses in a pouring rain as dramatic music plays (possibly over a hazy montage of remembrances of his life pre-bullet and land mine) are blissfully absent. We get a shot of Bazil, comprehending that THESE are the very corporations responsible for his discontent, and then boom! He's wandering the halls, looking for trouble. This energy, this pulse of life is what makes and sustains the film. It's a bit of a conceit, but the movie has this magical aura about it from the very first minute. Chalk it up to the score and art direction and all that stuff; this is magical realism in the Franco-"Amelie" style. And the beauty is that, because we can see that it's a fanciful story, we buy into it willingly and immediately. It creates the same kind of joy that I felt as a kid watching old Chaplin or Keaton movies-- yeah, dudes in real life don't actually do stuff like turn with the board on their shoulder and hit the other two dudes in the face, but it could happen, and perhaps the world would be a more wonderful place if it did, so of course I'll laugh and enjoy it. The silent movie comparison is probably the most apt, as the jokes in addition to the atmosphere of enthrallment with film as a medium share a whole lot with a less cynical era of moviemaking.

I'm waxing, but deservedly so. This movie is awesome, a delight in basically every way, and comes highly recommended. For our moment of universality and semi-academic thought, let's stop and think for a moment as to why on earth there aren't more action movies that are this fun and pleasing. It probably has something to do with this feeling I've been trying to describe through all of this rambling, the fact that this is whimsy of the inner-child-pleasing variety; none of your self-conscious adolescent whimsey, tinged with feelings of unrequited love (the worst kind, yet somehow quite pervasive) and insecurity, and none of your slightly cynical hipster-and-older whimsey, which comes off as slightly creepy. Another reviewer likened "Micmacs" to a Rube Goldberg machine, which is right on the money. The sum of the parts comes together completely to do something that wasn't precisely necessary, but with such flair and good nature that it instantly becomes necessary. Sure, parts of the machine are just there for show, and it could all have been a whole lot simpler, but it is what it is, and we love it. Contrast this with the machinery of your conventional summer action movie: big stars, enhanced explosions, otherworldly locations, all put together with the cold efficiency of economics. The sum of the parts is designed to appeal to as many moviegoers as possible in some very complex way, but the complexity really only relates to the equations involved, as the story is usually creatively and emotionally shallow. Let's not even get into the other realm of action movies, where things seem to continue to get grittier and darker as time goes on. That machinery is definitely militaristic, in the mean way of weapons favored by warlords in dangerous parts of the globe. I think the metaphor is pretty much played out by this point, but let's spell it out anyways: action movies, you don't need explosions and sex and violence and one-liners to be fun. In fact, I think that if you put some of that stuff aside for a while and instead chose to focus on the other things that make a movie fun, then we might get something spectacular on a regular basis. So go ahead, just try it out for a bit. Maybe you'll realize that being cool isn't about slick appearances, but instead relates to something that comes from within.

Some pretty wild sentence construction going on there, but it's okay, I'm not picky. I also saw "Babies" a while ago, but don't have much to say about it that you can't already intuit from the trailer. It's entertaining and cute. It features a lot of babies. It probably would make an awkward date movie. The end. Now, onwards to seeing a movie that has had me all worked up for a while now, "Winter's Bone."