My Thoughts On Amelie

Sunday evening I knocked another movie off of my Must See list: the French film Amelie.

Ah … the French. They gave us Monet, the Eiffel Tower, the accordion, berets, and (most importantly) crepes. Vive la France!

The French also gave the movie world Amelie. In French. As in little English is spoken. Mon dieu! Now, I took five years of French in high school and college, so I consider myself somewhat familiar with the language. I drew on this vast reservoir of knowledge and it led me to understand a solid seventeen percent of the dialog. Thank goodness for subtitles.

Kinda.

Subtitles in a movie make me feel like I accomplished a little bit more than watching a movie in English. In my brain, I equate a movie with subtitles the same as having read an entire book. In about ninety minutes. Reading an entire book in ninety minutes makes me feel like a smarty-pants.

Sunday felt like a French day to me, even without watching reading a French film. I had a croissant for breakfast. Later, I had a variety of fruits and cheeses for lunch. Plus, I inexplicably kept singing the Chef from The Little Mermaids' song most of the day.

(He's French and a very talented singer.)

(My family was thrilled.)

(You probably guessed that already.)

Back to Amelie. Since I don't own a copy of it and neither did the rental place, I had to download it from iTunes. Downloading large files such as movies might be quick and snappy for folks with a quick and snappy Internet connection, but I live in the country.

AKA the land the Internet service providers forgot.

Most of the time my Internet connection (albeit slow) is fine for the amount of online stuff I do, like browsing Pinterest and blogging. But when it comes to downloading a movie? Puh-lease. It took eight and a half hours to download a two hour movie.

I've seen dead snail races end quicker than that.

Once it finished downloading, it was nine at night. It's a two hour movie that I wasn't sure I wanted to start watching reading at nine p.m. I was still tired from having wrestled the Dyson the previous day. But, because I'm a trooper, I watched the entire movie.

And I am glad I did.

The basic plot is about a sheltered and socially unsophisticated twenty-something (Amelie) who becomes a sweet vigilante, righting the wrongs she sees being done in her area of the world. And, because the French love love, she finds true love along the way.

To recap: Saw Amelie and liked it. It was totally worth waiting eight and a half hours for it to download. It's a sweet, sweet movie, mostly because it lacked any disturbing scenes. Amelie is the antitheses of some, ahem, other more disturbing movies on my List that shall remain nameless (but their initials are Silence of the Lambs and Fight Club).


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