The Last Movie I Saw

I think my least favorite adjective in movie reviews is "quirky." It certainly can be a pretty useful word, but over time it has come to almost define a genre marked by offbeat characters whose weirdness stands in for any kind of coherent thematic point. A good example is Micmacs, a French film directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, which is rather charming for the first hour but then gets buried in over-the-top quirkiness. It's the story of an unlucky guy who gains an opportunity to exact revenge on those most responsible for his sorry state, and then concocts an elaborate scheme to realize that revenge. But as the complications multiply, and his ragtag accomplices get to display their quirkiness, it eventually gets quite tiresome. By the end of the movie, I didn't really care that much about what happened, even though early on I was kind of enjoying the ride. Jeunet is probably most famous in the US for the film Amelie from a few years ago, which was also in danger of going over the top with preciousness, but somehow retained enough of a connection with reality to come off as pleasantly whimsical. A Very Long Engagement was another of his films that I liked, but not really in the quirky vein at all. Micmacs seems a conscious effort to push the quirks to the limit, and let's just say that the cumulative effect is to render the whole thing boring. I guess I don't blame the filmmaker for seeing how far he could push that particular envelope, but I hope he recognizes that the experiment was a failure and keeps such expressions of quirkiness in check the next time out.

PS- By the way, in keeping with my opening statement above, my intention is never again to resort to using the word "quirky" (in any of its permutations) in relation to movies on this blog ever again. Feel free to call me on it if I break that promise.