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Frank Zappa had it just about right with that above quote, and if you're not laughing you've obviously never been to the REAL France (and stepped in some of the ever-present dog-doo on the sidewalks over there, or dealt with some of the 'rude, snobbish & bizarrely hostile behavior' that seems as natural as breathing air to more than a few people over there), or had blinders on when you did go there, inspired by the FANTASY Paris of charming little virtuoso films like "Amelie."

Now, in all fairness to the film, it does contain some very intense and hilarious satire in its first half (though of the much-too-exaggerated 'over-the-top' semi-fantasy kind) & is obviously the work of a CINEMATIC virtuoso (which does not imply Jeunet is an ARTISTIC virtuoso also, it only means the guy is a complete master of the TECHNICAL possibilities of the medium), but the splitting of the film between satire & irreverence on the one hand & the most cliched of schmaltzified romances on the other, seriously hurts the film's effectiveness as a possibly DEEPLY SIGNIFICANT piece of ART-ifact. It starts off majestically & ends up as CHARMING-SATIRE-MINUS-FLUFF, unlike "THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE" by the Coen Brothers, which starts off majestically dark & ends an awe-inspiring confirmation of the maxim behind every great 'realist' film: Pascal's famous "Man's greatness is so obvious it can even be deduced from his wretchedness." Now, I mention the Coens' film because it is the only film I've seen this year with CINEMATOGRAPHY (courtesy of Mr. Roger Deakins) matching or maybe even surpassing the INSANELY MAGNIFICENT level of the one in display in shot after shot in "Amelie" by BRUNO DELBONNEL. I was truly knocked out of my seat by the unerring beauty of the angles used & the antique-look-contrasting-with-modern colors within the shots. I also mention the Coens, because Jeunet is making films now that are sort of "Raising-Arizonaish" in their comic-book-imposed-on-reality extravagant, comic style, but will hopefully achieve the maturity of the Coens, in his deeper outlook to turn out something like "The Man Who Wasn't There."

Getting down to more specifics, "Amelie" reminded me of Louis Malle's classic 1960 film "Zazie Dans Le Metro," which also is split down the middle, magnificent for the first half, BORING & cliched in the second. However, Catherine Demongeot (who, bizarrely enough, Nabokov once said would've been the PERFECT LOLITA had he been allowed to pick one young enough to add the proper amount of repulsion to Kubrick's film) in "Zazie" is a 10 year old girl, & much less interesting to red-blooded heterosexual hairy-chested men (such as yours truly) than the supercute, 'BIG SHOED' (above as we;; as below), starlet of Jeunet's film: Audrey Tautou. On one level, the film is a love affair between Jeunet's camera & Tautou, in the time honored tradtion of Sternberg/Dietrich, Powell/Kerr, Hitchcock/Hedren, Godard/Karina, De Palma/Nancy Allen, etc., the angles he uses, the way he frames her, the endless close-ups, all of these things are the work of an artist in love with his subject (whether there's a 'love relatonship' in 'real life' is beside the point), and all the audience is thankful for it.

On another level (again reminding me of "Zazie"), the film takes you on quite a TURBOCHARGED, non-cliched 'tour' of picturesque areas of Paris, & is maybe the best advertising the old 'city of Romance' has had for years. It takes the eyes & sensibilities of masters like Jeunet & Delbonnel to get these shots with just the proper amount of irreverence incoroporated (by what they choose to show and omit), & then ruin them by overplaying sappy annoying accordion music for way too long towards the latter, weaker third of the flick.

All in all, 3 out of 5 stars or a 7 on a scale of 10, which means DEFINITELY RECOMMENDED, but like another technically dazzling, relatively popular French film before it Patrice Leconte's "The Girl on the Bridge," a little too short on substance and TRUE ROMANCE (as opposed to the cliched, NON-EXISTENT kind displayed in the film; check out Renoir's "Picnic on the Grass" or Jacques Becker's "Antoine et Antoinette" if you want to see a similarly whimsical, semi-fantasy film nevertheless displaying the EXISTENT KIND OF 'ROMANCE' IN INNER SENSIBILITY if not in actual, same-story realistic possibility) to give the 'HELL OF FRANCE' its proper artistic due, and in consequence become as great as let's say Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano Player." And did I mention that a sizeable portion of the film is, among other things, a dead-on satire of Hitchcock's overrated classic "Rear Window"?

Instead of doing commentary on the DVDs of his favorite Italian films, which he probably could do better than anyone else alive, being a masterfully adept teacher as well as the greatest working American director, Scorsese has decided to make his own film about them so he could relate them to his own development as a director. He relates how in the late '40s and early '50s, early Neo-Realist masterworks such as "Paisa" were shown often on New York area TV because of the large Italian-American population there, and what an indelible mark they made on him, a kid used to escapist Hollywood films. The films Scorsese's talking about, of course, are those of Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Visconti, and Antonioni. He leaves out some of the lesser known master directors such as Valerio Zurlini and Francesco Rossi, but does drop in a fascinating little visit to the beautifully dreamlike and nearly forgotten films of Alessandro Blasetti (1860, Fabiola) in his discussion of the common elements, born of a 2000 year old tradition, of Italian-made fantasy films and neo-realist films, as opposed to most Hollywood films.

Scorsese's sense of humor and eye for bizarre detail and the hilariously nuanced absurdities of some of these films are in top form throughout, and it's quite obvious from the get-go that he knows these films like the back of his hand. He's so passionate about these films that often his voice falters a little as you can hear him audibly moved to the point of tears in the voice-over!

The films he goes into in considerable detail are "ROME, OPEN CITY," "PAISA," "GERMANY: YEAR ZERO," "STROMBOLI," "AMORE," "ST. FRANCIS OF THE FLOWERS," "EUROPA 51," "VOYAGE TO ITALY," "SHOESHINE," "BICYCLE THIEF," "GOLD OF NAPLES," "OSSESSIONE," "LA TERRA TREMA," "SENSO" (Scorsese uses a breathtakingly beautiful restored print when discussing this technicolor Visconti film), "I VITELLONI" (the direct inspiration for "Mean Streets," as well as George Lucas' "American Graffitti"), "LA DOLCE VITA," "L'AVVENTURA," "THE ECLIPSE," and then closes the nearly 4 and half hour discussion with a brilliantly wide-scoped dissection of his favorite Italian film: "8-1/2."

This is a thoroughly amazing and brilliant film, that strangely enough not too many of the newer film-buffs have seen, despite the universal fame of Cooper and Shoedsack due to 1933's legendary "King Kong." Actually, they were almost as famous before that. When "Chang" came out in 1927, pre-King-Kong, post-Flaherty's-Nanook and Cooper and Shoedsack's own earlier "Grass," it became one of the most popular films ever made. The reason is simple: unlike the moderately successful, equally brilliant but more national-geographic-like and meditatively paced "Grass," (plenty of people may have accidentally stumbled upon it and seen it looking for films about Marijuana!) which deals with the emigration of Persian Nomads away from the winter and towards the land that has "Grass," this one is set in the middle of a sweltering, friggin' jungle in Siam (Thailand today), amidst wild animals, and has non-stop danger and adventure from beginning to end, not to mention a hilarious sense of humor.

The Thai woman in the film is actually not the spouse of Kru, the main actor, who was Cooper and Shoedsack's interpreter, but the wife of someone else living there. All these people were acting in the film without ever having seen a movie in their lives, reacting to these incredible events as they happened. Tigers, Leopards, rice farmers in the middle of a jungle running up coconaut trees to escape from them, Monkeys named Bimbo, and of course, Changs (meaning Elephants in the local language of Siam), and the big Chang/Elephant herd stampede, one of the greatest sequences ever filmed by anyone--all this is in Cooper and Shoedsack's film, which they shot all by themselves, with NO CREW, NO LIGHTING EQUIPMENT, and a 70,000 dollar budget which went up only to about 95,000 when the film took a little longer than expected, and they put some money in out of their own pockets which the studio later reimbursed. The new music by Bruce Gaston is absolutely brilliant, using a combination of traditional Thai music and modern sounds but never sounding trite or superficial. So many silent films suffer from bad, endlessly repetitive soundtracks that make you want to tear your hair out, this restored version of "Chang" on Image DVD isn't one of them. Rent it off the Internet or just go ahead and buy it, it's worth every penny, has a good transfer, an informative commentary track, and believe me, it's one of those films that you'll want to watch over and over again.