Cinecultist had mostly decided to ignore that today is Valentine's Day. After all it's an annoying, consumeristic, excluding holiday that we don't even have time to celebrate even if we wanted to, since things are crazy busy at the Day Job. But everything from girls carrying flowers on the subway this morning to the line of people waiting outside the Godiva chocolates near the office conspired against our fingers in the ears strategy.
If that's the way you're going to be Valentine's Day, fine. We don't like your sneaky proliferation tactics but we accept that people in the world are in love and feel they must celebrate it with blooms and sugar and kissie faces. Blech. If we were going to be cutesy about the "holiday," it would probably include a re-viewing of Amélie. Audrey Tautou plays the titular naif who decides to mend her isolated ways by helping out the lives of people around her with secret good works.
There's so many parts to this completely charming Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie that we love (not least of which involves a traveling garden gnome) but the romance between Amélie and Nino (Mathieu Kassovitz) is surely one of them. The quirky photo-booth picture collections, the motorbike and those brown eyes, sigh. It's enough to make CC all unnecessarily sappy and gooey and we can't have that.
Fight the power this February 14th! Don't let the homogenizing Hallmark celebrations get you down!
Posted by karen at February 14, 2006 2:48 PM