Micmacs: I Think... I Think This Is Kinda Awesome

I'm gonna be honest, I'm not sure if this was a good movie or not. I certainly enjoyed it, but it was so very, very bizarre. It's written and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, City of Lost Children, Amelie, Alien Resurrection), so I supposed that's to be expected.

Our hero is Bazil, as a young boy his father was killed by a landmine, later as an adult, he is shot as the innocent bystander of a gun fight, in the head. In the operating room the conversation goes:

Doctor: "The bullet is lodged in his brain, if I go in to remove it, there's a fair chance he could die, but if I leave it as it is, he'll constantly be on the brink of death."

Nurse: "Better to live on the knife's edge than to die on an operating table."

Doctor: "This is philosophy, not medicine, who has a coin to flip?"

Coin flips

Doctor: "Leaving it in then."

Bazil is then left with a tendency to have hallucinations, which can be stopped by smacking his head, and I assume shifting the bullet. During the three months of his recovery, his apartment is leased to a new tenant, his belongings are stolen, and his position is filled at the video rental store he works at.

He has to resort to street performing in order to eat, and sleeps down at the docks. Eventually he is taken in by a "family" of street performers and tramps who salvage refuse and fit it up and sell it. A number of this new family have their own injuries and abilities. There's a contortionist, a former human cannonball, a human calculator, and tinkerer/tiny strongman.

Bazil takes to his new family with gusto, and during one of his rounds of salvaging he finds the companies that manufactured the bullet in his brain, and the landmine that killed his father, across the street from each other (The army included a photo of the landmine in his father's belongings, and he was given the bullet casing from the scene of his injury, both emblazoned with their respective logos). What follows is a quest for him to bring the owners of the companies to account for their supplying weapons indiscriminately, eventually he enlists the rest of his new family, who all contribute their natural talents to the escapades.

I'm not really sure how to classify this movie, it's almost like a slapstick comedy, but it's unusually dark, I guess the best description would simply be that it's a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie, and leave it at that.

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