Micmacs / Tic Tacs

My Micmacs review has been a struggle, it has to be said.

I’d intended to crowbar in a genius Micmacs / Tic Tacs pun in which I compared French cinema to those little plastic boxes of sweets where one half was green and the other half orange, but it wasn’t happening and it seemed insulting to suggest that the French only ever made two types of films – cracking thrillers or crackers comedies.

I also started to compare Micmacs to Ajami, an Israeli drama I watched last year that bears no resemblance to Micmacs whatsoever apart from the fact that it has two characters who are so alike that I thought they were the same person.

In the end I complained so much to Mrs The Incredible Suit about my woeful inadequacy to articulate my thoughts that she got sick of my whining and told me to put a few bullet points down and come back to it later. Well I liked the first half of that plan, but I wasn’t too keen on the ‘coming back to it later’ bit, so with a blatant disregard for accepted methods of coherent writing, here are the essential elements I was going to expand upon in my Micmacs review:

• Typically over the top bonkers French comedy
• Two characters who I thought were the same bloke for the first half-hour because they look similar and I may have nodded off at an important bit because it was Friday afternoon
• Inspired set-pieces where the goodies play the baddies off each other
• Looks amazing
• Slightly uncomfortable / incongruous stuff in a screwball comedy about how terrible arms dealing is
• Where does it fit on the Jeunetometer?

Feel free to add your own rambling piffle to beef that up to a proper, structured post, but if you can’t be arsed I understand perfectly.

Anyway just to be clear, I liked Micmacs once it settled down and I could work out what was going on. To expand upon my last bullet point, of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s films that I’ve seen, it probably fits into his sliding scale of goodness something like this:

Thanks for bearing with me. You’re diamonds, the lot of you.

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