Day 57 - 2/26/09 - Movie #55
BEFORE: Seeing Rowan Atkinson's cameo in "Hot Shots", plus watching the (mostly) dialogue-free film "Triplettes of Belleville", logically leads me to watch this film next - since it's set in France, and Mr. Bean barely speaks -
THE PLOT: Mr. Bean wins a trip to Cannes where he unwittingly separates a young boy from his father and must help the two come back together. On the way he discovers France, bicycling, and true love.
AFTER: I actually really enjoyed this one. Yes, Atkinson's humor is low-brow slapstick, but it's FUNNY and the timing is always spot-on. Willem Dafoe had a great part as an egotistical, pretentious film director, and it's amusing to watch all of Bean's plans run off the rails before somehow fixing themselves. The Mr. Bean character wasn't as annoying here as he's seemed to me in the past - I don't know if that's because he had good intentions in this story, or if hanging out with a young boy sidekick and a cute actress humanized him a bit more.
RATING: 7 out of 10 phone numbers
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
You could definitely sense the Tati influence in this flick. Like "Mon Oncle" and "Mr. Hulot's Holiday" the movie is mostly a series of episodes; Bean is the thread that is pulled across France and drags chaos behind him.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you. It's solid, fun nonsense. And the end is profoundly charming.
I do have one complaint: as with the previous "Bean" movie, Mr. Bean seems to be a manchild at best, a moron at worst. That's not nearly as interesting as his portrayal in the TV series, where he was more or less any man on the street, facing the same obstacles and frustrations that we all face. The comedy came from the fact that he had very much his own methods of problem-solving.