Arsene Mosca Movies
An underground lair serves as the point of inspiration for this deeply whimsical fantasy comedy (with echoes of Jodorowsky's Rainbow Thief) from French cause célèbre Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie, The City of Lost Children). The locale is post-9/11 Europe. As arms dealers go head to head with one another in a series of violent skirmishes -- suggesting that an apocalyptic cataclysm may be lingering on the horizon -- the unfortunate Bazil (Dany Boon) still reels from the long-ago death of his father from a roadside bomb, an event that left him orphaned as a boy. Now employed in a low-paying job as a video-store clerk, and still trying to determine how he fits into the scheme of things, he gets hit by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting and promptly lands in the hospital. Upon release, he finds himself broke and unemployed. Hope soon crops up, however, in the form of Placard (Jean-Pierre Marielle), an ex-convict living in a scrap dump with a motley group of social outcasts -- all of whom welcome Bazil with warmth, compassion, and hospitality. Sure of his place for the first time in his life, Bazil joins forces with them to turn the dump into a lovely underground home, filled to the rafters with extraordinary inventions and sculptures. Soon after, the possibility of revenge against the munitions manufacturers responsible for Bazil's dad's death presents itself. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
- Starring:
- Dany Boon, André Dussollier, (more)
- 2009
This zany, French-language fish-out-of-water comedy concerns a married couple, Hugo (Dany Boon) and Ariane (Sophie Marceau), who attempt to escape from the doldrums of nuptial banality by exchanging professional lives. He takes up his wife's career as a door-to-door jewelry salesman, and she assumes control of a building rental company - leading to a predictably endless series of outrageous complications. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
- Starring:
- Sophie Marceau, Dany Boon, (more)
Mr. Bean -- the stick-legged goofball man-child created by Rowan Atkinson on television in the early '90s, and in the 1997 feature Bean -- undertakes his second cinematic adventure in the comic romp Mr. Bean's Holiday. Growing thoroughly sick of the wet, cold, and clammy London weather, Mr. Bean (Atkinson) finds just the right tonic when he wins a trip to sunny southern France, all expenses paid, with a new digital video camera to accompany him. However, he runs headfirst into a series of outrageous and unpleasant situations, such as winding up in a French restaurant where a maître d' (Jean Rochefort) convinces him to eat bizarre varieties of seafood that he's never before encountered, and discovering that the "Very Fast Train" certainly lives up to its name. Eventually, Mr. Bean (accompanied by a Russian traveling companion whom he meets along his journey) stumbles onto the French Riviera and spoils the latest movie production of snobbish, egomaniacal filmmaker Carson Clay (Willem Dafoe) -- little realizing that his own klutzy video footage will accidentally end up in Clay's film and be screened at the upcoming Cannes Film Festival. Unlike the first big-screen incarnation of Atkinson's character, Mr. Bean's Holiday adheres more closely to the formula of the original series by rendering the character almost completely mute. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
- Starring:
- Rowan Atkinson, Emma de Caunes, (more)
- 2006
- NR
- Add OSS 117: Cairo - Nest of Spies to Queue Add OSS 117: Cairo - Nest of Spies to top of Queue
OSS 117: Cairo -- Nest of Spies constitutes the eighth installment in a long-running series of movies about OSS 117 (the government code name for Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath) -- a French super-spy and European equivalent of James Bond. The creation of author Jean Bruce, OSS eventually starred in over 265 novels and seven cinematizations through 1970. The first seven film outings were sober and straight-faced; the eighth go-round (the first after a 38-year lapse) does a 180 to shamelessly poke fun of the rules established by the genre. A glib yet intelligent spoof, it joins the ranks of Our Man Flint (1965), Aghaye Hallou (1970), Mad Mission 3: Our Man from Bond Street (1984), and other international pictures that glibly satirize the subgenre made infamous to Americans by Bond; like Mad Mission 3, it even packs in an OSS 117 (Jean Dujardin) with a startling resemblance to Sean Connery. The film's comic conceit involves making OSS 117 arrogant, conceited, culturally insensitive, chauvinistic, and thoroughly moronic (he pretends that various cultural institutions and religious practices, for instance, are nonexistent if he is unfamiliar with them); yet the character somehow manages to slide through outrageously dangerous situations unscathed, time and again. The teaser prologue finds OSS 117 in Berlin, where he outwits the Nazis by stealing vital documents from them, hijacks an Axis plane in mid-nosedive, and saves himself and the craft at the last yawning moment. Ten years later, he journeys from Rome to Cairo, where he investigates the death of a fellow agent, posing as the proprietor of a chicken farm. His "side" activities during this jaunt involve hammering out a peace arrangement for the Middle East, keeping tabs on the Suez Canal, and monitoring the Russians. Jean-François Halin scripted the film, maintaining an utterly deadpan tone throughout; Michel Hazanavicius directed. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
- Starring:
- Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, (more)
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