Top 250 Challenge: 153

Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001)
Number 29 on IMDb's Top 250

Amélie tries to enrich the lives of those around her by weaving her special brand of mischievous magic. She befriends a neighbor who's a shut-in, plays pranks on another neighbor, steals a garden gnome and sends it around the world and returns objects she collects to their rightful owners. She romantically daydreams in the café she works at and marvels at life's ironies. One day she finds a small box containing a child's mementos and decides to set about finding its rightful owner...will romance blossom for Amélie? L'hilarité s'ensuit.

Trivia: The traveling gnome was inspired by a rash of similar pranks played out in England and France in the 1990s. In 1997, a French court convicted the leader of Front de Libération des Nains de Jardins (Garden Gnome Liberation Front) of stealing over 150 gnomes. The idea was later used in an advertising campaign for an Internet travel agency.

This was a strange little movie, fun, but strange. The setting is a largely unrealistic and picturesque vision of contemporary French society, well, it's a movie right? How many movies are largely unrealistic visions of contemporary society? I say a lot of them, that is why we like watching them, right? Well the movie was a critical and commercial success when it was released, but critics attacked it for being a largely unrealistic and picturesque vision of contemporary French society, a postcard universe of a bygone France. That is why I don't usually agree with critics. This was just a fun movie to watch, get over it.