The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adele Blanc-Sec

...It's a French film... No, wait! Come back!

It's a gaslight fantasy directed by Luc Besson* and based, I'm told, on a series of graphic novels. Like, say, Watchmen, the film takes its unreal reality seriously; there are comedic elements but they grow naturally from the characters. The tech and sets are pretty much period, too.

Notwithstanding-- To enjoy the movie, you'll want to carefully remove your skepticism, cage it and cover the cage so it falls softly asleep. With that out of the way, how could you not like a film that involves a dashing and attractive young female journalist-adventurer, mummy-hunting, a telepathically reanimated and hatched pterodactyl egg, freak tennis accidents, a detective who vaguely resembles Tompson and Thompson rolled into one, a lovestruck zoologist, the President of France, a twin sister in a waking coma, no end of villains and a kind of "Edgar Rice Burroughs on absinthe" ambiance?

I sat down to watch it over dinner tonight, thinking I'd get a ways in, see what it was like and move on, to watch it all the way through later. Nope, hooked; it was just crazy and convoluted enough that I had to see how it played out. At an hour and 42 minutes, it's not like you're gonna have to take an intermission.

The Extraordinary Adventures Of Adele Blanc-Sec. Good job of English dubbing; the subtitles are a little better but you can pick either, both, or -- if your French is up to it -- none. Amazon has it on DVD -- you might want to buy via Tam's link.
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* The Fifth Element, Nikita -- I hear he's pretty good.