This may expose my bad taste, but I did it again last night.
I watch "The Fifth Element."
Yeah, Sergeant McClane in space works for me.
ET has never been more adorable than Milla Jovovich with orange hair and babbling . . .
What language is that, anyway you might ask?
The language was invented by the writer/director Luc Besson, who was dating Mila Jovavich around that time.
She spent hours learning the language and they spoke it each other before production.
Gary Oldman's campy villain Zorg is almost a Platonic type.
Chris Tucker is so over-the-top obnoxious he is the perfect satire on celebrity. "Signing" the Japanese school girls' papers is a great moment.
The priest works, too.
Add those "five elements" together, and mix in the Chinatown floating restaurant in a Blade Runner urban setting, a quirky mix of musical scores including "space opera" with an ocean planet behind you, an excruciatingly whining Mom, and so on, and the movie always brings out a smile, for those of us unimpeded by too fine a sense of taste.