Question: What could be more boring than a documentary about a cemetery?

Answer: A documentary about a French cemetery, made by a French film maker.

When will the United Nations finally stop wasting its time on minor problems like Sudan and focus on outlawing the giving of movie cameras to French artsy-fartsy types who haven't a clue what to do with them? In the human rights violation called "Forever," a French film maker created a 90-minute documentary about the Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris, a topic that could have been covered in about...oh...20 minutes. To pad this le bomb out to the full running time, the crew interviewed tourists, family members, and the assorted loons they found wandering among the tombstones. The cemetery itself is cared for with the usual competence of the French. In other words, King Tut's tomb looked better when it was opened in 1923 after 3,000 years.

The supposed hook to this movie is that many formerly famous people are buried there, like bon mot artist Oscar Wilde, marginal actor Eves Montand, and Iran's greatest novelist, whose name I can't remember and who wrote a story about an owl.

One of the graves of the "famous" given endless minutes was that of French novelist and world-class agoraphobic, Marcel Proust. Even the dopes visiting his grave admitted that they hadn't really read Proust. One nut was the exception, however, and he loved Proust so much he drew a comic book based on the autobiographical, "In Search of Lost Time," which in the original print version consists of an ungodly seven volumes and wastes 3,200 pages. The only reason I know who Proust is, is because the suicidal unemployed professor loser in "Little Miss Sunshine" was a Proust scholar. And because I've watched a lot of "Monty Python's Flying Circus" reruns. The comic book goof shared that the genius of Proust is exemplified by an early scene in the book when the main character eats a biscuit and it reminds him of when he was a kid and ate biscuits. Brilliant! Quick, somebody lift the lid on the crypt and throw in a Nobel for literature.

Beware though, this film is also a typical art-snot ripoff. Although the advertising for the movie mentions Jim Morrison as being buried there, Morrison's grave is never shown and no one who was there to see his tomb was interviewed. Morrison is mentioned a couple of times, but only whimsically and in passing. Apparently, if you're a sneering Frog making a movie about a French cemetery, featuring the grave of an American, and the only person most audiences will have ever heard of, is beneath you. Pierre and his film crew do, however, give us a nice long interview with the daughter of a guy who is in the International Shoe Designers Hall of Fame.

In the end (note my cool insider's reference to the title of a Doors' song), this documentary wasn't just titled "Forever", watching it seemed like forever.

--oddball