Jacques Tati/Play Time

true, but my favorite line has to be "c'est cod."

additionally there is a fabulous book in france (which is actually out of print i think) on the production of "playtime" (written by..stephane goudet maybe?) which deserves to be translated. he did another one on "jour de fete," concentrating on the preparation of the first true color version in the 1990s.

Seriously, though, the sound design in Tati's movies is just endlessly fascinating - i don't remember ever paying attention to sound in movies before Mon oncle

i mean

http://cyclo60.myouebe.net/CinemaTV/Mon_oncle_5.jpg

just rented this on spur of the moment. have seen no tati. will report back.

love love love it - no one uses sound the way tati does

impossible to imagine any film even remotely like this getting made today

have maybe never laughed so hard at anything as at the old doorman with his electronic buzzers

the restaurant/party scene goes on way too long though

the restaurant/party scene goes on way too long though

Whoa.

Do you think it's too boring? Too didactic? I can't imagine the film without that scene's ecstatic peak.

I have a poster for this movie above my bed. :)

I watch this movie whenever I feel like I'm forgetting where I am or how to react to the city properly.

it's fatiguing trying to keep up with all the details in the party scene once dinner has degenerated; it's just overload for me. there's a curiously fine line between overexcitement and boredom.

You don't have that problem with the other scenes? So much of the fun of the film, for me anyway, is figuring out how to divide your attention; there's no way to keep up with every line of action in a single viewing. This is certainly most apparent in the dinner scene, but it seems like you would already had to have sunk into the movie's rhythm.

I don't think you need explain yourself further or anything--if the scene drags for, it drags for you; I just love the shit out of this movie and that sequence in particular.

i guess it is, in that way, a very realistic depiction of a party

beautiful beautiful movie -- i bought the dvd in the tower blowout and have been in the mood to watch it again.

This film is best watched without subtitles, so you don't get distracted from the action. No-one says anything really anyway.

there's a curiously fine line between overexcitement and boredom.

this was my problem with bourne ultimatum.

otm

Tati's CENTENNIAL is today!

Viva Jacques.

http://www.tativille.com/

M. White to thread.

Ha! I was just thinking that I wanted to see this again last week.

I was just summoning you to correct Morbius's French.

merde!

i still haven't seen M. Hulot's holiday, or the even earlier one.

yesterday i saw someone buying Play Time in a music/DVD shop and it made me happy

See them both, Tracer!

I was just re-reading pieces of Michel Chion's Tati book. It's really great (and the only worthwhile book-length Tati study I've read--I don't read French very well though). Chion's writing is pretty loose and digressive, but he fusses over the right details and never feels unmoored from the films he writes about.

Chion rules - and he LOVES Tati to bits

i just saw "A man condemned to death has escaped" by Bresson last night and hoo I bet Chion absolutely drools over that movie - the sound in it really is the hero, even if is necessarily formally subjugated etc. etc.

I hate Tati, the last thing Chaplin needed to be was French.

You might yet come around.

(Great film, echoing pretty much all the praise above. Watched it last night while recovering from a day of feeling very under the weather and it improved my mood immeasurably.)

I wasn't too keen on the first two Hulot movies (the 2nd is just painful) but this movie's great.

I'm rewatching it -- or rather, relistening to it. Having it on in the background as a sonic piece is...hard to find the words, exactly, it's not quite like anything else.

His follow-up film, Trafic, is out on Criterion today; though it's not as mammoth and ambitious as Playtime it's clearly of a piece with it in its visual strategies, and one of the best don't-laugh-much comedies imaginable.

http://notebook.theauteurs.com/?p=213

never did watch this! it's showing at a local theater here in december. should i wait til then to see it, or will i appreciate it more if i see it before then?

Have your first viewing be a big screen. I think it'll knock your socks off.

going to see it in an hour! will report back.

love lvoe love love LOVE LVOIE LOVE LVOE

What he said.

the party in this movie - which takes up the 2nd half - is my favorite movie-party ever