Jacques Tati/Play Time

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

http://peoplethings.com/andblog/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/pipandco_playtime_08052501.jpg

i have trafic sitting here but am waiting for a better tv

I finally completed the Hulot cycle (going backwards) about 6 weeks ago. Playtime is the best and actually plays pretty well at home since you keep re-playing bits over and over again. Although, having first seen it in a theatre, you do miss the sheer enormity of some of the shots and set-ups.

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare4/playtime/16.52-r2.JPG

http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/original/1109playtime.jpg

Is it just me, ore did Tati recycle big chunks of Mon oncle to better effect in both Playtime and Trafic. Not that the original is bad, but watching it after the latter pair gave me some serious deja vu.

http://www.spaceandculture.org/uploaded_images/apartments-725281.jpg

http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/program/porady/1176018486/foto/04.jpg

The only Tati I can stand.

it kind of tried my patience sometimes but i can't say i was ever bored. wonderful wonderful film.

favorite bits:

— woman admires the eiffel tower in the reflection in the door
— woman doing this really hilarious "groove is in the heart" style dance into the party, right after (i think) the neon sign leads the drunk into the building
— hulot holding up the door handle (i think i laughed harder at this than i've laughed at any scene in a movie in years)
— the last two shots

i don't know if i've ever left a movie theater feeling so giddy and uplifted without quite knowing why.

blu-ray was invented for shit like this, or if it wasn't it should have been

the more i watch blake edwards's mid/late '60s stuff, the more i'm convinced he's the only hollywood director influenced by tati (before david lynch, i suppose, if you can consider lynch a hollywood director).

see: pink panther, shot in the dark, gunn, the party

hell even as late as victor/victoria there's a minor motif of understated anti-slapstick that reeks of tati

blake edwards is seriously underrated, i think

also claudia cardinale was seriously hot people

http://elescobillon.laopinion.es/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/claudia5.jpg

Interesting. It's about time I watched Shot In The Dark, etc with better eyes.

shot in the dark is funny as hell

also wtf blake edwards directed another pink panther movie with ROBERTO BENIGNI in 1993???

this is the time when i hijack the thread with images of claudia cardinale

http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/claudia-cardinale11.jpg
http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/sch/cn/v/v0/w465/158639_400_300.jpeg
http://claudiocaprara.ilcannocchiale.it/mediamanager/sys.user/38949/Claudia%20Cardinale%20a%20schiena%20nuda.jpg
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2414/2965640626_e8a14b88f1.jpg

I will yank it in solidarity, if you like.

(No I won't.)

hate this stuff.

Tati? Really?

yeah it makes me feel anxious and i find it totally unfunny.

:(

makes me feel anxious and i find it totally unfunny

^^^ ringing endorsement of tati's success at recreating modern life in microcosm

sort've agree abt them not being that funny - i mean, hulot is the v. definition of 'gentle' humour - but i actually find that relaxing, not anxiety-inducing - its almost ambient cinema, where nothing happens, or things happen in repeating patterns/cylces/colours/shapes, and you can let lost in the movement and construction wout worrying overly much abt plot, character or verbal nuance

wld love to live in the 'modern' house in mon oncle

I do find Playtime more transfixing and utterly absorbing than roll-on-the-floor funny. Still, you make me sad, jed.

^^ OTM. The spread-out tableau of Playtime is entrancing.

Especially Playtime really needs to be seen in a nice theater w/ a big BIG screen.

is Tati-LOl funny? He's DROLL, not funny.

I don't care for the Uncle movies though -- too "whimsical"

they're like Anthony Newley songs or something

I think it's true that Tati the actor, Tati as Hulot, is maybe not quite as Chaplinesque as he thinks he is - he doesn't have the same physical gifts - and for me at least there also lurks something a little sinister back there. I could totally believe stories about him bring a monster to his wife or whatever, if those stories existed. he's a man who feels he doesn't fit in the world.

I am REALLY looking forward to this new animated movie, the Illusionist, from the creator of Triplettes of Belleville. it's based on a script that Tati never filmed!