humor

Review: Mon Oncle (1958)

Jacques Tati directed the movie Mon Oncle (My Uncle) which was released in 1958 in French. Tati plays the protagonist, Monsieur Hulot, an eccentric man whose sister, Madame Arpel (Adrienne Servantie), is married to industrialist Charles Arpel (Jean-Pierre Zola). Hulot is the uncle in the title to the Arpel’s son Gérard (Alain Bécourt). The overarching plot is simple: Charles is supposed to find his brother-in-law a respectable job that can keep him busy and out of trouble. A lot of silliness occurs in pursuit of that goal.

While I was watching the film, I was mindful of the theme that modernity is providing waves of technology for a modern homemaker to be proud of. That is a subtext of the reality that the Arpel’s move through. Their house is strikingly spartan. It has minimal furniture with no decorations nor signs of personality beyond its touches of automation. Outside, the garden is stark with only tiny patches of lawn and concrete stepping stones amidst gravel patches. The stones form paths from the outer gate to the house and small places to entertain guests.

a silver colored fish

The one embellishment of the yard is a ridiculous fish fountain. When a visitor presses the buzzer to request entry, Madame Arpel turns a knob to release a stream of water from the fish’s mouth. Next, she pushes a button to unlock the outer door. There is something peculiar about the fountain because it is never the same height and when it is turned off, the water hesitates to stop. Once the guest leaves, the fountain is turned off right away. Later, it’s the origin of a lot of silliness when it’s damaged by Mr. Hulot’s ever-present umbrella.

a drawing of a finger pressing a button with rings of action emanating from the fingertip

Newly invented technology is a theme in the “modern” world that the Arpel’s belong to. At his work, the phones are treated as fancy novelties. Mr. Arpel’s boss, Monsieur Pichard (Lucien Frégis) has his importance indicated by having two doors in his office that he can direct staff and visitors to choose. The factory makes kilometers of rubber hoses with a complicated machine that Hulot manages to crash. At home, the Arpel’s kitchen is controlled by a few mysterious buttons. Monsieur Hulot tries to open one of the cabinets and can’t find the correct (unlabeled) button in the console to get a snack. Suddenly, a cabinet to open and reveals a pitcher. Hulot accidentally discovers that the pitcher bounces satisfyingly. The glass that was in the same shelf didn’t bounce as well. A recurring theme is that the button is an essential feature of modernity. They can be found all through the house.

Mr. Hulot’s world is quite different. It’s a world of interesting people, their games and everyday amusements. Nothing is new and the market is full of (expensive) food options. His apartment is on the top floor of a three-story building. To get there, he follows a maze-like path to the roof. The windows in the house let the viewer see the stairs and corridors he passes on his trip. The first time he makes the trip, his slow, seeming random, progress is intriguing. Hulot introduces Gérard to this traditional world as he brings him home from school. Gérard has friends who are fond of pranks. For one trick, when cars are returning from dropping the kids off at school, the kids make a noise as if a stopped car was hit from behind, causing the consternation of the driver. Another game is to distract people walking so that they run into a lamp post.

The filmographer Thomas Flight has a recent video In Praise of Comfort Films which reported that Mon Oncle has the most cute dogs in a movie. The dogs are running the neighborhood and looking for whatever dogs look for. According to IMDB, the dogs came from a local pound. It reports that Tati found adoptive homes for the dogs after the movie was finished, promoting them as movie stars. The Arpels are wealthy and their home contrasts with the background images of generic, industrialized apartment buildings.

Although the movie is subtitled in English, the first few minutes of the film don’t have any dialog, just music and the activity of the everyday world that Hulot belongs to. The film was pretty funny with lots of LOL moments. The transition from traditional life to the technological world of modern cars and Arpel’s factory is full of dissonances. It seems that every opportunity for Hulot to fit into the future was a complete failure, but it didn’t affect Hulot’s playfulness and humor. A final show of opulence is the Arpel’s new pink and purple Cadillac, offering a ride into the future for Hulot.

Mon Oncle is really funny. It won a 1959 Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. The version that I saw was the French Language version with English Subtitles and not the dubbed English version. The disk was released by Criterion and also included a humorous short “L’ecole des facteurs” (The Postman’s School) that has Tati as a newly trained bicycle postman. Tati made several movies with Monsieur Hulot of which Mon Oncle is the most successful.

I was surprised that my search for the movie in the statewide library consortium, Evergreen, only found two copies of the film. I was really glad that one of them was in my local library. The library has a section of “Binge Boxes” which provide a wide selection of themed collections to binge watch with the whole crew. Mon Oncle was in the “Criterion 3” binge box.

Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

A movie reel

Everything Everywhere All at Once has an intriguing title. The story seems simple, a family that owns a laundromat needs to organize their business. Diedre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis) is investigating the family’s documents for their tax filing. She becomes a menacing monster terrorizing Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) throughout the multiverse.

Out of that simple nugget of a story, Evelyn is distracted by her tangled life. She can’t pay attention to what’s going on but denies her wandering attention. Through the film she finds what her life could have been.

Threaded through the story is humor and the ridiculous possibilities of life. Evelyn finds a way to lighten up each situation. She draws strength from the universes that she visits. Her ability to bring silliness is disarming. The film shows flashes of Evelyn in the different lives that comes from alternative choices. She can switch realities that are linked together so that Evelyn acquires new skills or memories.

When the action stops abruptly, there’s just the emotions of the Evelyn and her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu). Their chase ends in a stalemate, and they try to sort out what life means. They sit on the edge of a canyon watching the peaceful beauty.

The energy of the film grows out of control with montages of rapid cuts. The screen flits between brief views of Evelyn in many universes. She speeds through possibilities until she has found the resource that the current quandary needs. Googly eyes are used to represent mischief, inner sight and traversing life’s complexity.

The film balances humor, terror and sentimental feelings as the situation turns dangerous and then ludicrous and then emotionally difficult. A path through the multiverse is not easily mapped out. An app on the phone that the universe jumping version of her husband, Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan), helps find the right path. The red pill is pressing a green button on the earpiece of a Bluetooth headset. Evelyn learns there she has so many possibilities because of her imagination and flexibility.

Eventually, she still can’t pay attention but is willing to come “back to earth” and acknowledge her quirks. The changes might not stop, but her zany character is game to find a way through them.

Review: Playtime (1967)

The 1967 film, Playtime, directed by the French director Jacques Tati, was a project that was burdened by Tati’s grandiose vision for the film. He went over-budget with a tardy production schedule. This comic movie uses ludicrous situations that put the characters off-balance to create goofy humor. Without an overarching plot, Playtime is a sequence of scenes that don’t flow logically. They’re each silly and have unexpected turns.

One message of the film is that people are absurd. Early, the movie shows the main character trying to set up a meeting with a businessman. Eventually, he gets sidetracked by an industrial exhibition. After that phase of the action finished, much of the movie takes place at the grand opening of a nightclub with many silly mishaps. The humor in the movie is often visual. The dialog is primarily French with sub-titles but some speakers use German or English.

A theme of the movie is that glass can be a barrier and transparent at the same time. Seeing through glass walls leaves one isolated as an observer unable to participate in events that are so close. A door can be invisible until someone passes through it. At the nightclub, eventually a glass door was just a golden handle held by a doorman. Although a guest shattered the door, the greeter was acting as if the glass was still present. The glass shards were swept away but “the show must go on” so the door was simulated for the guests.

One segment in the film showed some apartments that were designed like department store windows. The rooms were on ground level with a fishbowl wall of glass giving full view into the residents’ lives. In one apartment, I was reminded of family Super8 movies showing travels and family reunions. The host tried to set up a screen to share travels but was rebuffed when the guest left suddenly.

The extra features of the disc emphasized the impracticality of Tati’s production of the film. Tati built a huge city-like sound stage of buildings and asphalt roadways for a modernist town. Tati had hoped other directors could use the same set. However, not long after the shooting was finished, the whole structure was destroyed. The commenters reported that on some days Tati would waste the day waiting for the sunlight and clouds to be just so. The cast might end up waiting and idle for much of a day.

The hapless architect was blamed for the mishaps at the not-quite-ready nightclub. The restaurant manager reports to him many flaws: The pickup window for the waiters was too small for serving plates; a bar that had ornamentation at the level of the bartender’s head; a tile in the newly finished dance floor stuck to a maître d’s shoe. One running gag was a waiter who tore his pants. As the evening progressed, that waiter waited outside and replaced defective shoes, a belt and tie that other waiters needed. Another ongoing joke showed that the chairs left deep crown-shaped creases on men’s suits. A sorry-looking baked fish was repeatedly seasoned with a flourish when staff passed by, but the fish was never eaten by anyone.

The action begins and ends with tourists traveling to an airport. The Eiffel Tower is shown in the distance to locate the action in Paris. The sets are constructed out of grays and blacks, straight lines and flat surfaces. It shows humans in a dehumanized setting. People don’t seem out of place, but nothing feels welcoming. The film is not showing a place where people would want to stay.

One strength of the show is how memorable it is. Even though is has primarily physical gags and silly situations, I can look back and see much of the movie in my memory. Rather than being based on a wide environment and varying settings, the film’s world was rigid and demanding. The world of Tati’s Playtime is strange and alien.

Meta-Data

One of the things slowing me down on posting on this blog is that I think I have to say something original. I get a lot of ideas, but if their negative and critical, I’m likely to delete them before they’re done.

The title is a pun… I’m taking a Library Science class at IUPUI “Metadata” and since this is a post talking about the post, it’s also meta.

If I don’t have to be original, I probably have more to say, but I don’t like saying things that are imaginary so I’m careful.

Book cover Switch gears… I’ve got a poetry book “Eyes of Hope” available on Amazon.com http://amzn.com/0986097705

Sometimes my friends and I have an animated conversation. We’re on the same wavelength a lot of the time so gear shifts just flow. It can lead to some humor when there’s a pun in the transition.