PlayTime (1967)
Directed by Jacques Tati
Clumsy Monsieur Hulot finds himself perplexed by the intimidating complexity of a gadget-filled Paris. He attempts to meet with a business contact but soon becomes lost. His roundabout journey parallels that of an American tourist, and as they weave through the inventive urban environment, they intermittently meet, developing an interest in one another. They eventually get together at a chaotic restaurant, along with several other quirky characters.
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What critics compared PlayTime to
Scorsese has said that he found inspiration in the works of René Clair and Jean Vigo, but the most direct connection for the railroad depot scenes is the work of Jacques Tati, in particular Playtime.
Scorsese’s orchestration of the massive space inside the train station and its numerous inhabitants will likely call to mind Spielberg’s similar use of an airport in The Terminal (2004), although both harken back to the great Jacque Tati’s masterful modern comedy Playtime (1967).
And just when you think Bird has exhausted his recipe book, he pulls off a slapstick climax that combines the sustained restaurant mayhem from Jacques Tati’s Playtimewith an episode of involuntary memory borrowed from Proust.
The aesthetics of the dreary, starless world outside of the prince's fantasy universe seem inspired primarily by the relentlessly gray, boxed-in world of Jacques Tati’s masterpiece of French cinema, Playtime, itself a hymn to the human spirit of ingenuity and individuality in a drab grown-up life.
For the new film, Osborne (“Kung Fu Panda”) and screenwriters Irena Brignull (“The Boxtrolls”) and Bob Persichetti have taken the generally more effective tack of nesting Saint-Exupery’s story within an elaborate framing device set in the kind of modular modern metropolis prophesied by Jacques Tati’s “Playtime,” full of technology and free of wonder.
In this regard it recalls another audacious big-budget fantasy, Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967), for which the director constructed elaborate and highly detailed sets of a futuristic Paris.
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(Tom Hanks has something of Hulot’s demeanor in Steven Spielberg’s fish-out-of-water comedy The Terminal.)
It was the direct inspiration for " The Terminal ," for which Stephen Spielberg built a vast set of a full-scale airline terminal.
Film buffs will recall that this is essentially the same thing that Jacques Tati did when he was making his classic comedy "Playtime" (which is being re-released later this summer).
As with John Ford's Wagonmaster or Jacques Tati's Playtime, the absence of a central star reinforces the sense of community that's integral to the creative vision being presented.
Like Rear Window to Alfred Hitchcock, like Nashville to Robert Altman, like Playtime to Jacques Tati, Lee’s Do the Right Thing is an undiluted representation of its creator’s artistic command.
(The city may remind you of Metropolis or the chaotic cityscape of Brazil.
A rendition of Orwellian dystopia with the comic cynicism of Jacques Tati’s masterpiece Playtime, Brazil is a parable of corporate dominance; it is an environment strewn in propagandistic slogans and scored with the unending rhythm of typewriter keys.
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Bringing to life a big-screen city unlike any we’ve seen before, Anderson has built himself the biggest Parisian playground since Jacques Tati doomed himself to financial ruin erecting the stages for his masterpiece Playtime.
If the setting of Chapter 2 's climax, a hall-of-mirrors museum installation, was a kind of Instagram thirst-trap version of The Lady From Shanghai , this film offers the series' take on Jacques Tati's Playtime , a cold glass world where transparent barriers cause playful misunderstandings — when they're not keeping one guy from killing another.