Monsieur Hulot's Holiday

The picture deals with Mister Hulot going to a holiday resort where he accidentally originates destruction and disaster . The movie is plentiful of original sketches . From the beginning to the end the good humor and bland comedy are continued . The film blends tongue-in-cheek , irony , giggles , joy , jokes , social critical and is pretty bemusing and entertaining . In spite of runtime is overlong , the run is two hours and some , isn't boring neither tiring but funny . The gentle humor developed in the film is clever and thoughtful and the comic numbers vary between slapstick and surrealist . The argument is plain and simple though is only set in a hotel and beach isn't dreary . Jacques Tati is extraordinary as Mister Hulot , character he'll repeat in a sequel : ¨My uncle¨ . Direction and interpretation by Jacques Tati is magnificent and excellent . Alain Romain's score ( habitual musician of Tati ) is agreeable and cheerful . The motion picture received awesome reviews and deserves the complete knowledge because there are amount chuckles and entertainment . The picture is nowadays considered a European cult film .

Like the man said if you're going to steal then steal from the best, something Jacques Tati took to heart, it seems clear he spent his youth screening one Buster Keaton movie after another and then starting again from the beginning until he'd mastered every sight gag, every move, every iota of comic timing from a master and then done his inept best to imitate it. He does, of course, rate top Brownie Points for taste and lesser Brownie Points for Effort but it's not enough to admire the Eiffel Tower to the extent that it inspires you to design and build one of your own, the trick is not just to replicate but to excel and come up with a better tower than the original. This is not to say that this movie lacks entertainment value in fact if you've never heard of or actually seen even a mediocre Buster Keaton movie and dig slapstick then chances are you'll enjoy this. Alas, I have seen the odd Buster Keaton movie ...

Monsieur Hulot (Jacques Tati) goes on a seaside holiday. He stays at a seaside hotel and meets various characters. Jacques Tati is doing his character in a minimal dialog performance similar to Mr. Bean in a later incarnation. It's very light and probably way too light. He needs more physicality and it would be better to be completely quiet. Also comedy doesn't always translate the language and cultural barrier. This movie needs a more concentration of jokes. The slapstick don't always hit. Again the touch is too light. The limited dialog does leave this with a lack of energy. For example, Mr. Bean puts in laugher to inject energy and the old silent movies would have music. There is too much quietness in this. I do get the idea of the comedy and one must allow for the filming in another era. However, there just isn't enough big laughs.

Pipe smoking Monsieur Hulot,Jacques Tati´s endearing clown takes a holiday at a seaside resort where his presence provokes one catastrophe after another. If you going to watch Tati I think you should start with this. It´s one of the funniest movies ever made. Beautiful filmed in black and white.And there are almost no talk in this film.It´s like a silent film. RATING: 5/5

People are in a hurry to go on vacation. They rush to the train depot. They speed down the pavement. They are all in an absurd hurry to relax and have no patience for slower traffic or animals. One such slower vehicle is a loud jalopy. It stops in front of a dog sunning itself in the middle of the road. The vehicle's owner honks the horn which sounds delightfully odd. The dog wags its tail but does not move. The horn sounds again and, once again, the dog wags its tail. Finally, the dog gets curious and goes over to the car. A hand reaches out from the car and gently pets the dog before easing the car onward to its destination. The owner of the car is Monsieur Hulot and he, too, is going on vacation. The fact that he is not in a hurry like his fellow vacationers can be attributed to the fact that Hulot lives life at an unhurried pace something that many of his acquaintances neither understand nor appreciate. Hulot is a man who prefers animals to things, play over strategy, summer relaxation over summer business, and freedom over rigid order (the headwaiter at the hotel where Hulot stays is constantly befuddled by this guest). Monsieur Hulot's Holiday is a funny, touching, and humane look at a summer vacation. As viewers we follow Hulot, an earnest but clumsily unlucky man, through a few blissfully lazy summer days. We share his energy in play (tennis and ping pong). We feel his delight when dancing with a pretty girl at a masquerade party, where few adults have bothered to attend. We are painfully aware of Hulot's embarrassment as he dishes out abuse at a Tom who was not in fact peeping. We laugh, and cringe, at Hulot's valiant but doomed attempts to stop the escalation of an ill-timed fireworks display. Finally, at the film's conclusion, we sense the bittersweet quality with which Hulot ends his vacation, a vacation that has had humor and sadness, adventure and boredom, romance and dejection, in short a vacation full of life. Director and Hulot star Jacques Tati does not always succeed in making me laugh (although when he does, I laugh heartily), but he always makes me smile. This week was my third go around for Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. I first watched the film a decade ago. I predict I will watch it another three times in the next ten years. I see too many films that offer nothing. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday always leaves me smiling, if somewhat sadly, from ear to ear.

Jaques Tati is a modern-day take of Charlie Chaplin; not a heavy talker, interacts in humorous ways to characters and different settings, and overall puts more emphasis on physical humor and the sounds that accompany them. Unlike Chaplin however, he puts almost all his focus on sounds, and is among the first directors to attempt to mesh it with the musical soundtrack that follows. With this movie, he doesn't perfect his skill in the least bit, but it's the beginning of something special between Tati and the camera. His facial expressions and mannerisms are fit for a movie screen, but he just totally lacks the talent to create a coherent story and plot line. Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot is about Tati's character taking a vacation and eventually creating chaos amongst the environment around him. That's pretty much about it, the rest of the movie focuses on the pratfalls and gags created by Tati. They are hit-and-miss, but like in a old-school Napoleon Dynamite style, they totally fail to enhance the story or move the plot along; resulting in the audience being at a standstill. What makes this in the least bit superior to Napoleon is that the setting is a character, and one that's actually desirable. Instead of the dull, boring, lifeless Montana, we have the beachside, which provides beautiful cinematography and relaxing scenery. Tati's advantage over Chaplin is that he has the beautiful Europe to draw influence from. Tai enjoys creating a deep setting that the audience can just step into with no trouble at all, and he accomplishes this easily within the first five minutes; a craft he perfects with his later films like Playtime and Mon Oncle. Mon Oncle would be him at his peak; as he combined great visuals with great music, decent sounds, good acting, and a fun little story that actually keeps the audience interested. The biggest issue I have with Tati is his inability to move the story and stretching his films as long as possible. Most of his movies can be 30-minute short films easily, but he chooses to continue stretching, stretching, throwing long shots, repetitive gags, and boring boring moments that suck away at your life and overall the quality of the film. Like almost all his movies, this one relies on short, ADD-like gags that are all visual and lack edge, lack intelligence. They don't say much about the characters, they are more like pawns in a chess game being moved around to make something funny. You could replace any person with any celebrity or historical figure and the results are remotely the same; there are no personality clashes, it's just people running into people and doing things to other people accidentally or not by accident. Kind of like what Sex and the City does to New York, the setting and atmosphere becomes a character itself and interacts with everyone. Bottom Line: Tati is good at making eye candy, but a sugar-coated piece of trash is still a piece of trash, no matter what you do with it, no matter how much you sprinkle. This movie doesn't entertain, doesn't really change the way you see movies; actually doesn't accomplish anything except prove that Tati knows how to manipulate space and…and…and…wait..that's it. There's not much more to say about this movie except…avoid. Avoid. He knows how to incorporate sound, but what good will that do if you have a stupid story to tell?

I had the profound misfortune to see this movie, in a theatre with a large audience (a good thing), directly after watching a pristine print of Keaton's "The General" that had the most perfect soundtrack a silent film could ever want. My friend's and I squirmed and struggled to sit through the entire labored effort of Hulot's holiday, and the forced comparison between a truly great film and Tati's movie could not have been more painfully obvious. Honestly, even Jerry Lewis' plot less films are more interesting, more funny, and thankfully shorter than this film. And recently I found more laughs and more sensitive cinematography in Harry Langdon's commercial failure "Three's A Crowd". I have to quote another reviewer, who comes right out and states it: "Tati is good at making eye candy, but a sugar-coated piece of trash is still a piece of trash, no matter what you do with it."

The measure of a good film, like a good painting, book or any other work of art, is its ability to draw you back time after time. I first saw M Hulot's Holiday more years ago than I care to remember and loved it immediately. The humour is gentle (it's not a laugh-a-minute riot) with superbly crafted scenes such as a tyre's inner tube transforming into a wreath interposed between the on-going observational humour as portrayed by the strolling husband and wife. Seeing it again for the umpteenth time it's as fresh as the first time I saw it. In fact having lived in France for the best part of two years it appears even funnier now that it did before, something which, no doubt, reflects my own observations of the French way of life.

It doesn't matter if you're British, not French : all the holidays of our childhoods were like this. Clear, unbroken skies, relatively empty beaches, chaos at the railway station, half the people acting strangely, the other half unyieldingly the same. There are two points where I laughed uncontrollably for several minutes, and that's more than in most films these days ! The rest is beautifully observed and more quietly funny, although Tati's use of sound can get a little irritating. And, yes, there were a number of versions of the film as Tati added bits over the years : for instance, the 'Jaws' sequence was added after Spielberg's film was released.

"Monsieur Hulot's Holiday" (literally "The Vacation of M. Hulot") For me, one sign of a great movie is when scenes are so unforgettable that they replay again and again in my mind. By that standard, "M. Hulot's Holiday" is the funniest movie of all time. I saw this movie soon after it first appeared in the USA (1953) and thought at the time it would become a classic. Since then, the projector in my mind has replayed so many scenes so often that in the replaying it's grown even more hilarious. From time to time, when I see it again, each time I realize that -- as funny as the original is -- it has that rare quality of planting seeds that grow and blossom in my memory even more. Looking for the end on a tangled garden hose always replays M. Hulot's experience with the garden sprinkler. There is very little plot beyond 'what I did on my summer vacation' -- but there doesn't need to be. Throughout the movie from time to time we see an elderly couple who stroll, observing the follies, eccentricities, normalities, of the behaviors of people on their summer vacations. This film's perspective is that we are similar to them, strolling, observing -- and as if the film's opening and close coincide with the beginning and end of the traditional French August vacation. I've also seen Jacque Tati's "Mon Oncle" several times; while it's good, to me it's several magnitudes lower than 'Holiday.' I look forward to seeing "Playtime" with the sure knowledge that nothing can top "M. Hulot's Holiday." But as with all humor, different folk like different flavors. This film's flavor is generally slightly dry with a few wet spots. Tati as director observes the usual, the commonplace, the well- meaning and then tweaks it just enough to either make you smile in self- recognition or sometimes snort milk out your nose. His Monsiuer Hulot is a gentle, chivalrous soul, always trying to be helpful although he inadvertently sows occasional chaos in his wake, as if "letting no good deed go unpunished." He's obviously a cousin of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. ETA: I've just read Roger Ebert's review of "M. Hulot's Holiday"; it is superb and I recommend it to all: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/ apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19961110/REVIEWS08/ 401010328/1023 (REMOVE THE 2 SPACES) The "Criterion" DVD version restores many portions that had previously been edited out and is by far the best version to see. Enjoy.