Playtime
Gothamist was kind enough to distract me into seeing Jacques Tati's Playtime at Walter Reade Theater on Wednesday. It had been years since I had first seen it, on VHS, and I immediately bought two tickets for the final showing at Lincoln Center. I was really psyched about this screening, as I had almost forgotten about the film, and the new print is spectacular -- a far cry from the crappy VHS transfer I had seen back when I first moved to the city.
Riding the uptown train, I tried to recall some of the film's best moments. Playtime is the kind of movie you finish watching and immediately tell yourself always to remember how totally brilliant it was, but there's so much to remember that all you walk away with is a sense of its massive scale and hilarious detail. I was thrilled to discover just how little of it I did remember; I might watch Playtime a thousand times and still not pick up the all the delightfully still passages, the chaotic crescendos, or the squishy vinyl chair references. It was a great experience to be able to watch Tati bumble around with 268 of my closest friends.
Playtime is mind-blowingly excellent, and retains a fresh sense of modern delirium even today, three decades after Tati first blew six million Francs on what was, at the time, a gorgeous commercial failure. The new Janus print is fantastic; hopefully they'll have a good reissue of the Criterion Collection DVD soon.
Posted by tangentialist at January 7, 2005 06:08 PM | more tangentialism
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