Movies that make you grin, smile or laugh out loud...

[cthulhu]

He was a genius and all his movies are wonderful. Kind of a sad story though that he went bankrupt producing Playtime, because he made all the costly descisions to get his vision on film, like choosing 70mm Film and a very sophisticated 6 channel sound design, not to mention the huge sets being build and he backed it up with his private money and also house i think.
Love all his movies very much the same but my order would be:

Playtime
Trafic
Mon Oncle
Jour de Fete
Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot
Parade

Would be a dream for me to see Playtime in a cinema on 70mm with the 6-channel sound.

[Ghosttrain]

I have never seen Parade....will investigate . saw Jour De Fete many years ago ....shall revisit it again..

[Ghosttrain]

Have done some research on Parade...............jury still out....however have ordered Jour De Fete on DVD...

[cthulhu]

Parade i've only seen once, it's nice and charming and has some great funny scenes in it, but for me it's not a "movie". It is a filmed circus show with Tati or Hulot as the Director in the manege or doing sketches and scenes. Worth watching but not comparable to the movies. Think you will have a great time rewatching jour de fete. It has some special energy in the acting and therefore the action, because Francois, the bicycle-postman, is a total different character than Hulot, who is more observing and subtle.

[Ghosttrain]

Thank you for your reply i think you sum up Parade perfectly and agree with everything you say,i had read about the film and from the verry little avail. i have seen on YouTube it does appear  as you say a series of sketches more than an actual film........i may have to buy it to complete the set...........

Scrub that thought ...............just checked it out on Amazon DVD @ £44.99 ......thanks but no thanks........

[Ghosttrain]

Have just watched Jour De Fete..........wonderful.......

[Master Ray]

OK, I've been trying to think of some comedy movies that are a bit 'under the radar' whether that be from being a huge box office flop, badly distributed or just terribly unfashionable and worth of reappraisal...

Firstly 'Walk Hard - The Dewey Cox Story'.  This one utterly bombed but it might be the funniest film I've seen this decade, a brilliant parody of rock biopics, taking aim at all the clichés of those films and a gag-per-minute ratio as high as anything like airplane or The Naked Gun.  Too many hilarious scenes to name but I did love the bit where 'Dewey' meets The Beatles...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2g_xaVNY9P4

As opposed to that, 'Four Lions' is one of the darkest comedies imaginable yet still manages to have so many big laughs.  A British comedy about suicide bombers, big recipe for laughs, right?  And yet it isn't really political... it's just a movie about some deeply incompetent men who are handed a job and just **** it up throughout.  It's from Chris Morris (The Day Today, Brass Eye), one of my comedy heroes, and I've never seen a movie about a disturbing concept that effortlessly flips between 'chilling' and 'LOL'... and I include 'Doctor Strangelove' in that.  Here's the trailer...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew-SrlQ9tlI

My third and last choice is my very, very favourite film of all time,  'Local Hero', another UK film concerning a man from a big US oil company who is sent to buy up a whole village in Scotland to turn it into an oil refinery... and then falls in love with the place and its people and doesn't want to see it ended... I won't say any more than that before it's gets somewhat more complicated after that. It's a warm and lovely hug of a movie with some great characters, maybe not a relentless laugh-fest but with plenty of chuckles and one that'll make you feel better after watching it.  And such a brilliant soundtrack by Mark Knopfler.  Here's the trailer...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nufb3JysCgY

I'm sure I'll think of a few more soon...

[Ghosttrain]

Totally agree with Walk Hard........excellent film ,i have it on DVD and love it.......

[cthulhu]

I also totally agree with what MR said about Walk Hard, being the funniest Film i've seen in a decade. I've stumbled upon it because of Judd Apatow being a producer and John C. Reilly as the main actor and it's so much more than i thought it was. I hadn't seen Walk The Line, the biopic about Johnny Cash and i still haven't, but expected it to be a spoof of that Film and i found it is so much more. Apatow has produced, written and directed many movies that hit my humour nerve and so i went for it. It is more a display of the music business in general and stardom problems, don't know how to describe it properly, but there are so many hints and hommages to the history of music, just wonderful. And all the songs and music performed in the story, the life of Dewy Cox, are just fantastic and funny and well performed. MR mentioned the Beatles showing up and then there is also this brilliant, funny scene about Brian Wilson loosing his mind while recording Pet Sounds. There is so much depht in it, if you know some of the storys...

And i also agree about Four Lions...hard to imagine a movie like this being made in these times we have now.

Local Hero has been on my wanttowatch list for a long time, haven't seen it yet and but it now also reminds me about another wanttowatch movie i haven't seen, The Long Good Friday:
Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) is a businessman with great ambitions. Spotting the development potential of London s derelict Docklands area years before the Thatcher government, he tries to broker a deal with his American counterpart (Eddie Constantine) that will make them both millions. But who is killing Harold s other associates and blowing up his businesses and why?
Sound slike a kind of similar storyline, but as a thriller, so this one will be for the other thread ;-)

Another comedy movie i love is Superbad
This one also surprised me totally for being not that what i thought it was. I thought it is a stereotype screwball comedy, but the humour and wit in there is just out of range, the acting and performances and the story is just...funny! 

Have just watched Jour De Fete..........wonderful.......

It's a great, great one! I wonder if you would update your list? I know, and i love all of Tati's movies, that a list is almost impossible to do...but now that you've seen it again..? ;-)
 

[Ghosttrain]

List update Jour de Fete in after Playtime and  before Traffic..........

[Master Ray]

cthulhu, The Long Good Friday might also be on my fave movies EVER list... possibly the best British gangster film ever.

And Superbad is, indeed, a very very funny film...

[cthulhu]

cthulhu, The Long Good Friday might also be on my fave movies EVER list... possibly the best British gangster film ever.

And Superbad is, indeed, a very very funny film...

Just found a different edition of The Long Good Friday for a good price and ordered it...


Some more strange, funny, maybe unknown movies:

Le grand soir - by Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern from 2012
The film tells the story of 2 brothers. One punk, one salesman. The salesman get laid off, and slowly becomes a punk like his brother.



The Punk brother in this movie calls himself: Not 


Crimen ferpecto - by Álex de la Iglesia from 2004



Dark also stupid and very funny..



The Science of Sleep - by Michel Gondry from 2006





A very very beautiful, surreal and funny love story and an exploration of subconsciousness..

[Winterwulf]

"The Long Good Friday" is definitely worth watching, though it's not a film that belongs in this thread given how bleak it is - it does capture the grottiness and general run-down feeling of late 1970s Britain very well, and "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" does owe a big debt to it, though the humour and ending in that one does make for a very different type of film.

Going back to funny films, how's about  Weird Al Yankovic's cult classic "UHF" - that's one I thoroughly enjoyed.

[cthulhu]

Yeah, U.H.F is a great parodie movie and so funny, love that very much. Totally over the edge and silly, great timing, cool music parodie videos..Dire Straits Money fo Nothing/Berverly Hillbillies...and all the movie parodies...made a picture from my mediabook



And the Rambo parodie is so excellently done, the special effects/the mask is a masterpiece and this could never have been achieved with cgi.


If you liked Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas by Terry Gilliam from 1998, you must check out:

Where the Buffalo Roam - by Art Linson 1980



The film was scored by Neil Young, who sings the opening theme, "Home on the Range" (from which the film derives its title), accompanied by a harmonica. Variations on "Home on the Range" are played by Young on electric guitar as "Ode to Wild Bill" and by an orchestra with arrangements by David Blumberg on "Buffalo Stomp". Music in the film included rock and R&B songs by Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, The Temptations, the Four Tops and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Additionally, characters played by Bill Murray and René Auberjonois sing lyrics from "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

Because of the high cost of music licensing, most VHS and all DVD releases retained only the Neil Young score and the Creedence song "Keep on Chooglin'", with the rest of the music replaced by generic approximations of the original songs. The choice of songs for the DVD version was somewhat anachronistic, featuring 1980s-style songs in a 1960s and 1970s setting.

In 2017, Shout! Factory released a Blu-ray edition restoring the original songs, making this the first home media version since the original VHS release to feature a completely unaltered soundtrack.

[Winterwulf]

Thinking about cult comedy films with great soundtracks, there's one comes to mind - "Restless Natives".  Great Scottish film from the mid-1980s, quite a few well--known actors with cameos in it (Billy Connoly, Mel Smith, and Bernard Hill)  with a wonderful soundtrack from Big Country, but thanks to legal squabbles over the rights it was all but impossible to find for years. I think it has finally had a DVD release though!!