Reviews

It's not often that I find comedies funny, but this was really amusing.

Every week Mr.Brochant (who works in publishing) and his over class and snobby friends have a dinner party where they all should bring an idiot, whereby they afterward decide who had brought the biggest idiot. (It's worth telling that idiot in this context really means a nerd, someone who can tell for hours about their hobby.) In this manner Mr.Pignon suits very well. Mr.Pignon is a humble and nice man who besides working at the tax office and cheering his favorite team Auxerre, makes models of famous buildings with matches. It's a friend of Mr. Brochant who has "found" Mr.Pignon and tipped Mr.Brochant about him. And to get to know him a bit Mr.Brochant invites him to his place in the hours before the dinner. But hey are denied from going to the dinner because of Mr.Brochant's injured back, but before Mr.Pignon gets to leave the apartment things really start to happen.

At times I felt really sorry for Pignon, like I suppose almost everybody feels, but at the time develops he's getting funnier and funnier in his always failing attempts to help struggling Brochant. It's not overdone (except from a scene in the beginning where another idiot gets his boomerang in his head) and the dialogs are really good and entertaining. Some of the scenes are worth watching over and over, I never stop loving them.

If you don't know french and aren't used to reading subtitles that might be a drawback, but I can highly recommend this movie. It's just lasting 1h20min, which I appreciate. Some movies last too long. If this one was a 2hours-movie things would had to be overdone, but this avoid this trap. Enjoy it!

The good rating this movie has achieved at IMDb is due to the fact that people who choose to watch a Japanese movie from the 50's are capable of appreciating such a movie. In other words...the rating has not been given be a mean of the people.

Personally I can't stand the blockbusters from Hollywood, so in my search for more interesting films I watched this one. I like deep movies, but this one was just too slow. The old man was mumbling the few times he spoke, and unless my subtitles were messing with me he always ended up saying "In other words..." or "What I'm trying to say..." It gave a funny view on the bureaucratism and what life is all about, that must be said, but this is a typical example of a film being overrated just because it's different. Applause for the diversity in the film-making, but this is not worth watching unless you really enjoy the odd stuff.

I rented this film because it had received great reviews by Norwegian newspapers and so on, 5 and 6 eyes of the dice. And further on I thought this film would be typical British in terms of showing how something "exciting" like a sex club could be funny and not exotic at all, like they did in Full Monthy.

The first sign that this wasn't the movie I expected came in the opening where there was a music so depressing that could kill all enthusiasm. And it continued all through the film. After half an hour where we had been shown how miserable this middle-aged lady was and what she was willing to go through to save her grandchild I thought that something was going to happen, that the film would turn around. But it never did. This story could be told in 15 minutes, there is no reason to make it longer than that. You might think that making it as long as it was was to show the depth of the characters and what they went through, but they weren't even close to give this any deeper meaning or emotion. I really think they went too far in describing the misery. For example the behavior of the people in the bank. Nobody in a bank talk to a customer like that, not even close.

And at the sex club they play the one song over and over again, and she's so good jerking them off that they stand in lines so long that they would probably had to wait an hour to be jerked off, and that hour had to be spent in between other horny males...come on, this was so exaggerated and stupid that I was embarrassed.

I could not recommend this movie. Normally I like different and odd films, but this was just dull and depressing without any deeper message.