Funniest movie I've seen in a while

It starts out as a family comedy -- and stays largely comic -- until it stops being comic....

I had the privilege of seeing this with a largely Japanese audience -- and they found much of the first two-thirds of the film funny.

The coming drunk to the daughter's house scene was intended to be comic and is -- and yet Ozu undercuts the humor (and gives us an understanding of the "mean" daughter) when he lets us know (in passing) that she is essentially re-living a trauma that had disturbed and frightened her when she was a child.


MEK

Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.

"Iiih" is equal to 'Yeah' in English.
Informal form of hai (yes).

http://myspace.com/adipocere

you haven't seen many movies, have you big guy?

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The movie reflects a pithy French bromide about life being either too tragic or too droll to know whether to laugh or to cry about it's misadventures. Like the bratty grandchild whistling the title track from John Ford's "Stagecoach" after being childishly psychotic to the indulgently smiling grandmom; or the bemused look on the face of the husband who is at a loss how to get the befuddled Hattori-san and his father-in-law to bed when there's no room and his wife is totally p....d-off; As a creature of black comedy, she's comically hypocritical, ridding herself of her folks and inventing reasons for making them "homeless" for a night, like the beauty-shoppe business event which displaces them from the meagre living space (and the name of her beauty shop was a howler: I forget the name, something cutsey-pie-like, but it was so petit-bourgeois, aping American Babbitt business names) and she is so unsympatico and then again she bursts into tears when her mom dies and then doesn't lose a beat in getting the wardrobe of the deceased (behavior which Kyoko, the youngest offspring, despises) and that is a counter-point to Noriko, the widow of the son killed in the war 8 years earlier and who only accepts the mother's watch from the father-in-law with tears of genuine grief (and she's not blood kin either...). No it's not funny so much as it's a tragic-comedy which life from Ozu's point of view most resembles. We laugh through our tears in the midst of life.

Wow, you're idiocy must be a "cultural difference" for Denmark. You are obviously a failure in your chosen course of study. Maybe you should consider switching majors before you make a complete fool of yourself.

christian-otte:

"when the daughter kept saying "Iiiiiih" to everything that was said to her."

The characters make all sorts of funny noises through out the film, which completely killed the emotional impact for me. The most annoying is the grandfather who talks as if he is on the set of Fargo by the Cohen brothers; at least during the second half of the film, he says "yeeeeeaaaahhhhh" every time he opens his mouth, which becomes so excessive that I felt like laughing hysterically. The grandfather spends the first half of the film saying "hhhhmmmmmmm" every time he opens his mouth, which is also unintentionally funny. There are all sorts of yyyyeeeeeeaaaahhhhhhsssss, hhhhhmmmmmmnnnnsss, aaaaaahhhhhhssss from the actor's mouths that I felt extremely irritated and had the desire to burst out into laughter.

There are other annoying things such as the actors having the same facial expressions in every shot, holding their heads at the same angles every time they are seen by the camera, keeping stupid and artificial grins on their faces through out such as the grandparents, and looking as if they are pieces of stock footage rather than being present on the set.

It takes many kinds of people to make the world go round so ok, it is possible, given the cultural difference, to take a certain kind of attitude and interpret such moments as funny and intended as part of a comedy. Since you are probably quite young and I am sure have never been to Japan (let alone Japan of that era) then it is less surprising that you reacted as you did.

But if you really do study film then I think you would want to at least try to understand the intentions of the film-makers. This film does have some moments that are humorous but it is definitely not a comedy intended to keep people laughing. I hope you go back to the film and try to look at it with a fresh perspective, then maybe you will get something out of it other than laughter.

I thought the constant drug and sex references were intoxicating and why this movie is one of the greatest of all time. I cried during all those funny moments you had with your friends.

My 100 favorite movies http://www.imdb.com/list/Uvw_F2_GMx8/
What are your favorites?