Tockinit not horrible nor great

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

ActuallyGlimmer The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

MartinHafer squeaky shoes, drawers, carts, etc. much like "The Artist" minimal dialogPierre Étaix co-directed one of Jacques Tati's great hits, "Mon Oncle" and I noticed that many folks think his style is very close to Tati's--which it is. However, and this is very important, if you don't like Tati's film, you'll probably not be particularly fond of "Yoyo". The film looks a bit like the recent film "The Artist" combined with Tati as well as Chaplin. Many love this, it's true. I didn't. I just felt that the pacing was extremely slow and the film lacked energy and fun.The film begins with a bored, rich guy (Pierre Étaix) in a huge house. He seems to have no interest in anything and eventually you learn it's because he's lost his love--a woman who ran off to be in the circus. This portion of the film is very much like a silent film--with very little dialog and VERY over-exaggerated sound effects. I thought it rather annoying when you hear almost explosively loud squeaking shoes and sliding drawers. It was supposed to be funny...it wasn't. When the stock market crashes in 1929, the bored rich guy sells off the contents of his house and goes in search of this lady love. They meet and tour the country entertaining--along with her son (the rich guy now realizes he has a kid), Yoyo. Yoyo is a small and very talented clown and when he grows, he is ALSO played by Étaix. He moves back into the empty mansion and restores it to its old glory--but eventually it turns out he's pretty bored and the home is emotionally empty.If you like mimes and Jacques Tati, then by all means watch this film. Otherwise, for me, it just wasn't particularly interesting. While it had some very nice sight gags, I just didn't care one bit about the characters--a serious flaw.

gerroll While Tati seemed to love performers this film abuses them, its seriously unfunny. The actors are fine but they are treated shoddily. The film maker seems to want to denigrate live performers. It's inventiveness is not enough salvage it's integrity.. Check out any Tati movie and compare the framing the narrative and the characterization to appreciate how trite this film is by comparison. Oddly it was made AFTER Tati's heyday. One would hope something had been learned. French satire by its very nature is somewhat lame, but this is embarrassing. It's as though Germany had won in 1871 and infected European story telling.

fergus-stewart I remember in 1965 seeing a clip of this movie on TV the week it came out. It featured a rich woman being driven slowly round the square by her chauffeur and 'walking' her dog by sitting in the back of the limousine with her dog on a lead to the pavement. That quirky and humorous image stuck in my impressionable young head and I promised myself I would go and see it when it came to the local cinema. Needless to say, it never did and it has never been on TV or DVD that I'm aware of.I'm still waiting...This is so often the case in the UK. I am a huge fan of Japanese cinema but most of the movies reviewed highly on sites like Midnight Eye never get over here. Are subtitles so unbearable to UK moviegoers? We lap up some of the tripe from Hollywood but anything where English is not the main language really struggles. One thing is for sure, most of the challenging and original stuff is not coming from Los Angeles.

B-rapunSaario *I'm afraid I can't avoid spoilers in this review.I was rather surprised there were no comments posted on this movie. Not many people seem to have seen "Yoyo" nowadays. It is a pity, as I find it a significant one, working on many levels. The director, Pierre Étaix, obviously fancied circus as an art form, but he really kept the circus performances to the minimum in this movie. The movie concentrates on the things the life as a touring circus artist represents; Simple, but free way of living. The movie shows us the development from silent movies to the television era. The first half an hour is silent apart from special sound effects. In my opinion, this is the best part of the movie. It makes fun of the life of the materially fortunate, and some of the scenes are absolutely hilarious, with a whole bunch of servants pretending to take their jobs seriously and their master pretending to enjoy his pointless life.The second part of the movie is no longer silent. It concentrates on Yoyo, the son of the rich man of the first part. Yoyo has spent his childhood in a circus group. He unfortunately sees only the glamor of his father's life and ends up searching happiness from wealth and materia. In the third part, in the television era, we see Yoyo's disappointment to the conventional life of the upper class. The circle of life has been completed, as the son has repeated his father's mistakes and ended up in the situation his father was in at the start of the movie. The simple but emotional (sad) story and the development of movie as an art form, already form an interesting and meaningful entity. But there is more to this movie.The pace of the movie is quite fast, but what really keep the spectator focused are the ubiquitous gags. Nothing really spectacular is seen, but the number and the good taste of the jokes create a warm and amusing atmosphere. Both sad and funny, both light and meaningful, "Yoyo" is a movie for everyone. I'd say the only real problem is the slight loss of integrity towards the end of the film. "Yoyo" definitely deserves more attention.