GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Asad Almond A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

jwvongoethe1800 On the 28th of December 1895, history was written. In the basement of a café in Paris, about 30 people witness the worlds first film screening by the Lumière brothers with their Cinématographe. This short is one of ten shorts shown on that day.It has a 45 second running time so the plot is simple: A gardener is using his garden-hose, when a boy starts standing on the hose. While checking what happened, the boy stands of the hose, allowing the water to spry the gardener wheat. The slapstick comedy in this film is funnier that in your average Adam Sandler film, and this film is 119 years old.It is the birth of cinema and comedy in one. The starting point of the reason why this site exist.

F Gwynplaine MacIntyre I had read descriptions of this movie at least 20 years before I first saw it; inevitably, the movie is a disappointment. Actually, the Lumiere Brothers made at least two different versions of this movie, in different locations with different casts. Its title is usually given in English as 'Watering the Gardener'. This 1895 effort is the earlier version.SPOILERS COMING. A gardener is using a hosepipe to water the garden. A boy sneaks up behind him and treads on the hose, shutting off the flow. The gardener, of course, peers directly into the empty nozzle to see what's wrong. Cue the boy to lift his foot, restoring the flow and soaking the gardener. Spotting the fleeing boy, the gardener catches him and spanks him.This movie is often cited as the very first film comedy, and it surely qualifies as one of the very earliest. When I'd first read about it, I visualised the boy as being about seven or eight years old at most. In this film (both versions I've seen), he's clearly at least twelve: really too old to be engaged in this sort of mischief ... and spanking a boy of that age is not so much punitive as something else altogether.I was vaguely intrigued that the hosepipe in this movie is made of some material which causes it to kink into sections rather than flex uniformly. Gutta-percha, perhaps?The Lumiere brothers' very earliest movies were simply filmed events: documentary footage. Although this movie's action has clearly been staged for the camera, it's still historically significant as an early attempt to tell a story in the cinema medium rather than merely record events. For that reason, I'll rate this crude soaker 10 out of 10.

José Luis Rivera Mendoza (jluis1984) On December 28, 1895, thirty-three people were witnesses of history being written as the very first audience of the Lumières' Cinématographe, an innovative device that was able to project motion pictures on a screen. Motion pictures were not new for the people gathered on at Paris's Salon Indien Du Grand Café that day, as Edison's Kinetoscope (the "Peep Show") was a popular form of entertainment; however, nobody in the room was prepared to see the images projected on the screen to move as unlike the Kinetoscope, the Cinématographe allowed the movies to be seen by an audience. 10 short films shot by August and Louis Lumière were shown that historic day, most of them depicting everyday scenes like people walking out of the Lumière factory or playing cards, but one among those 10 short films was different: "L' Arroseur Arrosé", the first comedy film."L' Arroseur Arrosé", literally ("The Sprinkler Sprinkled"), is basically about a practical joke committed by a mischievous boy (Benoît Duval) to annoy a Gardener (François Clerc) who is working with his plants in Lyons. The movie begins with the Gardener watering his vegetables when the boy steps on the hose he is using to water the plants. The Gardener is surprised as the water stops flowing so he inspects the nozzle to find out what's happening. As he checks it, the boy releases the hose and the water continues flowing, spraying the gardener as it comes out of the hose with strength. Surprised by this, the Gardener quickly realizes that he's been tricked, but the boy responsible escapes running away in order to avoid being caught. The Gardener decides to chase the boy in order to punish him for his actions.When compared to the other 9 movies shown on that first screening, "L' Arroseur Arrosé" always stand out as it was remarkably different from any of the other movies in the sense that it wasn't an "actuality film", but the very first staged fictional comedy shot on film. The Lumière brothers had a preference for documentaries (actuality films) as they weren't really interested in other uses for their invention besides the scientific documentation of real life events; so it is because of this reason that the creation of "L' Arroseur Arrosé" is truly a real oddity among Lumières' movies. Anyways, not only is this movie special for those reasons, it is also one of the best looking of the 10 (and one that has survived almost intact to this date), with the brothers showing a great early use of cinematography to frame the film.In its barely 50 seconds of duration, "L' Arroseur Arrosé", opened the way to slapstick and pantomime in film, as the movie showed that it was possible to use the new invention to make pure entertainment, and that there was an extremely high unused potential in the Cinématographe. It wouldn't be too far of a stretch to claim that comedy films were born in this movie. While the reasons behind the inclusion of this film among 9 documentaries is odd, it was quite probably that this was the film that inspired a notable member of that first audience to make fictional movies aimed to entertain: Georges Méliès, who would later become a famous filmmaker on his own (and would direct a remake of this very film too). 9/10

Snow Leopard This Lumière classic would always be worth seeing simply for its significance as a pioneering effort in using motion pictures to tell a fictional story. It also retains its interest as a brief but amusing story in itself, which sticks in your mind despite its simplicity.The old practical joke with the hose, which forms the premise of "L'arroseur arrosé", is one familiar to almost everyone, since we've all either played it on someone or had it played on us. Maybe that's one reason why, as light as it is, this works pretty well despite the relatively simple technique. Another reason is that the opening situation is set up well, establishing a peaceful scene of a man watering his garden, before the main action begins.For such an early effort, it's carried off quite well. Once the action gets going, you can see that the actors are a bit self-conscious of the camera's location, and there are a couple of brief awkward moments as a result. The man playing the gardener, though, is very believable in his responses to the situation. And anyway, this little movie is almost beyond a critique, in view of its good-natured energy, not to mention all of the later ideas that grew out of this simple footage.