http://criticafterdark.blogspot.com/2007/07/playtime-jacques-tati-1967.html

Excerpt:

Jacques Tati's Playtime is the comic twin brother of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, released a year later. Both are unique visions, arrived at after years of work and elaborate sets (Tati constructed an entire urban center nicknamed 'Tativille' which consisted of glass buildings (one of which contained a fully working escalator), roadways, a power plant, and a traffic signalling system to control it all), and both have as theme the at times antagonistic relationship between man and technology (machines for Kubrick, mostly architecture and design for Tati), and eventual human trancendence.

In 2001 we have brute man discovering technology (promptly taking said technology and bashing a fellow brute's head in), developing it for centuries (the passing of said centuries expressed in a single spectacular cut), ultimately having said technology literally swallow him up, turning him into a machinelike parody of himself. In Playtime Tati echoes that same development, with humans dressed largely in grey or beige, walking in predictable straight lines. In 2001 Kubrick inserts vestiges of lost humanity--banal jokes about chicken sandwiches, an unruly, insistent daughter; in Playtime Tati has a Hulot lookalike drop his umbrella (the clatter rolls across the hall of the indeterminate building (it's only when we see a plane's tailfin do we realize we're in an airport) like a sacrilegious cough).