Mel Brooks

  • Life Stinks (1991)

    Life Stinks (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2020) In Mel Brooks’ filmography, Life Stinks is clearly the odd one out—it’s still a comedy, but in a more restrained tone than his other film parodies, and it’s substantially more socially conscious as well. Taking well-worn tropes for another spin, it features Brooks as a billionaire who bets that he can live as a homeless man for 30 days. Except that there are corporate shenanigans afoot to deprive him of his fortune, and life on Skid Row isn’t quite as easy as what he expected. While a welcome break from expectations, this film (Brook’s second-least-popular, after The Twelve Chairs) doesn’t quite succeed at its own objectives. Roughly two-thirds of the film is conventionally made with big great guideposts to tell us where it’s going. That part stops once the protagonist gets his psychotic break—but what follows is markedly worse, as the film abandons even the fantasy grip it held on reality and goes for overblown set-pieces that actively grow irritating. While it’s fun to see Jeffrey Tambor play the villain, and have the lovely Lesley Ann Warren as the love interest, Life Stinks loses its way somewhere, and doesn’t break new ground in being socially conscious of homelessness. (There’s a tension between the tragedy of being stuck in the street and Brook’s intention to deliver a comedy about it that never gets fully resolved.) Brooks himself does have a few good moments as actor, but the rest of the film is definitely more miss than hit. While the effort to do something new is laudable, Life Stinks doesn’t quite land.

  • Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2017)

    Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2020) The story of how a beautiful movie star invented Wi-Fi is now well-known enough to be part legend and part truth. While Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story helps detail much of what happened, it does err a bit too much on putting the modern foundations of western civilization on Lamarr’s shoulders. Much of the film is about Lamarr becoming a movie star—her early career in Europe, immigration to the United States, success as an actress, and the legendary beauty that opened up many doors, whether they were professional or romantic. Since Bombshell is a hagiography, it doesn’t really mention how Lamarr’s films have not endured—Like Brigitte Bardot, she’s a movie star whose individual films aren’t that good, and unlike Bardot, she doesn’t have a signature film that people can point to and say, “This is what Lamarr was about.” Still, Lamarr was reasonably popular during World War II and if her life had been limited to her filmography, she still would have been an interesting topic for a film. But there’s more, obviously—thanks to contacts in the arms-dealing world (via her then-husband) and a musician friend, she co-patented a technique to hop between frequencies. This concept eventually became a building block for a host of later radio technologies, including the modern Wi-Fi protocol. Since Bombshell is all about Lamarr, it does draw a very thick, short and exaggerated line from Lamarr’s idea to modern-day Wi-Fi routers, ignoring the smorgasbord nature of technological development. The beauty-with-the-brain story is too hard to resist, though, and so is the tragically-victimized-woman narrative. In the third act of the film, we go over Lamarr’s less-than-impressive decline over the next five decades—how she married six times, wasn’t able to successfully transition away from the bombshell movie persona and how she eked a meagre living in difficult circumstances. The film definitely soft-pedals Lamarr’s increasing litigiousness and crankiness in later years, as well as her penchant for petty crimes such as shoplifting—although, amusingly, one of the targets of her lawsuits, Mel Brooks, ends up delivering one of her strongest defences when interviewed for the film. Still, Bombshell is equally dedicated to making a saint out of its oppressed heroine, blaming society-at-large for her use of drugs, her poverty, and her increasing obscurity until she and her achievements were essentially rediscovered during the 1990s. (Makes sense: I first heard about Lamarr in 1996 when her portrait won a CorelDraw contest—something that led to another lawsuit.) At the very least, Bombshell lays out the three main poles of interest in Lamarr’s life in compelling fashion, with several interviewees, including Peter Bogdanovich, Jeanine Basinger, Robert Osborne, her children and Lamarr herself in archival footage. It’s informative, compelling, emotional, somewhat authentic and filled with good archival footage. It’s, in other words, most of what you need to know about her. Where I’ll diverge from the usual good words, however, is in regretting that writer-director Alexandra Dean took the easy hagiographic way to cover the material, going for the cheap yet unarguable “genius woman underestimated because of her good looks” tragedy angle when there’s a lot of material unsaid or unexplored that would make this a more complex tale. But no—Lamarr is at the centre of the universe in Bombshell, so much so that it’s a wonder she’s not portrayed installing home routers.

  • Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)

    Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, In French, On Cable TV, December 2019) I’m not a big fan of late-period Mel Brooks and Leslie Nielsen played in some remarkable stinkers outside of The Naked Gun series between 1990 and 2001. Given those biases, you can accurately predict my tepid reaction to Dracula: Dead and Loving It. An obvious spoof of the film adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it strips down the plot to its barest essential, then adds gags as it goes. While the obvious inspiration is the 1931 Bela Lugosi film (“I never drink wine … oh, what the hell. Let me try it.”), there are obvious pokes here and there at 1922’s Nosferatu, 1967’s The Fearless Vampire Killers and 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And while (as someone who’s seen those Dracula movies in the past year or so), there’s something intriguing in seeing the Dracula story boiled down to its essence before, I’m not so happy with the comedy aspect. Dracula: Dead and Loving It simply feels laborious most of the time. In Brooksian fashion, the humour is basic, but the worst part of it is that it’s usually telegraphed well in advance and keeps going long after the humour has faded away. Predictability and insistence are not qualities that mesh well with humour, and one of the big surprises of comparing this film with other spoof comedies is how it feels far less dense with jokes than the better examples of the form. (At least it’s better than the non-funny Friedberg/Seltzer spoofs of the 2000s, although that’s not saying much.)  Still, let’s allow for some leeway: As I’m checking quotes from the film, I’m finding that the movie is far funnier on the page in its original form than on the French dub—this doesn’t change my mind about the pacing and predictability of the film, but it gets an extra point or two for the actual jokes. The other thing is that despite the film’s low budget, there’s a pleasant Victorian atmosphere to the proceedings—the sets and costumes are nice and it surely helps that there’s a lot of cleavage on display from nearly every female character. Then there’s Leslie Nielsen (as Dracula) and Mel Brooks (as Van Helsing) trying to out-ham each other, which is not all that bad. Still, Dracula: Dead and Loving It feels like it squanders a lot of its assets—but, of course, it’s late-period Mel Brooks, so what did we expect?

  • History of the World: Part I (1981)

    History of the World: Part I (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2018) Ugh. There was a time in my life when I rather liked Mel Brooks’ later phase (i.e.: Anything past the mid-seventies) satirical comedy. I still think fondly of Spaceballs despite a strong suspicion that I like it because of Star Wars more than anything else. A recently re-watch of Robin Hood: Men in Tights, however, had me severely downgrading the film. With History of the World: Part I, I have to face the facts: More of Brooks’s wild comedy is a miss rather than a hit. Oh, I still like bits and pieces of it. The fourth-wall-breaking is fun, the Busby-Berkley-inspired music number is a really good and I really can’t fault Madeline Khan in anything. But the rest of the film … oy vey. It really starts on the wrong foot with a caveman sequence going straight for lower-common denominator stuff, and much the rest of the film seldom rises above that level. Jokes are regularly run into the ground, the humour is usually puerile and the production values (at the notable exception of the musical number) look as if few people actually cared. It shoots in all direction but only manages to hit a few targets. I’m not sure what happened in the late seventies for Brooks’s stuff to fall so flat, but we’re stuck with the results.

  • The Producers (1967)

    The Producers (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) Being a modern moviegoer taking a look at the classics can lead to blasphemous statements, so here goes: I like the remake of The Producers better than the original. Once you get your rage out of your system, consider this: The original Mel Brooks version of The Producers is scattershot—it aims in all directions, occasionally hitting a bullseye and occasionally firing off in the air. The real highlight of this original production only comes after an hour of various nonsense—it’s really good once the stage musical begins and we get to see the insanity of a camp version of Hitler. In the meantime (and afterwards), The Producers is duller than expected. In contrast, the remake version doesn’t quite capture the stage musical in its unhinged glory, but has a much stronger first and third act, with more memorable supporting characters and a stream of musical numbers throughout. Yeah, I’ll take the remake if only for Uma’s Ulla. Still, preferring the remake over the fifty-year-old original shouldn’t take away from the qualities of the original. As stated, the original has a much stronger musical sequence. It also benefits from Gene Wilder and (to a lesser extent) Zero Mostel in the lead roles. There’s also a definite shock quality to the original that can’t be properly appreciated by modern audiences—although it can be felt secondhand from some reactions baked in the film itself. Remake aside, The Producers remains a film that can be readily watched even today without trouble … but it is definitely of its time, from a writer/director making his debut. Influential, but since then supplanted by a much slicker (and focused) remake. Considering that Brooks himself wrote much of the remake, that’s not that much of a blasphemous statement.

  • Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

    Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On TV, March 2017) Hmmm. My memories of Robin Hood: Men in Tights weren’t particularly good to begin with, but revisiting the movie more than twenty years later doesn’t do it any favour. The only reason why I’m not incensed about it is that there’s been plenty of terrible spoofs since then, even if you mercifully forget all about the Friedberg/Seltzer abominations. The truth is, Mel Brooks has a few unfortunate tendencies and while his best movies manage to avoid them, they’re nearly all on display in Men in Tights. The worst has to be a directorial vision that allows characters to mug for the camera, fully cognizant that they’re in a dumb comedy. That’s how we get quizzical glances, broad self-aware performances, pauses for laughter and blatant hamming. See, I’m funny! Is the unspoken assertion here, allowing viewers to shout back, “No, you’re not!” It harms the film even more when the pacing is slack enough to anticipate the next joke—the best spoofs usually move along at rocket pacing, layering jokes in background and almost never letting the audience in on the jokes. Here, there are basically honking signals, spotlights and subtitles to point viewers at the humour. Brooks himself shows up in a self-congratulatory sequence that quickly turns unbearable. Cary Elwes was a good choice for Robin Hood given a pedigree that included The Princess Bride … unless you’ve just watched The Princess Bride and was reminded of a kind of brilliance so lacking here. Isaac Hayes and Dave Chapelle do okay with what they’re given, but the only actors who escape from the mess with some decency are Roger Rees as the sheriff (hamming it up like Alan Rickman, but not mugging for laughs as terribly as other actors) and Amy Yasbeck, whose red mane is a compelling character in her own right. On the big scale of spoof comedies, the bottom has been lowered time and time again by Friedberg/Seltzer, and if Men in Tights is quite a bit better than those (by sheer virtue of actually attempting jokes), it’s still mediocre compared to the ZAZ classics or even Brooks” best. It should do if all you’re looking for is an amusing evening film, but given that my low expectations weren’t even met, I’d hazard that you’d be better off watching or re-watching other spoofs instead.

  • Young Frankenstein (1974)

    Young Frankenstein (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, November 2001) Alas, years of ever-heightened comic pacing have not been kind to this satire of the first two Frankenstein films. (Which you should see in order to get a few scenes, most notably the blind man sequence.) The jokes come too slow, and sometime feel too forced. Fortunately, the actors pretty much earn our sympathy early on, and help considerably in enjoying the picture. (Particular wows go to Teri Garr, whose luscious Inga steals the show. “Vould you like a roll in ze hay? It’s fun! Roll! Roll!”) Mel Brooks fans will love it: the overall pacing is a lot like Blazing Saddles. The DVD features quite a few deleted scenes (justifiably cut for pacing, but they explain a lot. The “intellectual discussion” should have been kept in the film.) and a good making-of documentary that benefits from a comfortably-distant perspective.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, March 2020) There are plenty of reasons why Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein is a great comedy that appreciates with time (I certainly like it a lot more now than in 2001), but my favourite one is that every top-billed actor in the movie goes all-out. Everyone has a memorable quirk to play, everyone has a few great scenes, and everyone gets to highlight something that makes them special — whether it’s Peter Boyle’s bulk, Marty Feldman’s bulging eyes, Cloris Leachman’s scenery chomping or Teri Garr and Madeline Khan’s gift for sexy comedy. And then there’s Gene Wilder (who co-write the script) – playing a neurotic character with carefully-studied cracks allowing a glimpse into the madness underneath. Better yet is that this terrific troupe of comic actors is finely controlled: unlike other Brooks films, Brooks-the-director finely keeps a handle on how to execute Brooks-the-co-writer’s script, and even keeps Brooks-the-actor from showing up. This gives to the film a deliberate nature that often feels missing from other Brooks film that never quite know when enough is enough – this one gets its laughs in, but doesn’t belabour the point. The laughs in Young Frankenstein are not always simple – a mixture of double-entendres, ironic riffs on overblown overacting, eye-rollingly dumb gags and a sophisticated pastiche of an earlier filmmaking era. The production means of the film are surprisingly good, which adds to the high comedy of the whole. Young Frankenstein is an incredibly slick production, and it’s hard to imagine it could be funnier.