Mel Brooks: Search and Destroy

It was so sweet, wasn't it?

Slowly making my way through the box set. The recent chat with Cavett is probably the highlight, so so very hilarious.

Watched "Robin Hood: Men in Tights" for the first time the other day since I saw it in a theater when it came out. It was pretty bad. Sometimes it felt like there were 10 minute stretches between jokes. At one point they have a blind man falling and injuring himself AND THAT IS THE JOKE! He's blind! Pretty cruel.

Still, the song is funny (not the embarrassing rap that opens the movie, the title song) and the casting was totally brilliant (Cary Elwes! David Chapelle! Isaac Hayes! Richard Lewis!) but where are the jokes?

I had a similar experience with Silent Movie last night. I remembered liking it when it came out, I even swiped a lobby card (I had a crush on Bernadette Peters.) But I tried watching last night and I couldn't even make it to her appearance. So slow, and the sight gags (such as they are) are so bad: a pregnant woman gets in the back of his car and the front wheels tip up. A Schezhuan restaurant with patrons breathing smoke. Seemingly endless, noisy slapstick with the three leads in clanking suits of armor...

i saw a few minutes again on TCM in December, and i laffed at the Szechuan gag.

as Mel has said, thgese films were meant to be watched in a theater, like all broad comedies. (silent esp)

(i will not argue that MB's filmic peak was long tho. The Producers thru Young Frkstein.)

Can we all agree that The Producers is pure genius? Because carping and caviling at it would only reveal an unbecoming pettiness in the carper.

history of the world part 1 is probably my favorite movie of all time

GIVE TO OEDIPUS
HEY JOSEPHUS!
HEY MOTHERFUCKER!

90 today. He and Reiner are gonna keep going til these bits are chronologically accurate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOTKDgrdvdg

welp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwuEAE83DjY

lol dang No Fear Mel Brooks

fwiw the Marine Band played "Springtime for Hitler" at this.

(yr Trump joke here)

I didn't know til I watched The Producers' DVD supplements this weekend that right after WWII Mel worked as a gofer for a Broadway producer who inspired Max Bialystock. The guy would shtup his little old lady backers in his office, and they would leave checks made out to "Cash." God bless America.

http://www.broadwayworld.com/board/readmessage.php?thread=931638#2936102

@MelBrooks
To the @latimes - shame on you for eliminating daily coverage of horse racing (the sport of kings!) from your newspaper.

Mel Brooks appears in "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast" which is hosted by Carl Reiner and is an optimistic documentary about aging. With Betty White, Patricia Morrison, Normal Lear, Dick Van Dyke and others. It's good stuff

*Norman Lear

ICYMI, RIP composer John Morris

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/obituaries/john-morris-composer-for-mel-brookss-films-dies-at-91.html

also a good story about The Elephant Man, Lynch, and "Adagio for Strings" in there

“I know how to write tunes,” he said in an interview he recorded in 2009 with one of his granddaughters, Hayley Morris. “All I have to do is think Johannes Brahms. And I know what Brahms does. I know how he wrote, and you just do what he does and you’re in business.”

Watched Silent Movie possibly for the first time since summer of '76 yesterday. I think it's clearly the point where Mel, coming off his best-directed film (YF), began to go downhill. He plays the lead for the first time, and while he's generally OK, everything else suffers a bit. While his percentage is always uneven, about 30% of the gags here are funny, another 30% "cute," and 40% just kinda lie there (ie the James Caan melon balls episode, which i'm sure read funnier). Bernadette Peters is criminally wasted.

On the bright side, Anne Bancroft's tango sequence is funnier than anything she got to do in To Be or Not to Be, Burt Reynolds' ego sendup is a hoot, and Fritz ("POP") Feld is onscreen way more than I remembered as the maitre d'. And Sid Caesar can do no wrong. Harold Gould and Ron Carey are also a pretty decent slapstick duo.

It's hard to believe Brooks didn't initially want music; John Morris elevates the picture greatly.

about 30% of the gags here are funny, another 30% "cute," and 40% just kinda lie there.

oh yeah, History is much worse.

basically, after his Caesar writing career, Mel's peak is 1960-74 (2000 Year Old Man thru Young Frankenstein)

Yeah, I’d go along with that. I have fond memories of High Anxiety and To Be Or Not To Be, but I haven’t seen either of those in years. And I was never able to make it through more than 30 minutes — tops — of Spaceballs and everything that followed.

As Gene said to Mel, "The trouble is, you destroy the 4th wall, even when you are trying not to"

Basically I think it’d be foolish at this point in my life to go back and watch any of his movies. They had their moment in my life and would only diminish upon fresh view. (It happened with even YF last time I watched it.)

The Twelve Chairs is the only one that I can rewatch these days.

I'm finding them (pre-History) reasonably fun to rewatch, partly because at least half the gags are about old movies/music that almost no one under 45 would get now. And on PC grounds (the 2000 YO Man records included), forget it.

Eric otm this is not the kinda thing that holds my attention if I go back to it

Spaceballs is pretty funny but it's also pretty stupid and pretty cheap-looking. The highlights are the Dark Helmet/Colonel Sandurz. The Producers, Young Frankenstein, and Blazing Saddles still hold up for me. HOTW1 was never much of a movie, maybe there were some solid gags but damned if i can remember a single one.

The Twelve Chairs is the only one that I can rewatch these days.

It's clearly a film made before "A Mel Brooks Film" was a distinct thing, and that's definitely part of its success.

This is covertly my way of saying that I will hold fast to my beliefs that History of the World, Part One and Silent Movie are both very funny movies by never watching them again.

And, unlike Morbs, I have no interest in making "before PC culture took over" an evaluative benefit.

I didn't, necessarily. (There are at least 5 gay panic jokes in Silent Movie.)

Mel does, however.

thread revive had me worried

HOTW1 was never much of a movie, maybe there were some solid gags but damned if i can remember a single one.

oh come on, i can think of at least fifteen ten examples

HOTW1 was never much of a movie, maybe there were some solid gags but damned if i can remember a single one.

That's nuts! N-V-T-S nuts!

screw the poor

or is it fuck the poor? i forget

i felt sorry for Sid Caesar during the caveman segment

Even though Gregory Hines addressing Oedipus with, "Hey, motherfucker!" was absurdly spelled out, I still chuckled.

Everything Madeline Kahn does in HOTWP1 is solid gold.

i've always sorta understood why ppl hate spaceballs but 1) i grew up with it and am incapable of disliking it 2) it's an oddly prescient film

moichandising!

i've always sorta understood why ppl hate spaceballs but 1) i grew up with it and am incapable of disliking it 2) it's an oddly prescient film

i kind of feel unless you love star wars you can't love spaceballs. it's no great feat of filmmaking, but not bad as a 90 minute Mad parody on the big screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvMG5U3TJnk

^That's a funny scene. Weird that Mel didn't put Howard Morris, a colleague from the Caesar shows, in his films until High Anxiety.

The only scene that stood out for me in Spaceballs was Mel/Yoda hawking toys.

Happy birthday Mel Brooks, 93 and still breaking the fourth wall pic.twitter.com/GSdJyJW5QW

— Darren Richman (@darrenrichman) June 28, 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIfMfLbCbzY

The streamer announced that the following will appear on the show (deep breath!): Pamela Adlon, Tim Baltz, Zazie Beetz, Jillian Bell, Quinta Brunson, Dove Cameron, D'Arcy Carden, Ronny Chieng, Rob Corddry, Danny DeVito, David Duchovny, Hannah Einbinder, Jay Ellis, Josh Gad, Kimiko Glenn, Brandon Kyle Goodman, Jake Johnson, Richard Kind, Johnny Knoxville, Lauren Lapkus, Jenifer Lewis, Poppy Liu, Joe Lo Truglio, Jason Mantzoukas, Ken Marino, Jack McBrayer, Zahn McClarnon, Charles Melton, Kumail Nanjiani, Brock O'Hurn, Andrew Rannells, Emily Ratajkowski, Sam Richardson, Nick Robinson, Seth Rogen, Sarah Silverman, Timothy Simons, J.B. Smoove, David Wain, Taika Waititi, Reggie Watts, and Tyler James Williams.

yeahhhh....

Mel Brooks produced Cronenberg's remake of The Fly in 1986. Bryan Ferry was hired to write a theme song, written and produced with Nile Rodgers. Brooks didn't like that the song was titled "Help Me", and Rodgers described having trouble explaining to him why it was inappropriate for Ferry to sing a song explicitly about a man morphing into an insect.

Deftones were 14 years too late