The Mel Brooks Collection on Blu-ray
Nine Mel Brooks films in one Blu-ray set: The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, The History of the World Part I, To Be Or Not To Be, Spaceballs, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights
From Fox Home Entertainment | Buy it from Amazon
Review by Dennis Cozzalio
As the godfather of what might be generously described as a dominant strain of comedy that remains popular into the 21st-century, it would seem that Mel Brooks has a lot to answer for. His particular brand of movie parody, forged in the white-hot success of the 1974 one-two punch of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, would set the bar for the Zucker Brothers (The Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane, Hot Shots et al), Ken Shapiro (The Groove Tube) and every other schmuck who picked up a camera to film a kitchen-sink movie parody, up to and including writer-directors Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, who carpet-bombed the genre with a streak of ghastly comedies like the Scary Movie series, Spy Hard, Date Movie, Disaster Movie, Epic Movie and Meet the Spartans.
It’s clear enough to anyone who can quote Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein backward and forward that there is a huge gap between the energy, spirit and, in the case of Saddles, delirium and even anger that Brooks brought to those movies and the soul-crushing emptiness of the …Movie movies. But within his own films Brooks was often wildly inconsistent — in a great comedy like Saddles, the highs were so high that the brief time the viewer spends in the valleys is a fair trade-off; the more balanced, well-paced, reassuringly genial satire of Young Frankenstein probably accounts for its being held up by more fans as the pinnacle of Brooks’ work as a writer-director. (It was also, for those less welcoming of his broad comic persona as an actor, the only one of his hit movies outside of his debut with The Producers into which he did not insert himself.) The rest of his work has much more of a grab-bag feel to it — for every grin, there might be as many as two or three groans.
Click here to continue reading…
From Fox Home Entertainment | Buy it from Amazon
Review by Dennis Cozzalio
It’s clear enough to anyone who can quote Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein backward and forward that there is a huge gap between the energy, spirit and, in the case of Saddles, delirium and even anger that Brooks brought to those movies and the soul-crushing emptiness of the …Movie movies. But within his own films Brooks was often wildly inconsistent — in a great comedy like Saddles, the highs were so high that the brief time the viewer spends in the valleys is a fair trade-off; the more balanced, well-paced, reassuringly genial satire of Young Frankenstein probably accounts for its being held up by more fans as the pinnacle of Brooks’ work as a writer-director. (It was also, for those less welcoming of his broad comic persona as an actor, the only one of his hit movies outside of his debut with The Producers into which he did not insert himself.) The rest of his work has much more of a grab-bag feel to it — for every grin, there might be as many as two or three groans.
Click here to continue reading…
Review Copyright © 2009 by Dennis Cozzalio
posted by Ray Young at
2:35 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home