Celluloid Heroes

Someday you’re gonna kill ten thousand in one of these firetraps, and I’ll keep eating smoke and carrying out bodies until someone asks us how to build them.

I suppose it’s just coincidence that this film wrapped 27 years to the day before 9/11, but in the wake of those terrorist attacks, and the ultimate sacrifice of hundreds of rescue personnel, this film carries a level of grim irony. Beyond that, however, Irwin Allen’s clichéd, overblown disaster spectacle offers little in the way of significance.

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Then one day I hear “Reach for it, mister.” I spun around, and there I was standing face to face with a six year old kid. Well, I just laid down my guns and walked away. Little bastard shot me in the ass.

Musicals use their plot as a connector between songs. Porn films used plot, back when they had one, to connect the sex scenes. Similarly, Mel Brooks‘ Blazing Saddles uses what plot it has as a framework upon which to hang a non-stop barrage of sight-gags, puns and just plain jokes, most of them very funny.

This is not Brooks’ best film. That honor belongs either to The Producers or Young Frankenstein. Blazing Saddles is, however, his most fearless. This is nothing he won’t do to get a laugh. Bodily functions, sex, race and gay stereotypes are all fair game. Brooks’ secret is that he doesn’t have a mean-spirited bone in his body. Only the genuinely stupid can be offended by this kind of film because, in the end, they are only people who are held up for scorn.

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I do not like the men on this spaceship. They are uncouth and fail to appreciate my better qualities.

Dark Star began life as a college film project by John Carpenter, who would go on to direct the influential horror film, Halloween. It succeeds despite its low-budget roots largely on the strength of its humor. This is a sly, anarchic film that seems to be 2001: A Space Odyssey for slackers.

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Of course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, public buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.

Take a screenwriting class, any screenwriting class, and I almost guarantee you that, before the first session is over, your teacher will mention Robert Towne’s script for Chinatown in a tone that grown men usually reserve for talking about their first crush. The screenplay for this film has been held up as an example of near perfection of the screenwriting craft and, if I were more cynical, I might look hard for evidence to the contrary. I probably wouldn’t find it, though.

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My grandfather used to work for your grandfather. Of course the rates have gone up.

Young Frankenstein remains the most consistently self-assured film of Mel Brooks‘ career. Not as audaciously funny as Blazing Saddles or The Producers, it is still a pitch-perfect send up of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s. Filmed entirely in glorious black-and-white, the cinematography sets the perfect mood for lovingly satirizing those classics.

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