![]() Both Brooks and Allen were parodists who more or less played themselves onscreen so as to never the let the audience forget the source of the mockery, but in Annie Hall (1977), Allen found a way to make his hybrid brand of self-centeredness and self-deprecation signify something greater. And while the choice superficially appeared to be between energetically warmed over borscht-belt shtick and brainy New Yorker-grade satire, the fact is that Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein appropriated and demolished classical filmmaking forms at least as adroitly as Play It Again, Sam (1972) or Sleeper (1973). In the early 1970s, there was a real debate about which shrimpy Jewish auteurburned brighter: Mel Brooks or Woody Allen. It’s positioned as being a far cry from The Producers (1968) or Young Frankenstein (1974), movies that for a time turned the former television scribe into the most popular and bankable comedian-a writer-director-producer-star-in American cinema. In her recent overview of Brooks’ oeuvre for The Globe and Mail-published on the occasion of the octogenarian writer-director getting a selective retrospective at the TIFF Bell Lightbox-Nathalie Atkinson doesn’t even mention Spaceballs, consigning it in its absence to the dustbin of the director’s lesser later work, alongside Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1991) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). ![]() I was nine years old, and it was the funniest movie I’d ever seen. Much like the vagrant book memorizers who consume and regurgitate the Western canon at the end of Fahrenheit 451-one of the only science-fiction classics not spoofed in Mel Brooks’ film-I could recite Spaceballs from beginning to end. In an essay published in Glenn Kenny’s 2002 collection A Galaxy Not So Far Away, Jonathan Lethem reveals that he saw Star Wars twenty-one timesin the summer of 1977 and stopped at the number only because the number “seemed safely ridiculous and extreme.” I shan’t speculate on how many times Lethem has seen Star Wars since then, but I’m still pretty sure that I watched Spaceballs (1987)at least 21 times in the first summer after my parents purchased a copy for me on VHS-at least once a day in between a regimen of (literally and figuratively) healthier outdoor activities. TIFF’s latest retrospective pays tribute to Mel Brooks, the “madcap maestro of silver-screen spoofery.” Adam Nayman writes on Spaceballs and how in comparison, Star Wars was essentially kids’ stuff
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |