Strictly for kids, and the younger the better. The simplicity of the images, the queer lunar lighting, and the 3-D-ish, split-level compositions give you the feeling of looking at a View-Master rather than at a movie. Jim Henson's dead-eyed puppets are pretty uninteresting as shapes and colors, and no matter …
Strictly for kids, and the younger the better. The simplicity of the images, the queer lunar lighting, and the 3-D-ish, split-level compositions give you the feeling of looking at a View-Master rather than at a movie. Jim Henson's dead-eyed puppets are pretty uninteresting as shapes and colors, and no matter …
The series peaked with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but the bean-counters at EON Productions considered it Ian Fleming’s red-headed stepchild. The producers faulted George Lazenby, the first post-Connery 007, for the film’s initial lack of grosses and canned him after one outing. The commonality between that film and this …
It would have been easier to dismiss if it had been the brainchild of a reverent screenwriter pitching an animated remake of Blazing Saddles, instead of a pale echo written, produced, and voiced by the man himself, Mel Brooks. Just 10 minutes into the opening weekend matinee, it became obvious …
Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder (the latter manages to steal every mutual scene from the former, who has devoted his entire career to the art of stealing scenes) portray a pair of seedy Jewish theatrical entrepreneurs whose scheme for financial gain depends upon the guaranteed flop of their next show. …
For posterity, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick reprise their roles in the Broadway musical, together with Gary Beach and Roger Bart, while Uma Thurman (with a funny SVEE-dish accent) appropriates the cheesecake, and Will Ferrell goose-steps into the part of the playwright of Springtime for Hitler, "A New Neo-Nazi Musical." …
This loving tribute to Gene Wilder celebrates his life and legacy as the comic genius behind an extraordinary string of film roles, from his first collaboration with Mel Brooks, to his inspired on-screen partnership with Richard Pryor. It is illustrated by a bevy of touching and hilarious clips and outtakes, …
Tardy takeoff on the already anachronistic Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Mel Brooks, trying to shoot his way out of a slump, keeps firing up the jokes, clanging bricks off the front of the rim or, just as often, heaving airballs. Among them are a "chorus" of rappers, a nomadic …
Mel Brooks does to space opera what he did in Blazing Saddles to horse opera, only a great deal worse. You can try to find sophistication in his self-conscious gags about the film itself, about the potential sequel to it, about the videocassette of it, about the merchandising of it; …
As remakes go, this one seems more purposeful than some. We are not surprised, certainly, that the choreographer of the "Springtime for Hitler" number in The Producers -- Alan Johnson -- would jump at the chance to break into the director ranks with an encore of Ernst Lubitsch's nose-tweak of …
A plodding cavalry-and-Indians story set in 19th-century New Zealand, all green and damp where American versions are brown and dusty, and with a predictably high content of anti-colonialism and White Man's Guilt. (It's true that Robert Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid tends to spoil a person for cavalry-and-Indians stories, but still.) Even …
Screenwriter Max Landis transfigures the backstory of Mary Shelley’s almighty monster-maker into a set-bound action/adventure/horror/buddy comedy told from the POV of the cutest lil’ hunchback this side of Disney’s bell-ringer. Daniel Radcliffe plays the abscess-backed circus clown (possessed with a surgeon’s steady hand) plucked from under the big top by …
Mel Brooks’s insular spoof on the old Universal Pictures horror series — it doesn’t reach very far in any direction, but it expends a good deal of comic energy within the narrow confines. Basically, it resembles the sort of affectionate parody of old movies common on the Carol Burnett Show, …