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On this day in history as it relates to the movies...
1461 Edward IV is crowned King of England. Over a dozen actors will play him from silent film to TV miniseries including Roy Dotrice (The Wars of the Roses), John Wood (Richard III), and Max Irons (The White Queen) but despite awards-voters fetish for royalty porn this role has never resulted in an Oscar, Tony or Emmy nomination. 1838 Queen Victoria is crowned. Emily Blunt reenacts the ascenscion for Young Victoria (2009) receiving her third of five Golden Globe nominations (she's won once). Oscar, though, has yet to notice her gifts. When Oscar, when? What do you require?...
Murtada here.The Writers Guild of America released their list of the 101 funniest screenplays of all time. The screenplays were voted on by members of both the East and West coast branches of the WGA. The eligible screenplays had to be in English and at least one hour in length.
Woody Allen is by far the most popular name on the list. He has seven titles including the WGA’s top pick Annie Hall (1977) which he co-wrote with Marshall Brickman. Compartively Billy Wilder only has two titles on the list, The Apartment (1960) and Some Like it Hot (1959). Other writers scoring multiple films include Mel Brooks, Preston Sturges, Christopher Guest, Charlie Chaplin, the Coen Brothers and surprisingly Harold Ramis.
Perhaps to ward off criticism about the lack of representation of women and people of color, the WGA acknowledged the list’s heavy “white bro dudeness”:
"Comedy screenwriting has long been a playground that women and writers of color have not had enough time in. The work of Richard Pryor on Blazing Saddles, Tina Fey on Mean Girls, Amy Heckerling on Clueless, and Hagar Wilde, co-writer of Bringing Up Baby, makes you wonder what a list would be if the playground had been more inclusive all along."
That’s all well and good but even when included the stories of women were low on the list. Really The Hangover and Wedding Crashers are funnier than All About Eve and Mean Girls ? Come on !
Surely everybody looking at the list will have their own reservations and “Really!!!” moments. Tell us yours in the comments.
I needed a really good laugh this week and Jean Hagen in Singin' in the Rain provided (again). Today apropos of nothing I thought of Chad Feldheimer (aka Brad Pitt) in Burn After Reading's overemphatic jogging/crying/phone-antics and started laughing. Silliness is so underrated in the movies... and in life.
When I was a child Cloris Leachman in The North Avenue Irregulars (1979) made me squeal with laughter - I had totally forgotten about that until she popped up in her own comic bubble in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidwhich we were just watching.
What's your favorite goofy thing in cinema with no pretense other than to have fun / be funny? I saw Mel Brooks Silent Movie for the first time a couple of years ago and was dying at Bernadette Peters' striptease... and at several other scenes, too. I was surprised because Mel Brooks doesn't always do it for me. For reliable laughs even if you've never heard of the movie, nothing beats 30s and 40s era screwball comedies in general or Carole Lombard specifically. I can't say that 80s comedies hold up all that well for me (Tootsie being a glorious exception) but I was thinking the other day that maybe 90s era comedy will last forever... so many genuinely hilarious movies that decade: Clueless, Waiting for Guffman, Bullets Over Broadway, Flirting with Disaster,Election!
Bernadette Peters in Silent Movie (1976)
Give us good rental suggestions to keep us giggling.
When The Artist won Best Picture at the 85th Oscars in February it marked the first time a silent film had reigned since the very first Oscar ceremony. Some articles on this unexpected throwback and French import mentioned modern filmmakers like Guy Maddin who've experimented with the silent form but strangely Mel Brooks' Silent Movie (1976) was rarely discussed. That's a shame since it might be the closest precedent to The Artist. It was also a widely released comedy about Hollywood and it's also very funny... at least in that shameless Mel brooks kind of way. There's another odd coincidence. Like The Artist it's sole line of dialogue comes from a famous Frenchmen.
The plot of Silent Movie is a simple laundry line on which to hang comic setpieces. Mel Brooks (as "Mel Funn") wants to make a silent movie and the powers that be in Hollywood won't let him unless he convinces the biggest film stars to participate. Since this is the 1970s that means Paul Newman, Liza Minnelli, Anne Bancroft (Mrs Mel Brooks but playing herself), Bernadette Peters and the like.
At one point, Mel Brooks and frequent comic foils Marty Feldman and Dom DeLuise pile into a tiny car and look for Burt Reynolds house. 'Are you sure Burt Reynolds lives on this street?' Brooks asks with frustration before the camera cuts to a huge mansion with Burt's face on it. Haha ...oh, the vanity of world famous sex symbols. After a few failed attempts to enter his house and access his celebrity will the filmmakers give up?
The camera finally finds the actual mustachioed 70s superstar enjoying a steamy shower.
Robert here, with my series Distant Relatives, where we look at two films, (one classic, one modern) related through a common theme and ask what their similarities and differences can tell us about the evolution of cinema.
Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do
It shouldn't come as a shock that Blazing Saddles and Hot Fuzz have basically the same setup: outsider comes to small town where he has a hard time fitting but eventually becomes the only man who can save the village. It's not that Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg and Mel Brooks and his co-writers all coincidentally had the same idea. Truth is, the western and cop movie, the two genres being spoofed here, are the same genre only set 100 years apart or so. In both cases, an outsider protagonist (not even literal outsiders, moral outsiders like High Noon's Gary Cooper or Serpico's Al Pacino work too!) creates drama by pitting the hero against insurmountable odds in an environment he doesn't know. In both cases a lovable sidekick helps grund him and a conflict only he can solve elevates him to hero status (in terms of both his success and rare skill).
The protagonists of Blazing Saddles and Hot Fuzz couldn't be more different but they're similar in that they contradict expectations set up by their genres' more serious films. Nick Angel (Simon Pegg) is a good cop who plays by all the rules. He isn't exactly Detective Riggs. Sheriff Bart (Cleavon Little) is vulgar, vain, charming, clever, and doesn't care to know the rules enough to break them. He isn't exactly John Wayne. The towns they inhabit, aren't so much contradictions of cultural portrayals as exaggerations. The town of Sandford is comically peaceful, playing off the idea of the quaint and safe countryside of movies like Local Hero. Rock Ridge has fun with the towns of the old west, with cows rummaging through churches, and citizens all named Johnson.
That's Entertainment
Each film skewers the genre it spoofs and eventually becomes. How do they do this? First by establishing a world where everyone knows the elements of that genre. In Hot Fuzz it's easy. Since the film is set in modern time, anyone can go down to the local store and rent a copy of Bad Boys. In Blazing Saddles, while it seems like a good assumption that no one there has seen a western, they still know their roles, appreciating good old fashioned gibberish, getting annoyed at classic western cliche and genuflecting the very mention of Randolph Scott. By giving everyone an understanding of how their world "should" work, they've made them extra-aware of when it's not actually working in that manner, like when a series of unusual crimes begin to unfold.
If comedy is inconsistency, then Brooks and Wright set up meta-levels of self awareness by which the characters can be inconsistent. Each film culminates in the ultimate self-aware spectacle. In Hot Fuzz this involves the plot actually turning into that of a generic action blockbuster. For Blazing Saddles, the action literally spills off the lot and onto other films.
But did we learn anything?
The big difference between these two films, as anyone would note, is in social commentary. Blazing Saddles, though often saddled itself with the qualifier "a film like this could never get made today" is an argument for tolerance, using the uber-racist town of Rock Ridge as a mirror for our reality. While one could argue that the small town of Sandford in Hot Fuzz is a take on a "violence begets peace" mentality not uncommon in our world, it might be a bit of a stretch. Hot Fuzz doesn't have a social message. Is that a sign that as satire, message movies are dead?
What Hot Fuzz does suggest however is a reality in which we're so immersed in media and culture that we can no longer separate it from ourselves. Culture is not a reflection of us, instead we are a reflection of it. Blazing Saddles, with its self awareness and unending pop-cultural references often suggests the very same. Both films get their laughs by creating worlds that couldn't exist without the totality of pop to be built upon.
The suggestion that the spoof film is dead is one made not without merit. Such films still get made, just not often well. What the evolution of Blazing Saddles to Hot Fuzz suggests is that while grand social statements aren't necessary, some statement, some observation about our reality is. References to culture alone won't do it. Some greater truth has to be revealed, whether it be the dark side of our society or the overbearing anti-originality tendencies of our culture. There's truth there. And truth is funny.
Tuesday, June 28, 2016 at 7:15AM 
On this day in history as it relates to the movies...
