comedy – Page 3 – Blue Ink Alchemy

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IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Blazing Saddles

{Audio returns next week.}

Hatred is, unfortunately, nothing new. There are people even today who have built their lives, fortunes and reputations around rhetoric that perpetuates ignorance and blind intolerance. From the Spanish Inquisition to the Nazis, the Crusades to Mao’s Great Leap Forward, sooner or later somebody somewhere is going to react in a violent and ugly fashion to somebody who’s different. It falls to those of us with tolerance, love for our fellow man and enough wherewithal to keep the things that actually matter in mind to combat this fear and hatred any way we can – even if it’s just by taking the piss out of those cretins. Hence, Blazing Saddles.

The year is 1874. The location, an unnamed territory of the American West. The attorney general of the territory, Hedley Lamarr (no relation to the similarly named actress of the 70s), wants to cultivate the land with railways to earn himself even more wealth than he already has. Standing in the way of his railroad is the quaint frontier town of Rock Ridge. When their old sheriff is murdered in an attack by Lamarr’s goons, they wire the governor for a new one. In his effort to drive out the people, Lamarr conscripts a man named Bart. Bart, incidentally, is black.

At its best, comedy is a way of holding a mirror up to the more absurd aspects of modern life, calling attention to stupid things we take for granted or as the status quo through way of parody or satire. For a long time, the western was seen as perhaps the manliest of the movie genres, with rough and tumble two-fisted fighting men gunning their way to victory. Nearly every single one was white. Moreover, this was a time when minorities were just beginning to come into their civil rights, yet still had to deal with a great deal of hatred, pre-conceived notions and harsh epithets. Enter legendary comedic film-maker, biting satirist and prominent Jewish-American Mel Brooks. It takes perhaps a particular kind of genius or insanity to look at the litany of Western cinema up until this point, and say “You know what? Why don’t we have a black guy in the lead role?” You can guess how some people reacted.

This is a point covered in the movie, and in fact directly addressed in an exchange between Bart, played quite well by Cleavon Little, and the always memorable Gene Wilder as Jim the Waco Kid. I won’t spoil the line, as it’s one of many great ones in the flick, but suffice it to say Jim hits the nail directly on its racist head. The very notion of the black leading man with a white sidekick can be amusing enough to consider on its own, but with these two actors the combination’s dynamite. They have great chemistry which only makes the punchlines funnier.

Considering the amount of comedic firepower Brooks had at his disposal it’s no wonder Blazing Saddles is thought of by many as his best work. Harvey Korman adds the perfect mix of presence and insanity to Hedley Lamarr, the townsfolk of Rock Ridge are great and Madeline Kahn nearly stops the show as Bavarian bombshell Lily von Shtupp. Not because she’s devastatingly sexy, though she is in her prime here – it’s because she is, like so many other things in the movie, pointing out something just a tad absurd. Like stopping in the middle of a rustic narrative to have a good-looking woman do a song and dance routine. It’s out of place in most serious films; but here, with Lily sounding more like a dying badger than a breathless lady of the evening, it’s just funny. It takes talent to sing; it takes real talent to deliberately sing this badly.

If Blazing Saddles has a flaw it doesn’t manifest itself until halfway through the third act. A sprawling, rolling fistfight for the fate of Rock Ridge spills out of the town – and into a neighboring movie studio. What follows is one of the most complete evaporations of the fourth wall I think I’ve ever seen. Chaos is unleashed upon Warner Brothers studios even going as far as the famous Grauman’s Chinese theatre in Hollywood. It’s known that Brooks was sat down by studio executives before the film was released and given a list of changes they wanted him to make, toning down the racist language and otherwise de-fanging all of the humor. Brooks, who had final say in the cut of the film, diligently took notes at this meeting, and when it was concluded, threw his notes in the garbage. This sudden shift at the end of Blazing Saddles could be Brooks taking a shot at the excesses, expectations and general idiocy he saw in the studio system. Or he could just have trouble ending his movies.

Either way, Blazing Saddles is hysterical from beginning to end. A tightly-written script assisted by Richard Pryor (excepting perhaps that last bit) is packed with humor ranging from the aforementioned epithets to what some consider the very first cinematic fart joke. This stands with his History of the World Part 1 and Young Frankenstein as some of the funniest parodies ever made. So powerful was the imagery, humor and outright Western silliness of Blazing Saddles that it was many, many years before another serious Western was made in Hollywood. For all these reasons and more, it’s a movie that belongs on your Netflix queue. If you ever look around the world at crimes perpetuated for the sake of hate based on the color of a victim’s skin, their gender or the people with whom they fall in love, I suggest you watch Blazing Saddles. Not only will you find yourself laughing, you’ll be reminded that people who act, think and speak based on such hatreds have ignorance and ignorance alone on their side. Mel’s filmmaking, jokes and excellent cast will show you just how short-sighted, misinformed, brutish and downright stupid those morons are. And there’s a pretty great pie fight at the end, complete with Adolf Hitler.

Don’t ask. Just watch the flick.

Josh Loomis can’t always make it to the local megaplex, and thus must turn to alternative forms of cinematic entertainment. There might not be overpriced soda pop & over-buttered popcorn, and it’s unclear if this week’s film came in the mail or was delivered via the dark & mysterious tubes of the Internet. Only one thing is certain… IT CAME FROM NETFLIX.

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! Airplane!

March 25, 2011 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

[audio:http://www.blueinkalchemy.com/uploads/airplane.mp3]

The year was 1980. It was a time when volcanos erupted, disco was dying, empires struck back and an actor became President of the United States. Comedy, satire and parody were nothing new to the people of this time, but when Airplane! premiered, it not only delivered the screwiest of screwball pictures to date, it also defined parody films for years to come, on the basis of being an absolute scream.

The airplane of the emphatic title is a jet liner traveling from San Francisco to New York, and tragedy lurks in the shadows of the plane. The meals available to the passengers are steak and fish, but the fish has gone bad and will poison several passengers and the entire flight crew. Unable to rely on the automatic pilot, Otto, for landing, stewardess Elaine must turn to a man she’s trying to leave behind, a man haunted by his time in battle, the only pilot left on the plane who can save all their lives: Ted Striker.

Stated so plainly, the plot might not sound like a premise for an absurd comedy. However, it does establish a solid basis for clear-eyed, lantern-jawed actors to deliver their lines with stony earnestness, while something absolutely hysterical is going on in the background. Following hot on the heels of Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, Airplane! adds celebrity cameos, direct spoofing of disaster movies (Zero Hour! in particular, which this film actually remade) and brick joke setups to the mix. The result is a movie that is smart, well-paced and very, very funny.

Mr. Bridges would disagree; it’s totally a serious movie. Totally.

The comedy team of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (remember them?) first burst into film with this title, and it changed a lot of things. While comedy was nothing new on the silver screen, it classically involved actors with comedic backgrounds almost exclusively. Airplane! broke that mold wide open with some brilliant casting. Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, the aforementioned Leslie Neilsen and especially Robert Stack were known primarily for their dramatic or action-oriented roles. It shows in their delivery, the confidence they project and the way in which their presence inhabits the screen, even as we laugh hysterically at the antics unfolding around them.

Much like The Naked Gun and other films that would follow this one, Airplane! relies on audience attention, very rarely calling direct attention to a gag. Which isn’t to say they don’t; Johnny’s bit with the lights is a notable exception. The crux of the comedy lies in the ability of the actors to maintain straight faces, from Robert Hays’ Ted somberly referring to his ‘drinking problem’ to Captain Oveur’s rather odd questions to the young boy who comes up to the cockpit.

“Joey? Do you like movies about gladiators?”

To say more would surely spoil a great deal of the jokes. And they’re almost all winners, from the presence of NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the final screen performance of Ethel Merman, from June Cleaver speaking ‘jive’ to a gag Robert Stack pulls that could later be played backwards as a meme reference. It’s packed so full of humor that the disaster movie plot is nearly superfluous. That’s forgivable, however, when the humor is this funny and timeless. The movie might have come out in 1980, but the fact that we can, in 2011, still roll on the floor in reaction to the jokes is a testament to what good writing can do for a comedy. I know what you might be saying: “Surely, this is a glowing recommendation for this movie!”

Spoiler

Yes. It is.

And don’t call me Shirley.

IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! The Naked Gun

March 18, 2011 / BlueInkAlchemist / 0 Comments

[audio:http://www.blueinkalchemy.com/uploads/naked_gun.mp3]

The parody is hardly a new form of artistic expression. People have been making fun of things other people do since time immemorial. I’m sure there are some cave drawings that, in context, are downright hilarious. For a few years the premiere comedy team for cinematic parody were David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker. One of the finest examples of their work came about in the form of a series of films that have been mercilessly pursued, copied and mined for ideas. It all began with The Naked Gun.

Okay, I lie. It all began with Police Squad!, a television show aimed at taking the piss out of the hard-bitten noir detective shows like Dragnet. The Naked Gun is the full-length film that grew out of that show, starring Leslie Neilsen as Detective Lieutenant Frank Drebin. Drebin’s a decent cop in a bad town, narrating the particulars of the case at hand and his feelings for Jane, a beautiful woman who seems to keep getting mixed up with slick corporate villains. With this somewhat loose outline of a plot, the writers worry less about the drama inherent to noir crime yarns and more about the right timing of a sight gag, the best snappy comeback and the most over-the-top way in which they can tackle a pop culture target.

When Leslie Neilsen passed away I was among those who mourned. His sense of comedic timing and elastic facial expressions were coupled with a fine form of gravitas which allowed him to deliver punchlines with the sort of straight-faced stoniness that’d put the detectives on Law & Order to shame. I consider the Naked Gun films to be among his finest work, though he also really shined in Airplane! to the point that “Don’t call me Shirley” creeped into the common parlance of anybody fashioning themselves as a top-tier wiseass.

I dare you not to laugh at this great man.

There are two reasons I feel the comedy in these movies work as well as it does. First, the characters aren’t in on the joke. While the actions that take place and the circumstances in which these people find themselves might be ridiculous, the characters themselves very rarely nudge or even wink at the audience to make sure they get the punchline. The things that are clearly ludicrous to us as observers is unlikely to be commented upon by the characters in the scene, as if they’re oblivious to things like odd chalk outlines or the particular detail given by sculptors to the genitals of the statues outside the high floor of an apartment building. The characters might not comment on these things, but there they are, for the audience to behold and laugh at.

Which leads me to the other reason the Naked Gun movies are rightfully considered go-to examples of well-done parodies. The movie assumes the audience is observant, if not smart. Instead of inserting pregnant pauses, obvious musical stings or other shallow means of calling attention to a moment the writers fell all over themselves laughing, the gags and bits play out in a very smooth, almost breakneck manner in terms of pace and execution. You might be wondering what the difference is between The Naked Gun and, say, one of those Scary Movie sequels.

There’s a joke about the Wayans Brothers in here somewhere…

It seems to me the many of those sequels and spin-off movies act a bit like carbon copies of The Naked Gun. While the content has been dutifully duplicated and updated with even more pop culture references and gross bodily humor, the intelligence behind that humor, the ability of the actors to play their scenes straight and the assumption that the audience doesn’t need their metaphorical hands held to know when to laugh are all absent. Due to this, the humor suffers, and if the comedy in your comedy movie isn’t funny, you haven’t got much left, have you?

That said, comedy is largely a subjective thing. It’s a case of one man’s meat being another man’s poison. I mean, there are people out there who find Grandma’s Boy or Trapped in Paradise hilarious, I’m sure. Still, I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say that The Naked Gun and its sequels have a sort of timeless, universal appeal. They can find a place on just about any Netflix queue. I mean my wife, who typically isn’t a fan of comedies, found them to be pretty funny. And this is the reason I’m tackling these films, you see, because this day, the 18th of March, is her birthday. She recently retooled her blog and there’s lots of content to come there, so why don’t you swing by and check her out? Let it not be said I forget my loved ones on their birthday, even if the only day-of present I can provide is a shameless plug.

The Curious Case of Randal Graves

March 7, 2011 / BlueInkAlchemist / 1 Comment

On Saturday, I watched both Clerks films, back to back, which I highly recommend for any fan of Kevin Smith. There was something I hadn’t noticed before, but was pointed out to me and I’ve taken some time to consider it. There’s also the fact I wanted to break in my revamped PC with some gaming, but that’s neither here nor there.

It’s important for characters to change over the course of a narrative. This is a given rule in creating good fiction. Characters that stagnate, that do not evolve, usually don’t make for good stories. It is odd, then, that a character in the most iconic of the works of Kevin Smith, held by some as a premier storyteller of our generation, does not evolve. In fact, it’s been observed that, if aything, he gets dumber.

I’m speaking of Randal Graves.

We first meet Randal in Clerks, tasked with minding the video store next to the Quick Stop grudgingly run by his best friend Dante. Randal is Dante’s enabler, keeping him sane through his shift with thoroughly irreverent humor and pontifications on pop culture. Through Smith’s black and white lens, we see clearly how the dynamics of this friendship work and continue to evolve.

When Clerks II takes place, Dante has changed. Sure, he and Randal are still working dead-end jobs, but Dante’s taken steps to change that. He’s on the verge of taking the biggest one as the film opens. Yet Randal hasn’t. Years have passed but Randal has not evolved. Even the dealers that hang out on the sidewalk have changed and grown somewhat, but not Randal. He simply never bothered to grow up.

As much as this might seem as a knock against the character at first, there’s a reason his behavior is manifesting in this way. For those of you who’ve refrained from seeing Clearks II, I’ll encapsulate this examination in spoiler tags.

Spoiler

When Dante and Randal are in jail, Dante vents his frustrations at Randal and his apparent lack of initiative and desire to move beyond their jobs. Randal responds by saying, in essence, it doesn’t matter where he works as long as he’s working with Dante. The prospect of Dante leaving is terrifying to him, and he’s been acting out of that fear and a stubborn desire to hold onto his best friend. But as much as the emotional causes are apparent, especially on repeat viewing, there’s something else at work that, to me, shows Randal is just as smart as he was in Clerks.

In that original story, Randal confronted Veronica about Dante’s feelings because he felt Dante wouldn’t do it on his own. As much as it upset Dante to the point of physical violence, Dante did appreciate the act and ten years later is still confiding in his best friend. There’s a line in Clerks II that indicates Randal is aware of the controlling nature of the future Mrs Hicks, and while part of him doesn’t want to see Dante under this woman’s thumb, there’s got to be part of him screaming “HEY! THAT’S MY JOB!”

Still, for all of his shenanigans, Randal has been a good influence on Dante overall, and in the second film Dante does make more decisions on his own. That’s one of the things I appreciate about Kevin Smith’s writing and characterization, even if it seems one of those characters hasn’t evolved. These young men are both intelligent and, on at least some level, in touch with their emotions enough to understand the whys and wherefores of their feelings.

This is a rare case. But it’s still proof positive that just because good characterization does not necessarily mean constant evolution. There are exceptions to every rule, especially in creative endeavors like writing, with the important part being how those rules are broken.