BBD Comments:
Coolbaugh hit a home run with this slam dunk. ‘Blazing Saddles’ had been my back-up pick when I opened up Movienight with ‘The Big Lebowski’ so it was a fitting penultimate pick. I was delighted to start closing out our first year with this Mel Brooks’ classic up on the wall. Couple that with the truly mad cap evening we had in the Back Yard and you have one of my favorite Movienights to date.
Writing a critique of this film is a bit of a challenge. I could compare it to Wiener’s ‘The Frisco Kid,’ but the two films are not in the same league. I could discuss the wild ride that this Wednesday turned into, but you kinda had to be there. Gene Wilder’s a genius? Yes. So too are Madeline Kahn and Cleavon Little. Mel Brooks is one of a kind? Check. Maybe I could write a diatribe about how incredible the investigation of race and gender this film contains. But come on, it’s ‘Blazing Saddles,’ if you don’t know it’s one of the finest comedies ever made I’m not gonna convince you. If there is one thing that strikes me every time I see this film, it is how crappy the ending is. That’s what I’ll talk about here.
I know it’s hard to imagine a great film with a piss poor ending, but that is exactly what ‘Blazing Saddles’ is. For all of its crazy cartoon logic the bottom drops out of the film when at the end, any and all rules of logic disappear for a wild trot through a Hollywood back lot. It depresses me every time. It strikes me the Mel Brooks underestimated his amazing cast and their ability to bring these cartoonish characters to life. By the end of the film I find myself deeply invested in the story of Black Bart and the Waco Kid. So when the film throws all traces of reality out the window, I feel as though everyone just got tired. I think Brooks and his screenwriters hadn’t peered past the jokes and recognized that this marvelous cast managed to make their world real. I believe in the town and it’s people and hate to see it all taken for granted in the climax. In the end it doesn’t negate the brilliance of the first two thirds of the film, but it does sadly keep it from being the cinema masterpiece it almost is.
Still, it was a great night, and Brooks’ played great on the Stucco. I’m glad I thought of ‘Saddles’ first. I am looking forward to next week when Nubs brings us the final pick of our first year.
Nubs Comments:
I can’t believe Coolbaugh’s blind luck. This was the perfect relief coming off an intense round of picks from the Crew. This was the perfect laid-back, fun, and frivolous pick to end the summer with. And most importantly it was perfectly significant because this should have been our very first ever Movienight pick almost a year ago if Davis didn’t audible, as usual. However, like my ‘Kung Fu Hustle’ being perfect, Coolbaugh only gets partial credit for going on instinct and not considering everything that made this a great pick.
‘Blazing Saddles’ really was like a nice exhale after your first drag of a cigarette in the morning…er, I mean exhale after your first bong hit at 4:20pm…no, I mean your first exhale after finishing a 26k marathon…and cleaning out the garage. Oh, fuck it. ‘Blazing Saddles,’ though an easy choice, is just want you want out of a Wednesday night at the end of summer (and for me a long day of drinking and drafting fantasy football). I will always encourage these nice, little, light-hearted, spoofs that even a 9 year-old could enjoy. For most of us, it probably was our first favorite movie at 9 years old. They were the good old days when fart jokes, pot jokes, and race jokes were all the ingredients necessary for a well made movie. Since those good old days, we grew up and our tastes matured; Davis grew into a much more adult fondness for Sci-fi and Comic Book movies, Coolbaugh aged into the fine art of the Sports genre, Wiener lost all joy moving into film theory classes at the University of Chicago, and I, well, I appreciated a lot of stellar cinema classics and then shared them with my inferior peers at Movienight, a club I invented for those with less privileged tastes than I.
But seriously folks, I feel quite unashamed writing this review at 1 am in Chicago after sucking down a fridge full of my parent’s beer, because what insight could I possibly need to offer about ‘Blazing Saddles?’ I thought about all the new things I noticed about this comedy classic in this viewing, and only arrived at the one thing Coolbaugh pointed out; the sheriff’s outfits are over-the-top slick. Like a pimp. That’s funny and I hadn’t/couldn’t have gotten that in my childhood viewings. That joke, along with half of the humor, I am both proud and embarrassed that I could comprehend as a prepubescent. I guess, to compare it to a similar flick, ‘Blazing Saddles’ succeeds where ‘The Frisco Kid’ does not; it’s funny. The performances, the direction, and, most importantly, the comic timing is what make this a classic.
It is not a timeless classic. There are too many “N”-bombs and kids play to ever work on any generation but us and our parents who just didn’t know better than to let us watch it with them. It was the glory days of Hollywood and we will never see humor as effective as Mel Brooks’s films in a ‘Scary Movie 4.’ So thanks, Coolbaugh, for this last hoorah of the summer. Now everyone get your thinking caps back on for Movienight’s fall semester kicking off next week.
SELECTOR Comments:
No comment.
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