Word: brooksian
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...investors' money. Young Frankenstein is, by contrast, mainly a series of goofs on old horror-movie clichés - gags that don't resonate as well on stage, and that lack the comic propulsion that keeps The Producers moving along. That puts a lot more burden on the usual Brooksian jokes about big knockers and small penises - which, as a result, seem more desperate this time around. The Producers was comedy; Young Frankenstein is shtick...
...close-ups onstage." True, but with the cameras right in their faces, it's more obvious than ever how much fun Broderick and Lane are having. You can actually see the glances zapping back and forth in the climactic courtroom scene, and when Lane, in a moment of Brooksian metazaniness, compliments Broderick on his singing, you can sense them both, after however many hundreds of performances, desperately trying not to crack up. Like all the classic comedy duos, they draw energy from each other, forming a feedback loop that spins faster and faster--although they are both loath to make...
...were a smooth-running team, the old Catskills tummler deferring to the surehanded Broadway director--though Brooks attended every rehearsal and made constant suggestions. "He's totally attentive, watching like a hawk," says Broderick. "And he picks up even the subtlest things." The cast got used to the occasional Brooksian outburst--"No, no, you're ruining my masterpiece!" he yelled on arriving at one rehearsal--and to his barrage of (sometimes bad) ideas. In one scene Brooks urged Lane and Broderick to try a bit of physical shtick when they exit the door at the same time. They tried...
...film does gently remind us of past pleasures, now missed, and it is rather handsomely produced. Maybe, since its creators lack a true-that is to say Mel Brooksian-gift for parody, they would have done better to play the whole thing straight and let us have our nostalgia unalloyed...
British Writer David Irving participates in the Hitler revisionism, though in a subtler fashion. His peculiar book, indefatigably researched for ten years and written to the size of a small footlocker, begins with a vaguely Brooksian premise: Hitler was "an ordinary, walking, talking human weighing some 155 pounds, with graying hair, largely false teeth, and chronic digestive ailments.'' He was not, Irving continues, the lone maniac exclusively responsible for bringing down European civilization in Götterdämmerung. This singular chronicle of World War II displays a quiet and sometimes fascinating empathy for its subject, viewing...