The Screengrab : blazing saddles

Unwatchable #36: “Daddy Day Camp”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Or is he? Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I’ve got good news and bad news, Unwatchable fans. The bad news you probably already know. There’s no way I’m going to be able to complete my march to the top of the IMDb Bottom 100 list before the Screengrab shuffles off this mortal coil. The good news is that, despite this devastating setback, I am determined to complete the Unwatchable project one way or another.

Wait – that’s the good news? Well, it may not be good news for me or my psyche, but I’d hate to leave you all hanging. I’m searching for a new home for Unwatchable (make me an offer!), so be sure to check my blog frequently for updates.

There’s no time for eulogies just yet, however! Unless we’re talking about eulogies for Cuba Gooding’s career. Perhaps you dimly recall Daddy Day Care, one of Eddie Murphy’s more insipid family-friendly vehicle of recent vintage. Murphy opted out of the sequel – probably to make Norbit or Meet Dave or some other ungodly piece of shit – and the producers were left to rack their brains for a replacement. Could they possibly find an even more shameless, milquetoast, edgy-as-a-marshmallow African-American actor than Murphy has become over the past fifteen years? Who better than the star of Snow Dogs, Rat Race and Boat Trip – yes, none other than Radio himself, Cuba Gooding, Jr.

Gooding reprises Murphy’s role of affable dad Charlie Hinton, while some random fat white guy takes over for Jeff Garlin in the role of Charlie’s fat white guy friend, Phil. Having achieved tremendous success as the owners of Daddy Dad Care, Charlie and Phil face a new challenge when they take over the rundown summer camp they attended as youths. Camp Driftwood is facing foreclosure thanks to the popularity of the upscale camp across the lake, Camp Canola, run by Charlie’s childhood tormenter, Lance Warner (Lochlyn Munro).

Once the kids arrive at camp, we’re treated to two of the highest forms of humor: adorable tots who all speak like Catskills comedians, and emissions both gaseous and tangible emitting with increasing frequency from every bodily orifice. There’s a recreation of the famous Blazing Saddles campfire scene, except with belching instead of farting. But don’t worry – there’s also farting! Also vomiting, pooping, nut-punching and balloons filled with piss. All the classics! Gooding brings his usual dignity to the proceedings, which means his face is perpetually plastered with the same expression my dog sports whenever he’s left a special present hidden somewhere in the house. Speaking of which:

Previously on Unwatchable:
37. Bad Girls from Valley High
38. Chairman of the Board
39. The Invisible Maniac
40. Son of the Mask
41. Troll 2

Dom DeLuise, 1933 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Tue, 05 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The Brooklyn-born actor Dom DeLuise, who died yesterday at the age of 75, was balding and roundish even in his early thirties, when he started getting roles in movies such as Fail-Safe (1964) and The Glass Bottom Boat (1966) and on such TV series as The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. If DeLuise's career had gone in a different direction, he might have gotten typecast as an urban sad sack, of the "I dunno, what do you want to do tonight, Marty?" variety, which would have been a tragic waste. It turned out that, in comic roles, DeLuise could create his own wild man's force field, capable of tearing into a part and investing it with its own glittering, beady-eyed insanity. A skillful actor yet also a burlesque madman, he was, at the peak of his career, both a modern performer and a throwback to the vaudeville-trained character comics of early talkies. And he had an uncanny gift for taking over a scene and making it all his without coming across as pushy or oppressive. He was so wildly likable that, when Anne Bancroft cast him as the lead in her 1980 directorial debut Fatso, more than one heartless movie critic began his review by writing that he sure hoped that Dom was okay with that title.

DeLuise had two major patrons and collaborators, if that's not too grand a term for "guys he seemed to like getting paid to hang out with on the set." He first worked with Mel Brooks--Bancroft's husband--in 1970, when Brooks cast him as the villain in his period film The Twelve Chairs, playing a Russian Orthodox priest on the trail of a lost fortune in jewels. He subsequently appeared in Blazing Saddles (1974), Silent Movie (1976), History of the World--Part One (1981) (as Nero), Spaceballs (1987) (as the voice of Pizza the Hut), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). He also played a villainous opera singer in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975), a Brooks imitation directed by fellow Brooks regular Gene Wilder. (He also appeared in two other comedies directed by Wilder, The World's Greatest Lover (1977) and Haunted Honeymoon (1986), where he was cast in drag.) His other great association was with Burt Reynolds, who had contributed a cameo to Silent Movie. Reynolds then cast him in a black comedy he directed, The End (1978), in which the director-star seemed no worse than pleasantly bemused by the sight of DeLuise heading over the next hill at top speed with Reynolds's movie tucked under his arm.

Reynolds and DeLuise also appeared together in Smokey and the Bandit II (1980), The Cannonball Run (1981), The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), Cannonball Run II (1984), the animated feature All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989), and countless TV shows, including an episode of Steven Spielberg's mid-80s anthology series Amazing Stories that Reynolds directed with DeLuise in the lead. DeLuise himself directed one movie, the 1979 crime comedy Hot Stuff, in which he starred; he used the occasion to provide the movie debuts of his three actor sons, David. Michael, and Peter DeLuise. (Their mother was the actress Carol Arthur, who was married to DeLuise from 1965 until his death.) DeLuise also directed a 1997 TV film, Boys Will Be Boys, and in later years turned up in movies and on TV (including a voice role as himself on Robot Chicken) when it seemed to amuse him to do so. A noted chef, he also wrote Italian cookbooks, as well as children's books.

Taverns on the Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part Deux)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a fine example of the way lazy, excessive reliance on ridiculous CGI (and CGI monkeys) can ruin an otherwise passable movie. And there’s no finer argument for the good ol’ fashioned non-CGI pleasures of real world filmmaking than the Nepalese bar sequence in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. To recap: winsome badass Karen Allen (oh, Hollywood, HOW did you ever let her get away?) drinks a yak-herder under the table, then her flaky ex-boyfriend shows up while she’s all full o’ rotgut and she slaps him in the face and sends him on his way. And THEN, creepy Nazi torturer Toht (a.k.a. Mr. Melty-Face) shows up with a bunch of evil minions and things really get interesting. What follows is a master class in cinematic action, pacing, camera placement, stuntwork, pyrotechnics, performance and editing...all without a bluescreen (or hangover) in sight.

ON_LINE (2002)

Okay, so maybe I’m biased, given that I co-wrote this one (with director Jed Weintrob), but I’ve always had a soft spot for the scene in this under-the-radar internet sex comedy where neurotic shut-in John (Josh Hamilton) goes to an odious, overpriced Manhattan nightclub on a disastrous double-date with Jordan (Vanessa Ferlito), the wild cybersex enthusiast he picked up on the internet, his oversexed roommate, Moe (Harold Perrineau, Jr.) and Moe’s pill-popping, manic-depressive girlfriend (Isabel Gillies). But don’t take my word for it: in a Salon review that (almost but not quite) made up for any number of really quite nasty reviews of the film, the extremely cultured and discerning Andrew O'Hehir summed up the appeal of the scene thusly: “John's nightclub internal monologue, as he watches Jordan dance and reflects on how hot she is, how shallow he is for thinking that and how little chance he has of actually getting in her pants in the off-line world, is probably the movie's high point.” Thanks, Mr. O’Hehir...I couldn’ t have said it better myself!

BLAZING SADDLES (1974)

Before that dastardly Hedley Lamar (played with nefarious gusto by the late Harvey Korman) decided to run the railroad through it, the hamlet of Rock Ridge in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles had everything an Old West town needed: a church, a hoosegow for when Mongo came to town, and proximity to the Hollywood Hills. And, of course, it had its own saloon. But unlike most of the filthy, rowdy joints in the history of westerns, this particular saloon was always kept nice and clean, thanks to the stewardship of the unfortunately named Anal Johnson. All that came to an end, however, with the arrival of the Teutonic songbird Lili von Shtupp, played with Dietrichian élan by the Oscar-nominated Madeline Kahn. Lili’s world-weary act, sweet set of curves, and foul-mouthed stage patter (“Why don’t you get your friggin’ feet off the stage?”) brings every rough rider in the county, but it’s her love of that delicious schnitzengruben that leads Lamar to hire her to seduce and abandon Bart, the new sheriff in town. In one of the most memorable scenes ever set in an Old West saloon, Lili sighs out “I’m Tired” before being carried off, James Brown-style, by her backup dancers and deposited in the arms of Sheriff Bart – who, it turns out, has more schnitzengruben than she can handle.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

It’s a scene we’ve watch play out a million times in a million action movies: a nameless bar in the middle of nowhere is taken over by a generic group of bikers, who wreak havoc in the place until they push the wrong guy just a little bit too far. But William Peter Blatty’s disturbing cult hit The Ninth Configuration is no typical action movie, and the bar fight won’t play out in a typical way. The set-up to the scene is more complex than it seems: mentally disturbed former astronaut Billy Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), disillusioned that sensitive psychiatrist Col. Vincent Kane (Stacy Keach) has turned out to be a blood-soaked Marine Corps commando, escapes from an asylum and seeks refuge in liquor at the nameless biker bar. A combination of booze, despair and a smart mouth enrages the boss bikers (the unstable brute Stanley and the cunning, sadistic Richard, played by the gaunt, devil-faced Richard Lynch), who abuse Cutshaw until Kane arrives to rescue him. Kane, who has forsaken violence and taken up the mantle of the caring, well-meaning shrink in order to bury his own murderous past, attempts to come to a peaceful resolution, but finally he can take no more. The scene that follows is one of the most stunning bar fights every captured on film – although to call it a fight ignores what truly happens: Kane utterly annihilates the biker gang in a matter of seconds, killing a number of them. It’s an astonishing scene, and even more astonishing is the fact that it’s not even the climax of The Ninth Configuration.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

In an audio commentary track recorded for the French Connection DVD, Gene Hackman described Eddie Egan, the real-life model for Hackman's obsessed narc "Popeye" Doyle, as having been "flippant" to a degree that he'd never encountered before in a human being. It's easy to imagine the conversation among the patrons of the Harlem bar that Popeye raids after he's stormed in and out like a hurricane: "That fellow was certainly flippant, wasn't he? I'm a fervent supporter of our boys in blue, but speaking as an amateur observer of the law enforcement process, I can't help feeling that some of that flippancy was unwarranted! Here, help me tie off this tourniquet?" The raid, which is actually a cover for a meeting in the men's room between Popeye and an informant, establishes Popeye's adversarial relationship to the city's civilian population, his casual racism, and the gleefully sadistic tinge to his brutality. (Obliged to rough up his informant so that no one will suspect the guy is a rat, Popeye asks him, "Where do you want it?" The man thinks about it for a second and points to his right cheek, and Popeye slugs him on his left. The blow looks hard enough to crack the guy's jaw, but this is Popeye when he's just playing.) In a recent interview in Reason, Ed Burns, the twenty-year veteran of the Baltimore Police Department turned TV writer whose HBO series The Wire dismantled the logic behind the nation's "war on drugs", called the scene "iconic" and blamed it for instilling the wrong mindset in a generation of cops by "put[ting] out the idea of this guy who cracks heads," Popeye set police work back by reinforcing the idea that cops should act like swaggering badasses instead of establishing a functional relationship with their communities. So if you're a fan of The Wire -- a not uncommon condition among Screengrab writers -- then give it up for Popeye Doyle; without him, The Wire might not have been necessary.

Related Stories:

Tavern On The Screens - The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part One)

CGI Must Die: Five Reasons Why

Harvey Korman, 1927--2008

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part One)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Two)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Three)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Harvey Korman, 1927--2008

Phil Nugent — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:30:00 GMT

Harvey Korman has died at UCLA Medical Center, at age 81. He had been recuperating after an abdominal aortic aneurysm four months ago. At six foot four and with easy access to an attitude of sneering, haughty disdain for what was going on around him, he sometimes seemed to be demonstrating the answer to a question that nobody asked: what if John Cleese were American and joined the Shriners to get away from his wife? After a stint in the navy, Korman studied theater in Chicago before going to New York hoping to make it as an actor. He didn't have any luck and, he said later, he finally decided to move to Hollywood so that "at least I'd feel warm and comfortable while I failed." For three years he grabbed whatever work he could get while selling cars and performing other odd jobs to get by, until he became a regular on Danny Kaye's TV series in 1963. That led to plenty of work guesting on other shows, including his iconic voice work as the Great Gazoo on The Flintstones. As a movie actor, he appeared in Lord Love a Duck (1966), The April Fools (1969), Americathon (1979), and Radioland Murders (2004), but found his steadiest employment in films as part of Mel Brooks's stock company. He first worked for Brooks in Blazing Saddles, playing the villainous Hedley Lamarr, then returned in High Anxiety, The History of the World, Part I and Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

It was in TV that Korman really made his mark, especially playing second banana to Carol Burnett for ten years, beginning with the first season of her CBS variety show in 1967, where he used his size and air of deadhead exasperation to parody classic movie stars and represent the soul of defeated Middle America in the classic "Family" sketches. "We were an ensemble," he said later, "and Carol had the most incredible attitude. I've never worked with a star of that magnitude who was willing to give so much away." Korman left the show after ABC offered him his own series, which was pulled from the air after three episodes; none of his subsequent attempts at a series of his own (including the 1989n flop The Nutt House, which Mel Brooks had a hand in) fared any better, and though he kept coming back, often in tandem with Burnett or his Carol Burnett Show sidekick Tim Conway, he was not above publicly airing his feelings that the best days of his career were behind him. On a 1990 late night talk show appearance with Bob Costas, Costas became so uncomfortable listening to Korman slag himself as a has-been that he jumped at a mention of the comedian's small daughter watching reruns of The Flintstones; did she, Costas asked, seem surprised at how much the Great Gazoo sounded like her father? Yes, Korman said, very surprised: "Daddy used to work!?"

In Other Blogs: Blazing Saddles and Venture Brothers

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Black History Month ends today, as does Black History Mumf at Big Media Vandalism. Before wrapping things up, Odienator takes a long look at an expected subject: Blazing Saddles, “a film so politically incorrect it should come with a surgeon general's warning for the easily offended. The film is full of racist language, Black jokes, Jewish jokes, gay slurs, religious blasphemy and cruelty to both animals and old ladies. There are at least three jokes about rape, two jokes about improper use of cattle (one of which I've already counted in the rape jokes) , and one joke about implied masturbation between a cowboy and his bathing boss.” Not that he has a problem with that. “I've a rule about comedy which states that nothing is offensive to me so long as it's funny. Luckily, Saddles is hilarious, but every joke is a powderkeg of potential offense.”

Today also represents the official end to the 2007 awards season, as the Screengrab’s own Paul Clark unveils the big winner of the 2nd Annual Muriel Awards at Silly Hats Only. The Golden Muriel for Best Film goes to No Country For Old Men, edging out There Will Be Blood and Zodiac.

At the House Next Door, Vadim Rizov brings us up to speed on the “"Rendez-Vous with French Cinema" series at Lincoln Center. His highlight is actress Mia Hansen-Løve's directorial debut All Is Forgiven, which he says “is so resolutely modest that it took me a while to realize what I was seeing was closer to Yi Yi than another purposefully small-scale festival movie. The style may be hermetic, but all the better to keep the plot away from the melodrama it would've turned into in lesser hands. There's heroin addiction here, destroyed marriages, abandoned children and all kinds of casual emotional damage—but it never feels like one damn thing after another, just a truthful look into the lives of adults fighting problems they should've resolved well before marriage and their potential march to serenity.”

And finally, Cinematical is taking a stand: The Venture Brothers need a feature film. As Monika Bartyzel writes, “the show's structure is much more ideal for a feature film. It's an animated adventure. There's no need to scheme up a way to make it cinematic, because the meat is right there. They've already faced aged prostitutes, the Bermuda triangle, tag sales for super-villains, mummies, Ünderland, space, and even dating. Take any frontier, any situation really, and you could slide the Ventures into it.”

John Alvin, 1948 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The painter John Alvin, one of the most iconic movie poster artists of the last three decades, has died of a heart attack at fifty-nine. Alvin's first official movie poster design was for Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles; its depiction of Cleavon Little flashing a peace sign while straddling a horse, set against a profile of Brooks, in Native American makeup and headdress, on a nickel emblazened with the words, "Hi, I'm Mel, trust me," established Alvin's gift for cariacture and for his knack for boiling the elements of a movie down to punchy image that captured a movie's flavor. His career made in the business, Alvin would work on more than a hundred movie campaigns; among the most celebrated and memorable were his posters for Young Frankenstein, Phantom of the Paradise, Blade Runner, Melvin and Howard, The Princess Bride, Gremlins, Empire of the Sun, New Jack City, the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series, and a slew of Disney movies, among them The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and The Pirates of Caribbean pictures. One project that had a special place in his heart was the campaign for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. For the poster image, inspired by Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, Alvin used his daughter Farah as a hand model.

The Rep Report (January 23 - 30)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

SAN FRANCISCO: The 6th Annual Noir City Film Festival at the Castro is jam-packed with seamy rarities and not-available-on-DVD obscurities. It opens on January 25 with a tribute to actress Joan Leslie, who'll be interviewed onstage between screenings of the 1947 Repeat Performance and the striking 1943 backstage drama The Hard Way. There are also tributes to Dalton Trumbo — the Trumbo-scripted Joseph Losey film The Prowler will be introduced by modern noir master James Ellroy, and they'll even show the movie if ever stops talking — actress Gail Russell, and the granite-jawed Charles McGraw, who appears in Anthony Mann's Border Incident and Reign of Terror (sometimes known as The Black Book, and starring Richard Basehart as that least likely of noir villains, Maximilien Robespierre. ("Don't call me Max!")

LOS ANGELES: Your obedient Jew, Mel Brooks, will be on hand fora festival of his films at the American Cinematheque from January 23 through the 30th. Brooks will kick things off by introducing his little-seen sophomore effort, the 1970 The Twelve Chairs, based on an Ilf and Petrov novel and starring the young Frank Langella, Dom DeLuise, and the criminally underutilized British actor Ron Moody. On Saturday, he'll participate in a discussion between films during a double fill of his first big hit, the 1974 Blazing Saddles, and perhaps his most underappreciated comedy, the 1981 centuries-spanning vaudeville show The History of the World — Part 1. Given Brooks's legendary reputation as one of the funniest talkers of the age, this event might be of interest even to comedy aficionados who already have the movies themselves well memorized.

NEW YORK: The Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking" (January 25 – February 14) is a big, ambitious program that concentrates on the output of Mosfilm, "the largest and most productive film studio during the Soviet era, which remains Russia’s most important film institution even today." Included are such chestnuts as Potemkin and the post-Stalin The Cranes Are Flying, as well as Tarkovsky's Mirror and other, lesser-known films such as Karen Shakhnazarov's1983 Jazzman, about a musician whose tastes run counter to those officially sanctioned by Moscow, and the more recent Happiness and Cargo 200.