The Mel Brooks Collection (Blazing Saddles / Young Frankenstein / Silent Movie / Robin Hood: Men in Tights / To Be or Not to Be / History of the Globe, Portion 1 / The Twelve Chairs / High Anxiety) This 8 disc boxset consists of Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, History of the Globe Part I, [...]
Posts Tagged Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks tells a hilarious story on The Tonight Show about meeting Cary Grant. The music video by Mel Brooks, released in 1983 as component of the soundtrack of the motion picture “To be or not to be”. www.nerd-boy.net
Amazon.com essential video It’s not Blazing Saddles, but there are some chuckles to be found in Mel Brooks’s 1993 spoof of the Robin Hood legend. Cary Elwes is Robin (with a lighthearted jab at Kevin Costner’s bad English accent in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), while Richard Lewis plays an angst-ridden King John, and Roger [...]
Spaceballs
Oct 31
Mel Brooks’s 1987 parody of the Star Wars trilogy is a jumble of jokes rather than a comic feature, and, predictably, some of those jokes work better than others. The cast, including Brooks in two roles, more or less mimics the principal characters from George Lucas’s famous story line, and the director certainly gets a [...]
The Producers
Oct 15
Amazon.com essential video Mel Brooks’s directorial debut remains both a career high point and a classic show business farce. Hinging on a crafty plot premise, which in turn unleashes a joyously insane onstage spoof, The Producers is powered by a clutch of over-the-top performances, capped by the odd couple pairing of the late Zero Mostel [...]
Young Frankenstein
Sep 21
Amazon.com essential video If you were to argue that Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein ranks among the top-ten funniest movies of all time, nobody could reasonably dispute the claim. Spoofing classic horror in the way that Brooks’s previous film Blazing Saddles sent up classic Westerns, the movie is both a loving tribute and a raucous, irreverent [...]
Silent Movie
Sep 13
Amazon.com essential video One of Mel Brooks’s weaker vehicles, this 1976 feature finds a movie producer (Brooks) deciding that the public is ready for the silent film form again. Reasonably ambitious and promising, the film ultimately doesn’t do for silent cinema what Brooks did for atmospheric horror (by reviving it while parodying it) in Young [...]
High Anxiety
Aug 28
Amazon.com essential video An affectionate homage more than a spoof of Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, Mel Brooks’s hilarious movie is one of the funniest modern comedies around. Brooks plays a psychiatrist with a severe fear of heights who moves to the Bay Area to take over a psychiatric hospital after its former head mysteriously disappears. He [...]
History of the World Part I
Aug 20
Amazon.com essential video Mel Brooks’s 1981, three-part comedy–set in the Stone Age, the Roman Empire, and the French Revolution–is pure guilty pleasure. Narrated by Orson Welles and featuring a lot of famous faces in guest appearances (beyond the official cast), the film opens well with Sid Caesar playing a caveman, then moves along to the [...]
There are plenty of belly laughs in The Mel Brooks Collection, an eight-disc set of most of the director-writer-actor’s best-known films. Four of them–Silent Movie, High Anxiety, To Be or Not to Be, and Robin Hood: Men with Tights–are making their debut on DVD, while a fifth, The Twelve Chairs, was briefly available as a [...]
