IT'S A LAUREL AND HEARTY BLU-RAY WELCOME TO THE MEL BROOKS COLLECTION

Yes, though it doesn’t much look like it around here right now I have been writing over the holidays, and now the first of it has come to light. You can press on over to Flickhead’s blog or the main Flickhead site to read my comprehensive review of the new Fox Home Entertainment Blu-ray box set The Mel Brooks Collection. The set, while not precisely complete-- The Producers has been left out, presumably over rights concerns, as have Life Stinks and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (for perhaps less tangible reasons)—is the best look at Brooks’ filmmaking career were likely to get, its manic highs, stupefying lows and all the pop and sizzle in between. It turns out Blu-ray provides the best showcase ever for Brooks’ rarely-seen The Twelve Chairs, and it’s been mighty good, from a technical and documentary standpoint, to all of Brooks’ films, the classics as well as the not-so-classics. Here are my thoughts, excerpted from the piece, on the Blu-ray presentation of Blazing Saddles:

“The seismic shift that came (after The Twelve Chairs) not only changed Brooks’ entire approach to filmmaking, but ended up being a landmark in movie comedy as well. Whether it’s a duplicate or not, the 55-minute interview attached to the commentary track for the Blazing Saddles Blu-ray is an invaluable peek into the process of creating this foul-mouthed, subversive satire. The audio piece details with fond remembrance and not just a smidgen of recalled frustration the difficulties and joys of bringing the movie together. “I wrote berserk, heartfelt stuff about white corruption and racism and Bible-thumping bigotry,” writes Brooks in the introduction to the chapter on Blazing Saddles in It’s Good to Be a King (the 120-page book that accompanies the box set), entitled “He’s Just Crazy Enough to Do It.” Brooks recalls that writing the movie “got everything out of me — all of my furor, my frenzy, my insanity, my love of life and hatred of death.” Seen in 2009, Blazing Saddles is, against all odds, as funny as ever (and this from someone who laughed so hard upon seeing it in 1974, at the tender age of 14, that several of my classmates at school told me the next day, “I heard you at the movies last night!”) To my mind that frenzy Brooks speaks of is channeled here into something truly representative not only of Brooks’s state of mind, but the state of mind of the country at the time he was making it. No other Brooks movie hits the kind of gasp-inducing highs that Blazing Saddles does, or sustains that delirium as well. And maybe part of why the movie plays so well in 2009 is that it taps into our memories of a time that was perhaps less enlightened but also far less suppressed in terms of a culture’s permission to air its filthy laundry in the form of a vicious romp on racism like this. Going into the second American decade of the millennium, we have a Black president and nobody says the “N” word anymore, but anybody with any sense will tell you that the old devils ain’t gone, they’re just well hidden. In Blazing Saddles Brooks fiddles with the enemy, recognizes him in us, and has a hell of a laugh in the attempted exorcism. In the long run the exorcism may not have worked, but it’s good to know that this movie, far from just a well-preserved time capsule, is still in there throwing punches around.”

You can read the rest of the review at Flickhead
and even order it from Amazon there too.

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