Blazing Saddles - It's Hedley!

Blazing Saddles

Director: Mel Brooks

Ooh baby, you are so talented. And they are so dumb! –Bart, to himself

Gol darnit, Mr. Lamar. You use your tongue is prettier than a $20 whore. –Taggart

Throw out your hands / Stick out your tush / Hands on your hips / Give them a push / You’ll be surprised, you’re doing the French Mistake / Voila! –Buddy’s Singers

Men, you are about to embark on a great crusade to tamp out runaway decency in the west. Now you men will only be risking your lives, whilst I will be risking an almost certain Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. –Hedley Lamarr

To quote Netflix:

Politically incorrect and relentlessly funny, Mel Brooks’s take on Hollywood Westerns follows the tortured trail of freed slave Bart, who’s elected sheriff of the racist town of Rock Ridge. He must foil a land-grabbing governor (Brooks) with help from a washed-up, pot-smoking gunslinger (Gene Wilder).

I don’t consider myself to be overly politically correct; it takes a lot to offend me where political correctness is concerned. But I was slightly offended by the continued incorrectness of this movie. Slightly. We’ve been so conditioned to cringe at the word nigger that in several scenes, I spent more time cringing than not. Once I was able to get over that, I could appreciate the bathroom jokes a little easier.

Honestly, I was surprised at my feeling offended. Let me clarify: I was not surprised by the content or the language; I was surprised by my reaction to it. I can let a lot of things roll off my back, particularly when it comes to film, television and literature; there are times when certain words find a comfortable home in a piece where they would jar me in life normally. Words considered derogatory, offensive, stereotypical or bigoted need to be used sometimes, I get that. I’m currently reading To Kill a Mockingbird and listening to Gone with the Wind as part of this project and both use the word nigger several times; and I don’t find myself cringing. I feel like that word is a natural part of the time periods, of the locations, whereas in Blazing Saddles, the time-period doesn’t seem natural and therefore the word seems unnatural as well.

But the more glaring difference between the books and the movie is the genre. While the books present a more serious, dramatic tone, the movie is clearly a comedy. And the more I think of it, the more confident I am that this is what is stirring the uncomfortable feelings within me. A comedy of this nature featuring words of that nature just doesn’t sit well with me, no matter how surprised that realization makes me. My reaction receptors seem confused – should they be focusing on receiving comedy or gravity? Should I feel light or tense? Throwing a word which clearly has weight in my mind into a movie that doesn’t is the source of my discomfort. I simply don’t find the word nigger funny, especially when it’s used as a common reference in everyday conversation; so, not knowing which reaction to elicit, I am left feeling uncomfortable and confused without really understanding why.

Mystery unraveled, let me tell you what I did enjoy. I thought the Merry Melodies style candy-gram was humorous in a Wile E. Coyote kind of way; I enjoyed some of the banter between characters and got a kick out of Mr. Lamarr's constant correction (even when unnecessary) of his first name; and I thought the singing introduction of the town, ending with the church congregation referring to Rock Ridge as “turning into shit” was amusing. And the ending was pretty entertaining! [Spoiler alert: if you don’t know the ending and plan on watching the movie, I’d recommend skipping the next paragraph, where I’ll detail why I liked the ending.]

While the movie made a few remarks that showed self-awareness, I didn’t particularly expect the Rock Ridge fight scene to first interrupt a closed set where an all-male chorus was performing a snappy little number called “The French Mistake” under the direction of Dom DeLuise (which, by the way, is one of my favorite scenes), and explode into then the cafeteria and before finally landing on the streets of Hollywood. The movie’s existential view of itself reached its pinnacle when members of the cast watched the movie’s ending in the theater as it was being filmed.

Did I chuckle at this movie? I did. And I understand why Mel Brooks is heralded for his humor. But, ultimately, it just wasn’t my kind of movie. I felt that the type of comedy verged on that of Airplane!, which admittedly came six years after this one, but it didn’t quite get there. While I say I chuckled at some jokes in Blazing Saddles, I full out laugh every time at parts of Airplane! I’m glad there are folks out there who feel just the opposite – what kind of place would this be if everyone’s comedic tastes matched mine?

My takeaway: Craftiness beats underhandedness, so long as they are in opposition. And a wed wose is womantic.

Royal Wedding - It's Almost Christmas

Royal Wedding

Director: Stanley Donen

Marriages are very healthy, sir. You see, married men live much longer than bachelors.  –Chester

If that's true, they're only trying to outlive their wives so they can be bachelors again. –Tom Bowen

He didn't have to chase very hard after Ellen. She stood still and waited. –Tom Bowen

Very quiet she is, but deep. At least I hope she is deep or else she’s wasting a lot of her time being quiet. –James Ashmond

From Netflix:

Brother-sister dance duo Tom and Ellen Bowen (Fred Astaire and Jane Powell) get the chance of a lifetime when they're booked for a London performance on the eve of Elizabeth II's nuptials. In the course of their journey, Ellen meets her match in Lord Brindale, and Tom finds romance with a British hoofer. Will love break up the act? Peter Lawford and Sarah Churchill also star in this classic 1950s musical comedy.

My favorite Christmas movie is Irving Berlin’s White Christmas. I love it for the music, the dancing, the clothing, the sets… but mostly for the way it makes me feel. From the moment Royal Wedding's opening credits began, I knew this movie would stir up the same feelings. And while it never quite got to White Christmas level, it sure did make me smile without trying.

This movie was made 3 years before White Christmas, and it looks very similar. It has the same faded coloring, where the edges blur into one another. And I instantly love it. As the opening scene begins, I find I love Jane Powell’s opening number dress… and then I find I love the opening number! And I feel like this whole post is going to turn into a love letter to Royal Wedding.

They speak differently in the old movies… they’re classy yet real. And the comedic timing is different than in today’s movies. It’s not better, it’s not worse. It’s just different. And I can’t imagine switching the two. They are perfect in their time, and I enjoy them both. But in the old movies, even their voices sound different – perhaps it’s due to the less-sophisticated sound systems, or perhaps it’s just the way things were back then. I don’t know and I won’t ever know. And I kind of like that.

And speaking of timing (which I was, before I got side-tracked), how can you not enjoy Fred Astaire’s timing in both comedy and dance? He’s magical. Even when he’s dancing on the walls and ceiling, he does it with such finesse that it doesn’t look hokey. It surprised me to know, upon looking at his filmography (IMDb is the best movie companion you can have – it knows all the answers to your question and never steals your popcorn) that I’ve seen only one other of his movies: Holiday Inn. And I've seen that only once!

The movie’s plot was very simple: two siblings, famous for their song-and-dance performances, travel to London to perform around the time of a royal wedding taking place. Both Tom and Ellen seem to balk at the idea of marriage – Ellen is having too much fun playing the field and Tom is married to his job. That is, until they find their perfect matches and have to decide if love is a strong enough reason to change both their minds and their lives. It’s no surprise, of course, that love conquers all in a musical, but they played it out very well.

But not everything in the movie is perfect. There’s a scene when Ellen and John are walking over a bridge and Ellen eventually breaks into song. It’s supposed to be evening, and the older camera and lighting equipment and techniques make it hard for the viewer to properly see their faces. While I appreciate the reality of the moment – it IS hard to see folks’ faces at night – I also miss the enhanced “moonlight” effects of today’s cinema.

While Jane Powell’s character Ellen has several solos in the movie, the best numbers for me are the ones she and Fred Astaire’s Tom perform together. While she has a great voice, the solos just don’t do it for me without Fred’s accompaniment. But their dancing gets me every time! The dancing... and the clothes!

My only true complaint was that the ending felt rushed. It’s as if they got to the end of their last reel of film and realized they didn't have any left over to finish off the movie. So they tacked on a 2-minute wrap-up and hit the end credits.

My takeaway: never close your heart or eyes to love, for it tends to find you anyway; and you’ll waste a lot less time if you’re ready for it when it shows up. And I was born in the wrong decade.

Midnight's Children - A Long, Slow Beautiful Dance

Midnight’s Children

Author: Salman Rushdie

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. –Narrator

I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world. –Narrator

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence. –Narrator

Description on book jacket:

Born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, at the precise moment of Indian’s independence, the infant Saleem Sinai is celebrated in the press and welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru himself. But this coincidence of birth has consequences Saleem is not prepared for: telepathic powers that connect him with 1,000 other “midnight’s children” –all born in the initial hour of India’s independence – and an uncanny sense of smell that allows him to sniff out dangers others can’t perceive. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem’s biography is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious.

Rushdie’s works hold the stigma of being hard to read. I got to about the second page when I began to understand why. Rushdie doesn’t use particularly difficult words, though he speaks of Indian and Pakistani names and places which were very foreign to me; he doesn’t speak particularly abstractly, though he does have his moments. The difficulty lies – at least for me, and at least in this novel – in his sentence structure, his unbelievable storyline and his tendency to jump between present and past. Several times, Rushdie chooses not to use conventional grammar, often listing a series of words with no commas where normally commas would exist: “And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane!” His sentences also run long, a few times eclipsing multiple paragraphs. I found that the best way for me to understand and keep straight what I was reading was to read it aloud, as if I were telling the story to an audience.

The storyline, too, was difficult to get behind. It was told first-person by Saleem Sinai, though to be honest the narrator would sometimes refer to himself in the third person: “Saleem could sink no lower: I could smell, on myself, the cesspit stink of my iniquities.” I tried to suspend my reality and believe everything that Saleem wrote about himself, though it got difficult at points. While I can accept that ordinary people have extraordinary gifts or powers – let’s face it, I was one of the two people who watched Heroes to its bitter end – and I can accept some of the various adventures Saleem takes, I found it hard to swallow the portions where jealousy was literally sewn into clothing or guilt cooked into food, where emotions were detected by smell and pheromones changed at will, where electrical current passed undetected through a body in a latrine.

The narrator jumps constantly and without warning between past and present, as he interjects asides to and comments from the woman to whom he is telling his story. And while he gives many dates and even times (mostly midnight) in his accounts of the past, there are time jumps even then.

The story begins about 30 years before Saleem was born. The narrator recounts the story of how his grandparents met, fell in love, got married and progressed to childbirth; and then of how his parents met, married and lived before his birth. He spoke of his mother’s encounter with a fortune-teller who prophesied her son’s birth:

A son… who will never be older than his motherland—neither older nor younger… There will be two heads—but you shall see only one—there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees… Newspapers praise him, two mothers raise him! Bicyclists love him—but, crowds will shove him! Sisters will weep; cobra will creep…Washing will hide him—voices will guide him! Friends mutilate him—blood will betray him!...Spittoons will brain him—doctors will drain him—jungle will claim him—wizards reclaim him! Soldiers will try him—tyrants will fry him…He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die… before he is dead.

The narrator then details his life and how it paralleled the life of his land-twin, India, which gained independence at the very moment when he was born, forever bonding them. Saleem’s life is one of monetary privilege and physical disadvantage. As the story continues, we are taken to such places as Karachi in Pakistan, the Sundarbans in Bangladesh, Delhi and Bombay. Intertwined with the story of Saleem is the story of India – Rushdie includes politicians like Mian Abdullah and Indira Ghandi, real and fictitious military personnel like General Zulfikar and Tiger Niazi, gods like Krishna and Ganesh and events like Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and the “cleansing” of the slums.

There are some beautiful passages in the book that, when read aloud, have such poetic cadence and flow that I read them several times before moving on. One of the largest blocks of this poetry-language is found when Saleem is under the influence of a very high fever, dreaming restlessly (excerpt only; full passage is larger):

Between the walls the children green the walls are green the Widow’s arm comes snaking down the snake is green the children scream the fingernails are black they scratch the Widow’s arm is hunting see the children run and scream the Widow’s hand curls round them green and black. Now one by one the children mmff are stifled quiet the Widow’s hand is lifting one by one the children green their blood is black unloosed by cutting fingernails it splashes black on walls (of green) as one by one the curling hand lifts children high as sky…

I learned many things about India’s history, though I can’t promise anything will stick. What’s more is that since the narrator entwines the fictional with the nonfictional, it is sometimes hard to distinguish which parts are fabricated. It’s almost the Forest Gump concept in an Asian setting.

Despite the difficulties I had with the book – and the overwhelming feeling I had at the length of time it took me to complete it (there may have been tears) – I am surprised to say that I thoroughly enjoyed all the pieces that made up this award-winning and highly-praised book: the language, the structure, the characters and plot; the time-jumps, the places, the feelings evoked. I wouldn’t change any of it and would recommend it to anyone with patience, an open mind and lots of time.

My takeaway: My actions, my words, my very existence is a part of the broader picture of my city, country and world; my life’s labors do not end with me, and are never solely my own. And I will never hide in washing chests.

The Gods Must be Crazy - Two Out of Three Ain't Bad

The Gods Must be Crazy

Director: Jamie Uys

Are the voices in my head bothering you? –Woman in lunchroom

The rhino is the self-appointed fire prevention officer. When he sees a fire, he rushes in and stamps it out. –Narrator

I said stop playing that bloody game! –Boga

Confession: the only thing I knew about this movie was that it included people using a language that incorporates clicking. And the only reason I knew this was because of Russell Peters’s stand-up bit where he travels to South Africa and realizes for the first time that what he heard in The Gods Must be Crazy wasn’t part of the writer’s attempt at comedy. Netflix shed a bit more light: 

Three vignettes highlight the surreal in this 1980 classic comedy written and directed by Jamie Uys. Among the three, the one about a Coke bottle falling out of the heavens and becoming a one-of-a-kind object coveted by everyone in a small African village is a cult favorite. The bottle creates such dissension that its finder, Nixau, decides the gods must’ve been crazy to give such a gift, so he sets out to drop it off the edge of the world.

Netflix mentions three vignettes but only describes the one. Going into this, I had no idea what to expect from the other two, or even that the three would be intertwined. After watching the movie all the way through, I don’t really quite know what to make of it. It’s a “classic comedy” according to Netflix, and I did laugh… but I don't think this will rank up there for me as one of the best comedies I've ever seen. The funniest part for me was the trip that Andrew Steyn took into the city to pick up Kate Thompson for the Reverend. I couldn't stop laughing as he worked to open and then close the gates without being able to stop his car -- it wouldn't start up again if it died, according to Mpudi -- and then as he fell repeatedly into the water trying to dislodge the car from the mud. And again as the whole comedic affair began anew as he and Ms. Thompson had to return the same way from which he'd come.

The Coke bottle vignette was definitely the best contrived portion of the movie. The story line was funny, and the setup was genius. Setting it up as a documentary allowed for the “natives” to remain in their own world without influence of the filmmakers. The casting, as well, was brilliant as I found it hard to believe that I was not, in fact, watching a tribe of bushmen in Africa. The character of Nixau was endearing throughout the movie, and I understand why this portion of the film became a cult classic, as it were.

The part of the film I enjoyed the least – aside from the fact that Mpudi’s voice never matched up with his mouth, which by the way, drove me crazy! – was the guerrilla war. I never fully grasped what was going on, and rolled my eyes whenever their portion of the story came back on the screen. I understood their existence only when they kidnapped Kate and the children, but even then I didn’t much enjoy their storyline. I suppose it’s all opinion, and someone else watching the movie may find this portion to be one of the better parts; I, however, just didn't like it.

For the most part, I feel like I laughed when I was supposed to laugh, I sympathized with the characters I think they wanted me to side with, disliked the characters I was supposed to dislike. I enjoyed the movie, but won’t be going out of my way to see it again, especially because I have confirmed that those 10 minutes or so of the car trip can be found on YouTube.

Takeaways: Different views are not necessarily better or worse than my own; they are merely different. Littering can have negative effects on more than just the environment. And Smokey the Bear is the regional, but apparently not the universal, mascot of forest fire prevention.

One for the Money - Debbie Does... Not

One for the Money
Director: Julie Anne Robinson

We got this good cop bad cop thing going...except we’re hookers. –Lula

I was shooting a gun. How hot is that? I'm gonna nail Morelli. Not 'nail' Morelli! You know what I mean... –Stephanie Plum

How does a person eat like you eat and look like you look? –Joe Morelli

Janet Evanovich's spunky heroine, Stephanie Plum, is adrift after getting a divorce and losing her job. To make ends meet, she becomes a bounty hunter, with her first big case revolving around a high school boyfriend who may be falsely accused.

Let me start by saying, “I’ve read the book.” This one sentence should set you up for the kind of review you’re about to read. I could make an effort to avoid comparing this movie to the book on which it’s based, but I’m choosing not to. I took a linguistics class in college and was taught that part of what I bring to the table is the person I am, based solely on my past experiences. And in this case, one of my past experiences is reading this book. So I can no longer see through the eye of someone who hasn’t, and why should I try?

So let’s begin with the casting. The main character is Stephanie Plum, as portrayed by Katherine Heigl. I feel like this was a good choice: Katherine is tall and slender with a penchant for playing strong-willed but slightly aloof women, of which Ms. Plum most definitely is. The other main characters are Joe Morelli, played by Jason O’Mara, and Ricardo Carlos “Ranger” Manoso, played by Daniel Sunjata. More decent casting. My one complaint, however, is the casting of Stephanie’s Grandma Mazur. Debbie Reynolds is a fine actress – a great actress, some may go so far as to say – but she is no Grandma Mazur.

The character of Grandma Mazur is supposed to be colorful verging on insane – she should be a loose cannon edging ever closer to explosion or death, with the understanding, and almost expectation, that the events will be simultaneous, if- and whenever they happen. Debbie Reynolds has too much control, too much poise, dignity and class to play such a character, in my humble opinion.

Plot then, is the next point of contention. While I’ve yet to see a movie whose book I’ve read that follows the plot to the tee – nor do I expect to in the future – I judge the movies based on the liberties they take with the plot. The liberties taken by this particular movie were understandable. However, I do have issues with a few. I don’t like the way they handled Benito Ramirez’s proprietary and psychotic attitude toward Stephanie. The element of fear was removed from the emotional make-up of the movie… and the ending, therefore, was vastly different than it was in the book.

I don't blame the movie for failing to live up to my expectations. If anyone's to blame, in fact, it's Janet Evanovich, the author of the series, for her comedic and addictive writing.

Overall, did I like the movie? Yes. Did I love it? No. Will I add it to my personal collection? Only if it makes it to the $5 rack at Target.

Takeaways: some stories are better between book jackets than credit rolls. Never leave the house in Jersey without your tube of lip gloss, can hairspray and pocketful of sass... gun and taser optional.