Tag: The Producers
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Year Of The Vampire: Dracula Dead And Loving It Doesn’t Suck
(Welcome to Year of the Vampire, a series examining the greatest, strangest, and sometimes overlooked vampire movies of all time in honor of “Nosferatu,” which turns 100 this year.)Comedy legend Mel Brooks ended his career on low note, with his final film “Dracula Dead and Loving It” bombing at the box office in 1995 and…
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Mel Brooks on losing the loves of his life: ‘People know how good Carl Reiner was, but not how great’
From best friend Carl Reiner to wife Anne Bancroft, the great comic has had to face great loss. But even in the middle of a pandemic, the 95-year-old is still finding ways to laughIn February 2020, I joined Mel Brooks at the Beverly Hills home of his best friend, the director and writer Carl Reiner,…
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Mel Brooks to Be Honored With L.A. Film Critics Career Achievement Award – Film News in Brief
Mel Brooks Awarded With the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Career Achievement AwardThe Los Angeles Film Critics Association (Lafca) has announced that legendary filmmaker Mel Brooks will receive the Lafca Career Achievement Award.Brooks began as a comic and writer on Sid Caesar’s variety show, “Your Show of Shows” and went on to create the comic…
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Bamboozled, Showboat and Vitalina Varela: Jim Hemphill’s Home Viewing Recommendations, March 27, 2020
Although it borrows liberally from earlier films like A Face in the Crowd, The Producers, and Network, there’s nothing else quite like Spike Lee’s 2000 satire Bamboozled, the most ferociously funny movie of the writer-director’s career as well as one of his most formally adventurous. It’s a movie of extremes, raucous in its gleeful willingness…
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Jojo Rabbit review – down the rabbit hole with Hitler
Taika Waititi follows a distinguished tradition with this ‘strange art comedy’ about a boy growing up in Nazi Germany, but fails to cut to the dark heart of the matterSince the days of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, film-makers have adopted naive or comedic perspectives to pierce and deflate the hideous bubble of Nazi ideology –…
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Toronto Film Review: ‘Jojo Rabbit’
Long ago, turning Nazi Germany into a joke was verboten. Or, at least, it seems like it was; it’s actually hard to imagine a time when that was the case. Charlie Chaplin made Hitler into a figure of ridicule in “The Great Dictator,” released in 1940. I grew up watching “Hogan’s Heroes,” which portrayed life…
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MoviePass Kills Repeat and Unlimited Movies, and Will Cost You $10 More Each Month If You’re Not Careful
In a move that seems to borrow business strategy from Mel Brooks’ protagonists in “The Producers,” who attempted to stage an intentional Broadway flop and oversell production shares for profit, recent changes to MoviePass policy suggest the service’s profitable subscribers are the ones who use it the least.While MoviePass remains $9.95 per month for an…
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Martin Scorsese Receives First Robert Osborne Award As TCM Classic Film Festival Gets Underway In Hollywood
I made it back from CinemaCon in Vegas yesterday just in time to take in the opening night of the ninth Annual TCM Classic Film Festival, again taking place at the fabled Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. So glad I made it because this evening gave us a double dose of cinema icons with Mel Brooks…