Silent Movie
Director: Mel Brooks
Year Released: 1976
Rating: 2.0
I have to hand it to Mel Brooks: he'll do almost anything for a laugh. Anything. Sure, it doesn't always work - this particular movie, which is 99% silent (Marcel Marceau's "NO!" is the only utterance), relies too much on slapstick and corny jokes which generally don't do anything for me (unless they're done by absolute masters like Chaplin, Keaton, Arbuckle, Lloyd, etc.) - but it's not for lack of effort. Sid Caesar's chair flies across the floor, Burt Reynolds gets washed in the shower by three men, a pregnant woman causes a car to tilt upwards from the weight, Bernadette Peters' sassiness knocks tables over - if you are the kind of person who gets a kick out of a giant fly landing in Henny Youngman's soup and Mel himself using Coca-Cola grenades to ward off nasty capitalists, you know what to do. I prefer bawdy Mel (Blazing Saddles, History of the World, Part I) over all other Mels, but not all viewers are built the same.
