The Wilder Wild West

 Dare we dig up a relic and once again confront the consequences of a misspent youth?

BLAZING SADDLES (1974) (B+) - About 20 years ago, I was dating a woman 12 years younger, and I thought it would be fun if I schooled the young woman on the great joy of watching "Young Frankenstein." This was 30 years after its release, and I'll never forget how, after about 10 minutes of Borscht Belt slapstick (the worst part of the movie) that left my date stone-faced, I leaped for the remote to turn it off, embarrassed that I was now on the wrong side of my 40s and out of touch with the person on the couch who born the year the movie came out.

 

So it was with trepidation that I approached the whole idea of screening "Blazing Saddles," the other Mel Brooks-Gene Wilder collaboration, released earlier in 1974. And this one comes with a whole nother hornet's nest of pitfalls -- it has a script riddled with the n-word, and it leaves few vulnerable groups unscathed as it employs Brooks' patented broad vaudevillian humor to skewer the western genre that he and others grew up with. Good lord, should anyone watch this anachronism anymore? 

The screenplay was a five-person effort, which included Richard Pryor, who gave cover to Brooks' regulars to let fly with the racial epithets and who was supposed to star, but for his drug and alcohol battles rendering him unreliable. Enter Cleavon Little, who is a revelation as Black Bart, who lucks out when he's plucked from a lowly railroad job and foisted on the town of Rock Ridge as sheriff. This is the plan of Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman), who needs the town's real estate to reroute his railroad through. The plan is that the sight of a black sheriff will cause all the townsfolk to flee.

Surviving the initial backlash, Bart teams up with the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder) to win over the residents and fend off Lamarr's henchmen, which includes the monstrous moron Mongo (football player Alex Karras), who achieves screen-legend status when the character drops a horse with one punch. Lamarr also sends in a German chanteuse -- the impeccable Madeleine Kahn satirizing Marlene Dietrich -- who succumbs to Black Bart's charms because ... well, you know what they said back then about the brothers. 

This all gets quite silly, of course. And the movie has burnished its notoriety with scenes and one-liners that got passed around my junior high back in the day -- bean-eating cowboys farting around a camp fire; "Where the white women at?"; and, of course, "Excuse me, while I whip this out."

It's been 50 long years since even the idea of a spoof of westerns seemed like something that could work. Jokes about a man constantly being mistaken for Hedy Lamarr ("It's Hedley!") certainly don't age well. The kitchen-sink slapstick can still elicit belly-laughs, but too much now just seems more embarrassing than gut-busting. You can carve out a pretty fun drinking game every time a new vulnerable group gets made fun of. (Even Kahn's character, Lili Von Shtupp, not only has a slut-shaming name as subtle as a poke in the eye, but she comes with a wacky speech impediment.) Back then, you could be an equal-opportunity offender and be rewarded with a hit movie; these days, the few of us who bother to revisit that era will find it more quaint than hilarious. We won't even get into the beta-meta ending, which breaks the fourth wall and offers a spectacle of anarcy, featuring hundreds of extras, that would make Cecil B. Demille blush and which would leave anyone under 40 baffled as to how this would ever be considered amusing.

But, "Blazing Saddles," for better or worst, is a snapshot of a moment in time. In 1974, it had been less than 50 years since Al Jolson performed in blackface. Hollywood of the '40s and '50s was still a fresh memory, and Brooks was the master of satire. Nazis and Klansmen were played for laughs. Effeminate men were a riot. Ethnic putdowns were the coin of the realm. You could argue that the excessive use of the n-word is so over the top that it makes a powerful argument against racism. Who can say anymore? Who cares? Why did I even bring it up? (Counter-argument: the Library of Congress has preserved the movie in the National Film Registry.)

That said, there is much to enjoy about this crazy production. Little is smart and charming. Wilder is an understated gem. Kahn was probably the funniest actress of her generation (she would re-team with Wilder, more famously, in "Young Frankenstein"). I laughed when town leader Howard Johnson (again, that name was funny back when Nixon was president) held up a floral wreath and announced that he wished to "extend a laurel ... and hardy handshake" to the new sheriff. That one will always trigger the 12-year-old in me. Even during this enlightened era we now live in.

REMEMBERING GENE WILDER (C) - This is a rather glum hagiography about the career of Gene Wilder, narrated in his monotone from beyond the grave, presumably from the audio version of his 2005 memoir. He was not only a great comic actor who peaked in the 1970s, but he went on to make his own movies and was also a published author.

But this unimaginative slog through his oeuvre leans heavy on the likes of Mel Brooks -- almost certainly spinning apocryphal, embellished tales of their time together, especially that great run of "The Producers," "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein -- and, for some reason, Harry Connick Jr. Other random folks who show up include Alan Alda, Richard Pryor's daughter, and Eric McCormack. Ben Mankiewicz puts on his serious glasses to play cinema historian for the guy who played Willy Wonka.

Wilder was intensely funny. The bar he set in "Young Frankenstein" will always be tough to clear for any actor. But it almost diminishes his contributions to have folks fawn over him as if he were some sort of saint. His relationship with Gilda Radner -- her cancer was diagnosed not long after they fell in love -- gets surprisingly short shrift, with a couple of backhanded digs at the former "SNL" star's troubles. Wilder's widow -- whom he met within a year of Radner's death -- dominates the second half of the film, which takes up Wilder's descent into dementia (in a Hallmark fashion). The man (and poor Gilda) deserves better.

Finding Your Voice

 

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES (A-minus) - There they are, at the top of the ticket, a dream team: Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane. You go into it thinking "Please don't screw this up." Thankfully, filmmaker Nathan Silver -- who has flown under our radar up until now -- delivers, along with his stars.

Schwartzman plays Ben, a depressed cantor who has lost his voice -- but not his job, because his two moms are big donors to the temple. He gets drunk (and slugged) at a dive bar. He lies prone in front of an oncoming truck (to no avail; it easily stops before it gets to him). By chance, he runs into his childhood music teacher, Carla (Kane), who decides to take his bat mitzvah class, along with a bunch of tweens, as a sly way of getting closer to him to look out for him. 

 

What develops is a charming update of "Harold & Maude," featuring a quirky odd couple who develop an improbable but deep bond that helps heal each person's psychic wounds. No one is better at this than Schwartzman, the master of intellectual quirk, and Kane (TV's "Taxi" and "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"), who can find the humanity in any screwball character. The two of them make the screen ripple with joy and melancholy, as they blithely carry every minute of the nearly two-hour run time. 

It's a little disconcerting to see Schwartzman -- the breakout youngster from "Rushmore" and then so many other Wes Anderson films and lo-fi indies -- start to descend into a chubby middle age. But that aging process, while it threatens to take the zip off his fastball, has the effect of wiping that smirk off his face and revealing another layer to his personality. Kane looks surprisingly youthful here, a cross between Ruth Gordon and Julie Delpy, a savvy mix of would-be cougar and mother hen. Their bond is ostensibly platonic, but it does intrude on others' efforts to set Ben up with the rabbi's daughter, Gabby (a vivacious Madeline Weinstein), whose healthy lust is too much for Ben to contemplate these days. (The rabbi is played by gagster Robert Smigel, who delivers one-liners with a low-key confidence.)

None of this would mean much if Silver didn't imbue it with smart humor and carefully layered characterizations. The whole production has the grittiness of a 1970s comic morality play, even copping the retro graphic styles for the opening credits (plus, see the soundtrack samples below). And the cast sinks its teeth into the clever dialogue, much of it subtle and deliciously Jewish. At one point Ben has to explain away the concepts of the afterlife: "In Judaism, we don't have heaven or hell; we just have upstate New York." Upon first meeting Carla, he tries to jog her memory, bragging that he got top grades. Her retort: "It's music class; everybody gets an A."

You can never be certain, right up until the end, if Ben will get his voice back (and if that matters), or if he seriously thinks he has more of a future with a woman decades his senior while passing up a romp with a randy younger woman. But the particulars of romantic possibilities are not really the point here. Toss aside your scorecard and let a movie by adults, for adults, carry you away with its nuanced storytelling.

BONUS TRACKS

The soundtrack adds to the '70s vibe with a bunch of folky throwbacks, many in Hebrew. They set a Lee Hazelwood mood. There are a couple by Arik Einstein, including "Hi Tavo (She Will Come)":

 

There is the glum "Wish I Was a Single Girl Again," from Tia Blake from 2008:

 

And this dusty from Buddy Gibson, "To Be or Not To Be":

New to the Queue

 Winning as often as we're losing, and that's not bad for an underdog ...

Our gal Aubrey Plaza ("Emily the Criminal," "Ingrid Goes West") stars in the story of a young woman who meets her older self, "My Old Ass."

Our guy Matt Johnson ("BlackBerry") co-stars as a man meeting up with his married female friend from college, as complications ensue, "Matt and Mara."

A couple of music docs: "Boom: A Film About the Sonics" and "Louder Than You Think: A Lo-Fi History of Gary Young and Pavement."

Let's see if Azazel Jacobs ("The Lovers," "French Twist") is back on his game with a fine cast in "His Three Daughters."

We're game for Demi Moore in a de-aging sci-fi thriller, "The Substance."

Sebastian Stan stars in a dark comedy about a guy struggling to like himself, inside and out, "A Different Man."

Microaggressions

 

THE TEACHERS' LOUNGE (B+) - Writer-direct Ilker Catak spins a fascinating story about small-stakes accusations and misunderstandings that consume a new teacher and the middle school staff and students around her. It's a small but compelling film that's tough to look away from.

 

Much of that comes from the star, Leonie Benesch, who plays the cool, caring Carla Nowak, an immigrant to Germany battling some cultural prejudices involving her and her students of color. The film begins with the administration's interrogation of Carla's seventh-grade class after a Turkish boy is seen carrying an unusual amount of money. Carla shows sympathy to her students and to the boy when his parents are called in for a tense conference with administrators.

It turns out another bright student, Oskar (Leonard Stettnisch), grabs the teacher's sympathies, especially after Carla, through surreptitious video surveillance from her laptop, apparently catches Oskar's mother, a staffer, of stealing in the teachers' lounge (she's not the only one nicking things). The mother is sent home on admin leave, and Oskar becomes a sort of folk hero among students. (The supporting cast of students is another asset, especially the rebellious student-newspaper staffers.) Carla's group conference with parents brims with tension.

Catak, writing the script with Johannes Duncker, has a compelling message to convey about "outsiders" and the passive-aggressive ways that closed social systems manipulate the truth and create sparring factions. At only a few ticks past 90 minutes, the film unspools its story methodically, showing a subtle transformation in Carla as she learns to navigate her new environment. (In a telling scene, she insist that a fellow Polish teacher speak German in the teachers' lounge.) The ending is heartfelt, with a whimsical final shot that suggests the dangers and rewards of bucking the system. 

BONUS TRACK: Life Is Short     

Screenings don't get more timely than "Mountains," a minor-key mini-drama about an immigrant couple getting by in Miami's Little Haiti community. If only this debut film had a little more chicken meat on its bones. Xavier and Esperance are a sweet couple, but the monotony of their days eking out a living in a gentrifying neighborhood is too often as dull as plain white rice.

You can tell their neighborhood is gentrifying not only by the "We buy houses" door-hangers but also by the presence of an improv theater. Xavier (Atibon Nazaire) works on home-demolition sites, and Esperance (Sheila Anozier) earns money as a crossing guard when she's not at home cooking and sewing. Surrounded by increasing affluence, Xavier spots a nice house that's bigger than their rundown one-bathroom place, seeing an opportunity to move up on the social ladder. Their son, Junior (Chris Renois) a college-dropout is a typical Americanized young man who has little patience for his parents' boring traditional lifestyle. 

We find out halfway through that Junior is honing a standup act at the improv theater. Director Monica Sorelle gives us little to glom onto narratively in the first half -- how many times can we watch Xavier clear debris (to make way for McMansions) or dutifully eat his lunch out of Tupperware. Nazaire has a Mike Tyson roughness and gruffness to him, but there is no real dimension to this stereotypically noble blue-collar man. Junior's standup set, about five minutes, shakes the film out of its stupor. But I just didn't have it in me to return to the worksite and find out if Xavier and Esperance get the chance to rise in the wake of the gentrifiers. Sorelle has crafted a sweet, quiet slice of life that floats in Haitian culture, but she needed more of a hook to hang a feature on.

Title: MOUNTAINS

Running Time: 96 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  50 MIN

Portion Watched: 52%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 9 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Went home and started in on this review.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 3-1 (maybe I'll catch the ending some day)

Life Is Short: Let the Story Begin

 

What is it with annoying mother-daughter movies this year? We stuck it out for the execrable "Tuesday" a few months ago. But we were not as patient with "Janet Planet," a tedious tale of maternal melancholy told through the perspective of the nerdy tween daughter, an obvious avatar of first-time filmmaker Annie Baker.

We waited a half hour for a plot to develop, and it just never materialized. When tween Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) went to a bread-and-puppet show with her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), and the hippie-dippy performance droned on for a minute or two, it was time to bail out. Before then, Baker was meticulously trying to craft a relationship between friendless Lacy and her depressed mother who is in a dead-end relationship with a monosyllabic cipher named Wayne. Janet likes to lie in bed with her daughter to help Lacy fall asleep, and it presents an opportunity for Janet to inappropriately whine about her unhappiness to an unhappy, though highly clever, girl.

Lacy dominates the first half hour, and there just is not enough narrative to sustain the film. Her best shot at having a friend comes when Wayne's daughter joins one of their outings, but it's obvious that Wayne will get the boot soon, and so too will go the daughter. We are forced to watch Lacy entertain herself with nerdy pursuits. For some reason we have to watch her practice the keyboards three separate times -- in extended sequences that grow more and more annoying. We also have to tolerate Lacy being annoying to Wayne when he is suffering from a migraine, and it's not clear whether he's supposed to be seen as a jerk for not wanting Lacy to keep pelting him with questions when it's obvious that she should know better.

Baker takes a molasses-like approach to her scenes, in no hurry to bring this in at much less than two hours. If I'm going to watch a mother and daughter mope around, it would be advisable to start developing the plot in the first 20 minutes or so. Otherwise, it's just your old '90s diary performed as rural hippie theater.

Title: JANET PLANET

Running Time: 113 MIN

Elapsed Time at Plug Pull:  30 MIN

Portion Watched: 27%

My Age at Time of Viewing: 61 YRS, 9 MOS.

Average Male American Lifespan: 77.3 YRS.

Watched/Did Instead: Talked politics with my movie pal who bailed with me.

Odds of Re-viewing This Title: 10-1

Throwback Thrills-Day

 

MAXXXINE (B) - God bless movie star Mia Goth and writer-director Ti West for their commitment to their trilogy of retro horror films, a delightful mix of spoof and homage. Here, they take their story -- which began with "X," set in the 1970s -- into the day-glo '80s around the seedy San Fernando Valley's porn industry as Goth's lead character Maxine yearns to cross over into the respectability of Hollywood.

 

Goth is riveting again as the cut-throat striver who will do anything to be a movie star, even as the friends around her start falling victim to a serial killer stalking L.A. In "X," she survived a slaughter on a porn shoot at a Texas ranch, with a dual role as the murderous old lady in the farmhouse, whom Goth then portrayed in the heady prequel "Pearl," set during the 1918 flu pandemic. Now set in 1985, the story finds Goth running from her past -- not just that '70s bloodbath but also her strict Christian upbringing, which is brought into stark relief through a single opening flashback scene to her childhood.

West crafts the story around his meal ticket, and he has an uncanny ability to not only send up the thrillers of the '80s era, but also to steep this film in the texture and tropes of the movies of that Cinemax era. (The needle drops of hits by ZZ Top and Kim Carnes don't hurt.) He also has a facility with writing dialogue that also walks the line between authenticity and parody.

Goth (who also stole a few scenes in "Emma" a few years ago) carries this on her shoulders, with a placid facial expression that brings to mind the mask-like visage of Isabelle Huppert. While portraying characters (Maxine, as well as Pearl) who were desperate to be stars, Goth emerges from this sequel as a classic movie idol. She gets solid support from veterans Giancarlo Esposito (as her sly business manager); Elizabeth Debicki as the mother-hen horror-movie director; and Kevin Bacon as a creepy Cajun private eye, chewing up scenery as if he just got kicked off the set of "The Big Easy" for overacting.

I could watch West and Goth follow this saga for a few more decades. It's a lot of dumb, juicy fun.

BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) (B+) - It was an interesting experiment, revisiting this onetime indie phenomenon on its 25th anniversary screening, along with a full house full of 20- and 30-somethings at a midnight show. I was wondering how it would hold up and curious about how it would play to a generation steeped in the internet and social media.

I first watched this on video some months after it was released in summer 1999. It was notable at the time for a brilliant PR campaign that tried to dupe us -- in the early days of the internet -- into thinking that this found-footage film was real (going so far as to hide the three stars from the spotlight during the rollout at film festivals). That all now seems quaint looking back from our jaded media-saturated land of artificial intelligence.

I heard several millennials grumble their disappointment as the lights came up and the final credits rolled, and the woman in front of me spent much of the final climactic 20 minutes of the movie scrolling through her cell phone. I was able to appreciate a slow burn of a thriller with fresh eyes and an open mind. When I first saw it, the steadily building terror had me jangled, even though I knew that it wasn't a real documentary.

This time, I was surprised to see how methodically -- and often blandly -- the suspense builds. And I was impressed by the three actors -- alpha female Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard (the only one to go on to have a decent acting career, including in "Humpday" and "Fully Realized Humans") -- who mostly improvised the dialogue and who wielded the handheld cameras, a key visual effect throughout the film.  

Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez conceived the movie and directed it and even edited it. The banality of three young adults getting lost in the woods, spooked by some strange but not necessarily scary sounds, dominates the running time until really the final 10 minutes when everything bursts into full-on horror. That includes the now-iconic scene of Donahue, snot running out of her nose, doing a video-selfie, her character apologizing on camera to the group's parents for her role in stranding the trio, and the final image before the cut to black. 

It is difficult to reconcile the experience of 1999 with that of 2024, but you can still say that "Blair Witch" is a successful horror film that can jangle your nerves even after multiple viewings.

BONUS TRACKS

"Maxxxine's" soundtrack blasts through era hits from New Order and Judas Priest, plus Animotion's synth earworm "Obsession":

And near the climax we are treated to Carol Burnett, of all people, belting out "There's No Business Like Show Business." (One character during the film reminds Maxine of the cutthroat nature of the industry: "It's not called show friends; it's called show business."