The Producers

Mel Brooks has made two films by that name, the first of which spawned the homonymous musical (12 Tonys!) on which the current oneⁱ was based. Go fig!

I will not bore you with detail as to exhactly how talented, gifted and skillful Brooks is, which is unfair to him - by rights it should be in the prubirn - but shamefully practical. So instead, I will convey my shocked amazement at the beautiful contradiction of two previously firmly held convictions of mine : one, that no movie worth the watching was made this millenium, and the other that... well, you know. Remakes, seriously ? Of a derivative work etc ? Just how intellectually dead is Hollywood these days, after all!

I would even dare say the sequel (gasp!) is even better than the prequel (GASP!), owing particularly to the excellent Lane-Broderick interplay. The first ten minutes of this thing stop your clock, so to speak, in that you forget what time it is. Polito'd be just as good, except he's stuck doing drill sargeant for an array of stray dogs (some of which good looking), whereas Lane & Broderick can ballet - and ballet they do, oh my oh my oh my.

Brooks has, among the numerous pokes and punctures he delivers to precogitated material (chiefly as found on the faggoty side of the... isle), the unmitigated audacity to cast a very tall, lanky and most definitely unvoluptuous Thurman in a role entirely cosubstantial with a fatass bombshell a la Monroe (whose simplicity au naturel would have been wonderful for this movie, by the way). It... sort-of works, I suppose, in a boyish kind of way.

You've got to see this thing.

1. The Producers, 2005, with Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick and Crooked-Toe-Girl. [↩]