Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker and parody cinema
Just finished watching Top Secret! and hadn't seen it in a long time. Still really good. Not quite up there with Airplane! or the first two Naked Guns but there's still a multitude of brilliantly silly, creative visual gags and wordplay. So, what happened to these guys? Has there ever been a more depressingly marked slump in quality from once hilarious filmmakers? I know David Zucker went a bit nuts post-9/11 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Carol), but does new-found hardline Conservatism mean you physically can't be funny anymore? Abrahams seems to have pretty much retired after the lacklustre Jane Austen's Mafia! (possibly related to exclamation mark fatigue), and Jerry Zucker shifted in to sporadic producer credits, probably made a metric shit-ton of money with Ghost, and floundered with the awful ensemble comedy Rat Race.
And does their decline simply mean that the parody film had a limited shelf-life anyway? At the cinema for certain films right now you may well get trailers BACK TO BACK for Scary Movie 5 (a lame riff on Paranormal Activity plus gay and fart jokes) and Marlon Wayans' A Haunted House (a lame riff on Paranormal Activity plus gay and fart jokes). Both looked utterly, exhaustingly awful, beyond lazy, offensive, completely dull witted dross of the lowest order. Only one had Charlie Sheen though, so that's some respite. Is it even possible to do a decent parody these days? Should you even bother when the whole genre is so tarnished? Is there even still an impulse to lampoon when the source materials are so debased and awful in the first place? I understand the business impetus behind it, sadly, as you'll rarely fail to claw back a profit when so little is invested in the first place. But I cannot for the life of me see what an audience gets out of it.
I know the Epic/Date/Whatever Movie slating has been going on for a while now and has achieved precisely nothing. I'm just wondering whether this is just the natural end result of a genre doomed to implode or whether it would still be possible to make a film of the calibre of Naked Gun or Airplane! these days, and whether it's possible to pinpoint the exact moment when it all went irredeemably wrong. I might be tempted to suggest it was with the release of Spy Hard. That was fucking dire, and it's all been downhill since.
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Apologies for the absurd amount of words.
It's a very, very slow day at work. Hence watching an entire film.
Black Dynamite
Shit that is a good point
Black Dynamite was awesome.
Although, and this is really irritating, Black Dynamite worldwide box office: $2.9m. Meet The Spartans worldwide box office: $84.6m.
I don't know what lies in store for the genre
but Hot Shots Part Deux happened and that's all that matters.
''President Benson''
''No you're not, I've seen him on TV. Older man. About my height.''
I presume you have the series of Police Squad on DVD?
Yeah,
I've listened to a few of the commentaries too which were interesting, where they said that the show failed because TV is a passive viewing experience and people would miss the background gags because they were used to their laughs being telegraphed by music cues and canned laughter. It'd probably fit in to today's TV landscape much better, oddly, now that certain shows are willing to be much denser and command more of the audience's attention.
Is this some kind of bust?
I'm sorry we took a while getting here
We would have come sooner, but your husband wasn't dead then.
FROM BEIJING WITH LOVE
it's not that recent but yea
i didn't read the thread anyway.
Trying to think of recent good examples of the genre
Not Another Teen Movie was good, but that's twelve years old now.
True,
also it was pretty uneven. I agree that it was the best of its ilk though, and really lucked out with unearthing Chris Evans. He single-handedly lifts a lot of middling material.
Pretty sure one of the Zucker's directed Scary Movie 3
because I saw it on that basis. I actually found it pretty amusing too.
The problem with the genre is that those epic/scary/date Movie films are specific parodies, as in they rely on sending up sequences from well-known films.
Airplane! is obviously a weird one when you consider how much they didn't write, just bought an old script and played it for laughs. I've still never seen Zero Hour but apparently it is a weird film to watch after seeing Airplane!
But regardless, those films are all so much cleverer than mere Simpsons style homage comedy. I think films like Dodgeball and Anchorman are more obviously a modern take on the same ideas and they're both great.
I'd say in its day The Simpsons embodied the best elements of that kind of homaging,
playing with and exploiting genre tropes but using that as a jump-off point for abstract silliness. Like Hank Scorpio saying goodbye to his shoes, or McBain: Let's Get Silly.
Dodgeball and Anchorman go for the same kind of almost stream of consciousness silliness but hung on the barest hint of plot and get away with it by keeping the genre references really broad. Same goes for Hot Rod, which is also brilliant. The ZAZ films had a tighter reference on the main source material (60s police procedurals, Zero Hour, Elvis Presley movies, Top Gun, Rambo sequels). They spoofed a bunch of other stuff besides but always had that main element. The recent ripoffs have kept that framework but are now just flat out hitting every plot beat of a popular film, throwing in a fart noise and an unrelated pop culture character and hoping that mere recognition will make some idiot chuckle. I mean, if people are apparently just going to go and see these things regardless of quality, you'd think that just for the sake of the writers/directors' sanity they'd at least attempt a couple of decent gags. You'd think that just by accident they could come up with at least one passable punchline.
Woah, just one thing to get straight here: Hot Shots isn't a ZAZ film.
And they're just not that good as a result.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zucker,_Abrahams_and_Zucker
(Wow. Ruthless People? That film was really funny back when I first saw it. But I don't recall it being anything like the other stuff.)
Anyway, I don't think Hot Shots is a great deal better than Scary Movie 3, which is the only other one I've seen of their non-group projects. I've not seen Hot Shots Part Deux.
BASEketball is incredible but I think that's more about the South Park guys' script combined with Zucker's ability to direct comedy.
OK, fair, I was going with Abrahams' solo stuff from that era purely
because I like the two Hot Shots films. They're not up to the standard of the collective work but I think they hold up really well. The humour skewed much broader as time went on, to the point where I think Naked Gun 33 1/3, while still very funny, resembles the Hot Shots style more than it does Police Squad/Airplane, so you can see the overlap. I still haven't seen Scary Movie 3; even the intrigue of the return of David Zucker couldn't convince me that it'd be worthwhile after sitting through both 1 & 2.
does Kung Fu Hustle count?
probably not
I liked Kung Pow though
(haven't seen it since I was about 12 and not really very recent anyway)
i know a little german
that's him over there
top secret was amazing, watched it on a school trip to that london with a bunch of mates.
always surprised at how little attention it got compared to airplane/ airplane 2/ the naked gun
It's really funny,
so many great visual gags too
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akLC_JMjpjA
It's basically ONLY visual gags.
The script isn't as packed with silly, quotable dialogue as some of their others
but there are a few good ones in there.
''Nick, I've tried everything: the embassy, the German government, the consulate. I even talked to the U.N. ambassador. It's no use, I just can't bring my wife to orgasm.''
I'm not sure there is much quotable dialogue in any of the ZAZ films.
Almost all the gags stem from a juxtaposition of a completely serious line of dialogue in a context that lampoons it, or simply straight out visual gags.
Some of it is
although it's always reliant on context and delivery, sure.
''Know what I'm gonna do if we make it? I'm gonna go back to Eagle River and marry my gal, Edith Mae. Gonna get us a nice little place with a white picket fence. You know the kind. Two-car garage. Maybe a fishing boat. And in 15 years, when they're all paid for... I'll set my charges and blow the shit out of them.''
it was slaughter
we shall have to stop these afternoon football games
I re-watched Top Secret a while ago with my housemates (double bill with Story of Ricky which was unexpectedly a perfect combination in some weird way)
it's amazing, total surrealism. So many amazing sight gags some of which are barely even a gag.
I finally watched Story Of Ricky last week or the week before.
Truly magnificent. Start to finish. Inexplicable.
http://youtu.be/qYsjB-jWk10?t=2m19s
Such a great film
I've spent about 1/3 of my life trying to get more people to watch it
Fucking adore every frame of it.
Top Secret! And Airplane are amazing
Because they're well written, barmy and hilarious. They happen to be set in pastiche settings but that's not what makes them funny. It's the obviousness of what's coming, shifting 80s attitudes to 40s Germany, wordplay, turning to camera, serious actors clowning around etc.
Whereas modern day parodies think what made those films funny was the send up. It wasn't at all. Mimicking a film or era in itself isn't enough.
Need to look into what films they did / didn't do. Always thought Airplane 2 was their fault until recently.
I actually think Airplane II is surprisingly good given they didn't have anything to do with it.
I mean, someone sat there and just did a load of the same sort of jokes but in some ways it's the same way you can get 7 seasons of the West Wing even though Sorkin has probably written less than half of them.
It's not terrible
And the gag where Shatner just walks into the other room is plain amazing.
But it was the start of the problem (eg. repeating the same jokes rather than thinking of new ones). The core ZAZ films didn't do that until the last Naked Gun and that's why they're all so, so much better.
I think being a comedian consistently for decades is hard to
They have a style and that wears thin.
Comedic writers can adapt I guess. Ianucci has. But most have their time and know it.
They haven't written a film together since Naked Gun 33.3, though.
That's a LONG time back. Who knows what would happen if they could get back together as a team.
Is Austin Powers parody cinema?
If not, or if they're not recent enough, then the OSS:117 series of films are decent.
mel brooks subthread:
do you know what's genuinley terrible? dracula: dead and loving it. complete waste of leslie nielsen
See also: Spy Hard
And Bill Murray in The Man who knew too little
Nostalgic fondness for Robin Hood: Men In Tights aside
it is also not very good, despite the fine work of Cary Elwes. And Spaceballs is very inconsistent. History Of The World Part 1 is a lot of fun but the cracks were starting to show. Everything before that is solid gold.
Um, "Nostalgic fondness for Robin Hood: Men In Tights aside"
WTF? I remember my mate seeing that when it came out and saying it was awful. I seem to recall it being roundly slammed and generally listed as Brooks' worst.
Weird
Reception
Critics gave mixed reviews to the film, with many noting Brooks lacked as many humorous scenes as his earlier works.[4][5][6][7]
Rotten Tomatoes rated the film as "Rotten", giving it an overall 48% rating. Despite this, the film has since developed something of a cult following. Voters at the Internet Movie Database rated the film 6.4 out of 10. In an Entertainment Tonight review of the film before its release, test audiences did overall feel the film was a good spoof, but only about ¼ of those surveyed felt the film was strong enough to launch a sequel.
[edit]Box office
Robin Hood: Men in Tights was not one of Brooks's best grossing films.[8]
The film debuted at #6 at the North American box office, with only $6,841,830.[9] The film went on to gross a domestic total of $35,739,755.[2]
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That said, people on here seem to think Ghostbusters II was good.
I was only 9 when it came out
and used to watch it on video pretty obsessively until I was about 12 or 13. That's pretty much its ideal demographic. In fact it was probably the first instance of going to the cinema and seeing and recognising a spoof for what it was.
Also I still love Ghostbusters II. I saw that in my first ever back-to-back cinema day out with Back To The Future II when I was 5. Holds a special place in my heart. This shit me right up:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nh2BB7NyPM