Hard winds today. We ended up putting up the tree in my room this year! Chicken and coneys for meals.Went uptown with Mom and got (indecipherable) at Post Office.
New books were out over the river later and I finally saw SILENT MOVIE.
Tonight I heard the live BAND ON THE RUN on the radio and had along talk with Terry.
NOTES: Wish I could recall or at least interpret what we got at the Post Office. Oh, well...it's a lovely Depression-era Post Office we have here. All Art-Deco. I was there just Tuesday in 2011.
SILENT MOVIE was the somewhat self-indulgent comedy that madman Mel Brooks made after his spectacular success with BLAZING SADDLES and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. It's a clever idea for a comedy sketch...dragged out to feature length. Basically Mel Funn (Brooks) and his two associates (Marty Feldman and Dom Deluise) were planning anew silent film and went around Hollywood attempting to convince some of the biggest stars of the day to star in it. These included, in unbilled cameos, Burt Reynolds, Liza Minnelli, Paul Newman and Anne Bancroft. It's not a bad movie. It's just NOT the laugh-riot they seemed to expect. Best part is famous mime Marcel Marceau, ironically and amusingly given the only one word bit of dialogue in the entire film. He says "No!"
A few years back, Amazon had a big box set of Mel Brooks DVD's on sale for only 35 dollars. SILENT MOVIE was included and I watched the whole thing again. Didn't laugh. Neither did my son. We both kept pointing out how clever this bit or that bit was, however.
I remember being totally smitten by Bernadette Peters. The bad guys in the film led by Sid Cesar,ran a studio whose motto read " et ar pecunia" if I'm remember correctly. I don't know why I remember that but I never found out what that means if anything. Any guesses?
ReplyDeleteAlberto Ramirez Jr.
According to imdb, the motto "Ars est pecunia" which means "Art is money" is a takeoff of MGM's motto "Ars gratia artis" which means "Art for art's sake."
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