Word: mel
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...selfish dopes who don't deserve the money but apparently get it anyway. The moral simplicity of the tale is so distorted, and its punch so diluted, that we end up disgusted with the heroes and indifferent to the outcome. Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and even Mel Brooks in his undisciplined way are intensely moral comedians; they treat comedy as much conflict between concepts of good and evil as tragedy, and accordingly are very strict about who their heroes and villains are and what values are being knocked around. There is substance in laughing at their films because...
...record. The Graduate, Catch 22, and Carnal Knowledge were based on real and depressing subject matter from which Nichols shaped a lot of very funny scenes. The relationship of humor to unhappy truth was accurate. If he conceived The Fortune as homage/satire about the vaudeville era, he forgot what Mel Brooks proved in Young Frankenstein: that the best way to poke fun at past cinematic formulas is still to take them seriously. He gave us buffoonery but it was a joke we didn't catch. The grimy, bourgeois wit of his earlier films was more perceptive and more easily shared...
...routine. But no one stays at the top of the pop charts for any length of time without twanging chords that reverberate in the teen-age psyche. What sets Elton apart is the fact that his appeal knows no demographic limits. Said British Rock Promoter Mel Bush, watching a sellout crowd of 75,000 file out of London's Wembley Stadium after John's appearance there a fortnight ago: "Elton's appeal is across the board. We had heads, hippies, film stars, lords and ladies here today." Says the star of the huge audiences he regularly attracts...
Edwards has directed some smart Hollywood entertainments (the under rated Darling Lili, for example) and two of the three previous Clouseau excursions. This one is the most raucous of the lot, and possibly the best. It may not be as wild or inventive as Woody Allen or Mel Brooks or the Monty Python team. But The Return of the Pink Panther is fully as funny, in its own brassy, uncomplicated way, and that is probably what counts...
...evidently, the price one pays for an Allen comedy. It is worth the fee. For unlike his closest cinematic competitor, Mel Brooks, Allen aims his custard pies up, not down. If his humor is merciless, it is not unkind; Boris' angry monologues with God are closer to Fiddler on the Roof than to comic on the make. The same affection courses through his parodies of Fellini and Bergman and of Pierre at Borodino. In mocking classics, in touching on the topics of religion and mortality, Allen has drawn laughter where there was silence and mustaches where there were faces...