There's this wonderful movie starring Alec Guinness that i really want to watch.
But i need to work on Christmas cards.
So instead I need to find a film that's fun but in no way requires my attention.
Enter Spaceballs the film I've seen several times before and I've always had an amusing chuckle ad. That was the years have gone on I've become less and less interested in it cuz I've realised it's not that great. That is it's not great overall. I don't think Mel Brooks is particularly good at doing more modern science fiction satire.
He's phenomenal with westerns. He was really good with sword and sandal movies and anything involving European or North American history in the 20th century is just golden. But Star Wars just seems kind of odd. Maybe because it's just this one unique franchised and it really only has one venue to leech comedy out of.
I think it would have been better if you had done a Wizard of Oz spoof instead. As half of his jokes within this movie are just references to that.
Heck even taking Star Wars and completely adapting it into a Wizard of Oz story might have been fun. God knows a bunch of people today have done that and half of them aren't funny at all.
There are plenty of good sketches with in the movie. Individual jokes or humourful moments. Everybody knows what ludicrous speed is even if they haven't seen Spaceballs. And a lot of the offhand remarks from our main characters in response to their ridiculous situation is funny.
But that's just it, there's a lot of basic humour in this movie I just don't think the overall story is all that great.
I just don't think it's satirises Star Wars correctly. And in all truth I don't know how you do that. I don't have enough love for the franchise to know what buttons to push to make the best comedy. And I suspect Mel Brooks was the same way. He doesn't strike me as a guy who sits down to watch a lot of Science Fiction especially modern stuff.
However despite whatever issue I have with their overall comedy I still find it entertaining and well paced movie. It's fun enough to watch the soundtrack is basic but fun at the same time and if there's one thing Spaceballs does right it set design and costume design. This movie looks phenomenal I love the way everything looks from the lazy but very comedic flying Winnebago all the way to the space ball uniforms which somehow look cheaper and better then the original Star Wars uniforms. And I just like the disconnected nature of all the Star Wars material intermixing with more typical Mel Brooks trappings. Especially the Spaceball headquarters where the president of the Spaceballs resigns and we get more Star Trek jokes than we do Star Wars.
The most unique angle about Spaceballs today is its own self-contained Universe. Spaceballs is its own thing it's based on Three Star Wars movies and that's where it's always going to be. We're not going to have five or six newer films coming out in 40 years trying to build on the expanded universe of Spaceballs.
And even if we did the first one would do so poorly that it would never happen again. So now we have this really unique world with a bunch of basic Jewish jokes and off-hand references to Wizard of Oz being mixed in with comedic Star Wars tones that exists in a vacuum surrounded by an ever-expanding, confusing, ever dis-interesting Star Wars franchise that feels less and less like it has anything to do with its original film.
And now I think I'm rambling.
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