Blazing Saddles
30th Anniversary Special Edition
(http://i.imgur.com/SW1TShG.gif)
(http://i.imgur.com/XHP7OoV.jpg)
Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLNQv19YpG4
The brilliance of Mel Brooks is in his ability to alter the perceived perception of what a movie is and isn't and Blazing Saddles is probably the grand daddy of them all with the constant breaking of the 4th wall. Just when you settle into this "Western", Brooks throws in a sight gag that takes you completely out of it when he injects modern day artifacts onto the set. The other thing that makes this movie work for me is having the 'movie within a movie' angle which I'm a huge fan of. So when the characters break away from their Western and end up at Grauman's Chinese Theatre to watch the very same movie they were and still are part of, it does give one a good chuckle, if not an outright belly laugh.
There are plenty of laughs to be found here with even more quotable lines that have been beaten into the ground over the years. With that said, the movie is kind of hard to watch today for a couple of reasons. You know all the jokes and there aren't any surprises left to be found anymore. But that's not my biggest issue. The movie in this day and age is very Un-PC with the amount of times the N-Word is thrown about as well as the F-Word. No, the other F-Word. Hey, I get it. It was a different time and era back in the 70's. But today, I just think it plays differently than its original intent and it kind of made me uncomfortable watching this today. It's still a funny movie, but those scenes that I just mentioned are going to stick out like a sore thumb today. Still worth a Rent though.
Great cast that includes Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Harvey Korman, Madeline Kahn, Slim Pickens, Dom DeLuise and Alex Karras.
Blazing Saddles DVD Screencaps
Coming soon...