While it’s nice to learn that so many other people love The Cannonball Runas much as I do, it’s very unfortunate that such a discovery comes only with the death of Dom DeLuise. The actor passed away peacefully last night at the age of 75, and today the Internet is heavy in mourning, as well as in discussion and celebration of underrated DeLuise classics.
For me, after the apparently “classic” Cannonball Run movies and my obvious rememberance of the actor’s appearances in The Muppet Movie and on The Muppet Show, I thought of Don Bluth’s animated features, many of which feature the voice of DeLuise. I recall being so excited upon the release of Bluth’s All Dogs Go to Heaven as a kid, mainly because it reunited DeLuise with his Cannonball costar Burt Reynolds. Plus, as much as it was always a delight seeing DeLuise’s jolly face onscreen, his voice alone always gave me a warm feeling. Even his “Pizza the Hut” from Spaceballs comes off as someone you’d like to hug, as messy as that might be.
Speaking of Spaceballs, many around the web are obviously writing fondly of DeLuise’s work in Mel Brooks‘ movies, and at least one person has acknowledged the late actor’s work in Fatso, directed by Mrs. Brooks, aka Anne Bancroft. That and other remembrances can be found after the jump.
For city-dwelling adults without kids, Halloween can be truly frightening. With the pressure on to outdo ones friends, frenemies and total strangers with a costume that strikes the perfect balance between creative, alluring and topical, the average October 31st night out can be a lot like sixth grade, except with the added toxic influence of alcohol and biological clocks. Plus, this year the streets are expected to be full of Sexy and/or Ironic and/or Demonic Sarah Palins. Scary! So why not stay home and watch movies instead? If you’re gonna convince anyone to abandon their plans and spend the night on your couch instead, you’ve got to have a theme and a plan, so we’ve put together an outline for a full night of films, all of which are available on DVD and/or online, based around one of the ultimate icons of classic horror: Frankenstein. We lay it all out after the jump.
Lists of movies within movies are fairly common on the internet, enough that I now realize I need to finally see Bowfinger simply because I’ve counted about a million list makers in love with something titled “Chubby Rain.” And the lists are likely to keep on coming thanks to this week’s hot release, Tropic Thunder, which actually features two movies within (the Vietnam War film “Tropic Thunder” and the festival-winning making-of documentary “Rain of Madness”), as well as the upcoming How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which has spawned a popular fake movie trailer for an NC-17 film titled “Mother Theresa: The Making of a Saint” (previewed above). Yet until someone makes a Wikipedia page for “List of Fictional Films,” these blogged and forumed lists are necessary to keep us movie fans remembering those non-existent movies we wish existed.
Narrowing down to ten seemed to be difficult — fictional films have been at least nominally been created for tons of films about filmmaking, otherwise reflexive films, sketch comedies, spoofs, etc. — until I realized that a lot of these films within films are appropriately nominal or trailer- or clip-sized gags and would in reality be terrible (imagine actually watching the entirety of“Asses of Fire” from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut). Even “Je Vous Présente Paméla” (”Meet Pamela”) from Day for Night and the sci-fi film being made in 8½would probably be major disappointments in actuality if you expected from them the work of Truffaut and Fellini, respectively.
So, I went mostly with fictional films that would probably be bad, but would at least be amusingly bad — though I purposefully avoided fictional porns, including those from Boogie Nightsand The Big Lebowski, of which there are literally thousands:
I first caught wind of the news from Stu over at Defamer, and seeing as how his post features a montage of Brooksfilm clips that excludes Solarbabies (for which he apologizes), I present you with a clip from the film here. Isn’t it great to know that breakdance and beatboxing is still cool in the waterless post-apocalyptic future? Another thing that would be cool in the future: a Broadway adaptation of Solarbabies. Hopefully Brooks will forget about that Blazing Saddlesmusical that’s rumored to be in the works and concentrate on bringing one of his non-classics to the stage. It’d be kinda like Starlight Express meets Urinetown. If Xanaducan be a hit and Young Frankensteincan’t, I say this idea should at least be explored.
I don’t really know what the TakeApart blog means when they say, “with the times of today mirroring the times of the film, [Zabriskie Point] couldn’t be more relevant”––the movie’s such crazy hippie fantasy, I can’t imagine a time when it was ever relevant––but I’ll thank them for pointing to the clip of its beautiful but vacant stars sitting next to Rex Reed and Mel Brooks on The Dick Cavett Show.
Victoria Large at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, on David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s “outsourcing” of some of the shooting of Intimidad to their subjects: “The technique of allowing the subjects to help author their own story feels appropriate to Intimidad, not only because it allows for the intimacy of the title, but also because it reflects one of the most striking things about the film: that it is about those who take action and are not merely acted upon.”
David Hudson alerts us to the Invitation to the Dance blog-a-thon, which began at Marilyn Ferdinand’s blog yesterday. I’m thinking about taking a crack at how the dynamic of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is inverted in Dirty Dancing, but I’m open to other suggestions if you’ve got any.
Above: Mel Brooks’ The Critic, which won an Oscar in 1963. Found via this compilation of YouTube links to virtually every Oscar-winning animated short since 1932. Via Fimoculous.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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While it’s nice to learn that so many other people love The Cannonball Run as much as I do, it’s very unfortunate that such a discovery comes only with the death of 
