Spaceballs (PG)
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In the '70s, Mel Brooks was Woody Allen's lowbrow, gutter-talking, ass-grabbing, shmatte-selling cousin from the outer boroughs. No allusions to the New York Review of Books for pin-striped Melvin: The scattershot energy of a Brooks movie found its origin in 75 years of the effacement of Jewishness from Hollywood cinema. Brooks reveled in what was considered "too Jewish" for Middle America by the Louis B. Mayers of the world, and the high point of his re-Jewification process--the 1981 History of the World, Part I--can still provokes gasps. (Its centerpiece--a Holocaust musical thinly veiled as a boffo salute to the Spanish Inquisition--is probably the closest film equivalent to a great Lenny Bruce bit.) All of which is why it was so profoundly depressing when, in the summer of 1987, Brooks released this incredibly stupid and unfunny movie aimed at eight-year-olds who love Star Wars. Perhaps still reeling from History's commercial failure, Brooks decided, as he careened into his sixth decade, that the truly low road was the only one for him: Thus Spaceballs' dick jokes and icky sight gags--and the sad sight of Rick Moranis in giant nerd glasses emulating Steve Martin's line readings precisely. In his best work, Brooks parodied Hollywood genres he knew and loved from his childhood. But there's nothing he's emotionally attached to in Spaceballs; pretty much every gag seems focus-tested not to soar over the head of a grade-schooler. (One exception: Brooks, inexplicably dressed as Chaplin's M. Verdoux, tells a couple of blond twins, "Chew your gum!") (Matthew Wilder)
Review by Matthew Wilder
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