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Blazing Saddles 1974
Not my favorite Brooks film, because while it's remarkable what he's able to get away with, even today, he's not really at his funniest when getting away with stuff. Unlike HISTORY OF THE WORLD, PART 1 (which is just non-stop spoof) and YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (which works on every imaginable level), the centerpiece material in SADDLES (i.e., Brooks' attempt to push the racial envelope as far as he can) ranges from mildly amusing to kind of flat, and it's the unrelated…
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In the House 2013
A gleeful contradiction -- a meticulously assembled story about the problem with meticulously assembled storytelling. Ozon suggests that the allure of fiction is in the voyeurism of glimpsing the lives of others, messy and impulsive and human, not in intellectualized deconstruction; but of course the film itself is nothing more or less than a tidy little deconstruction, arranged just so with its jaunty violin score, ultra-precise editing, and constant self-revision. When his head isn't lodged firmly in his ass (e.g. with HIDEAWAY), Ozon can be wonderfully playful and entertaining.
