TCM begins tonight’s all-night salute to Mel Brooks, fittingly, with A Salute to Mel Brooks, a repeat of the entertaining AFI Life Achievement Award special televised last month by sister network TNT. But here, the festivities are presented uninterrupted by commercials, and in a longer, uncut version. And that’s just the start of a Brooks lineup so good that, for the first time in the history of TV Worth Watching, every entry of today’s Bianculli’s Best Bets will be devot

2013

Jul

THE TWELVE CHAIRS By David Bianculli

This is the first time TCM has shown this 1970 Mel Brooks film – the relatively (and unfairly) overlooked one he directed after The Producers but before Blazing Saddles. It stars Ron Moody and Frank Langella as an unlikely pair of Russians – one man a descendant of royalty, the other a beggar – who team up to find a fortune in jewels, sewn into the cushions of one of a dozen family chairs. The chair have ended up in various places over the years, and in search of fortune,

2013

Jul

EXCAVATING THE 2000 YEAR OLD MAN By David Bianculli

Matthew Buzzell and Kel Symons directed this 2012 documentary, originally shown on public TV, about the durable comedy character embodied by Mel Brooks, in a series of largely improvised conversations between Brook’s 2000 Year Old Man and Carl Reiner’s straight-man interviewer.

2013

Jul

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN By David Bianculli

One of Mel Brooks’ unqualified masterpieces. This 1974 satire of Universal Studios’ monster movies is brilliant not only because of its hilarious script and riotously funny performances, but because, visually and even tonally, it is so impressively faithful to the original Frankenstein films. Gene Wilder, Cloris Leachman, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr all are a riot – and Peter Boyle as the Creature, singing and dancing a duet with Wilder’s mad doctor, is at the center of one

2013

Jul

THE PRODUCERS By David Bianculli

Another unqualified Mel Brooks cinematic masterpiece. This one is from 1968, and stars Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder as Bialystock and Bloom, the Broadway producer and meek accountant who team up to try, on purpose, to create the biggest flop in Broadway history, as part of a complex get-rich scheme. What an idea – and what a musical they come up with! Dick Shawn, Kenneth Mars, Christopher Hewett and Lee Meredith co-star, in this movie that, decades later, inspired one of the biggest hits in

2013

Jul

WHOSE LINE IS IT ANYWAY? By David Bianculli

Did this series, which CW revived last week after several years of dormancy after its ABC run, continue to delight, even with new host Aisha Tyler? Yes. Try it – you’ll like it. I promise.

2013

Jul

CASINO ROYALE By David Bianculli

With this 2006 movie, the James Bond franchise was rebooted yet again, introducing Daniel Craig as the actor who still plays Bond today. This film recycles the title of the one Ian Fleming novel whose rights were sold elsewhere prior to the establishment of the “official” cinematic Bond franchise, starting with the inimitable Sean Connery. That’s why, on the CBS anthology drama series Climax! in 1954, Barry Nelson got to play American spy “Jimmy Bond” in a TV adapta

2013

Jul

DRUNK HISTORY By David Bianculli

Tonight’s edition of Drunk History focuses on the city of Atlanta, and one of its inebriatedly told stories has to do with the invention of Coca-Cola, and features a familiar face, even under the tacky beard, from Saturday Night Live.

2013

Jul

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS By David Bianculli

This 1944 movie has a plot which should be seen by all fans of Lost. It’s about a ship, during wartime, housing a small group of passengers with an even smaller crew. Where are they headed? How did they get there? And when and how do they disembark? I’d tell you more about this allegorical mystery, but I don’t want to risk offending the Spoiler Alert Police – a mere 69 years after this film, starring Eleanor Parker, Sydney Greenstreet and John Garfield, was made.

2013

Jul

WEB THERAPY By David Bianculli

SEASON PREMIERE: Lisa Kudrow is back with another season of her comedy series, one of the earliest good comedies to originate on the Internet. And this season, while her fabulous core cast is back (including Victor Garber and Alan Cumming), we also get such new guest stars as Steve Carell, Billy Crystal and Matt LeBlanc.

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