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An entertainment blog that pops culture right in the kisser.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

film | Trapped inside a wacky Broadway nightmare

A Mel Brooks movie musical adapted from a Mel Brooks Broadway musical based on a Mel Brooks movie farce about a Broadway musical (phew), THE PRODUCERS honors the Tony-winning pedigree of the crowd-pleasing 2001 play — and the Oscar-winning 1968 comedy that inspired it — for five deliciously promising minutes, and then becomes a glitzy migraine with song-and-dance diarrhea. Seriously. this first-to-second-scene turnaround leads to some of the most exasperatingly forced yuks since Christmas with the Kranks, which puts The Producers on par with Tim Allen wearing nothing but a fake tan and a Speedo: unpleasant at best.

Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick reprise their famed Broadway gigs as indiscriminate financier Max Bialystock and nebbish accountant Leo Bloom, a pair of 1950s cads who team up to put on a show that flops fast and hard, enabling them to pocket the residuals and hightail it to the tropics. Their craptastic find: a little gem called Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden, penned by a brash Nazi (Will Ferrell) as a gushing ode to Großdeutschland, complete with a goosestepping chorus line formed into a climactic Busby Berkeley-style swastika. On paper, this premise is bad-taste bliss, and the bizarre Springtime for Hitler sequences are orchestrated with a roguish wink that's missing from the rest of the film, but maybe that's because the talents of director Susan Stroman — a holdover from the original Broadway crew — seem better suited to the theater. Unfortunately, she helms nearly every moment of The Producers with a live performance in mind, from the static camera work and anti-cinematic staging of the big set pieces to the awkward hold-for-laughter-and-applause pauses every time there's a joke or a production number.

Lane and Ferrell coast through their comfortably kooky element, and Gary Beach and Roger Bart (Desperate Housewives' psycho pharmacist) are blazingly boisterous as a flamboyant auteur and his "common-law assistant." But Uma Thurman, as a slinky swedish secretary who deftly shimmies her way between Max and Leo, is too conscious of her character's inherent wackiness to make her the sly sexpot the script requires, while the unusually manic Broderick twitches and tics like he's channeling Roger Rabbit through Jerry Lewis. Perhaps never before has so much energy resulted in so much lethargy. D+

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