The Zen Kitchen

Airplane!

After the success of the Poseiden Adventure and The Towering Inferno, the 1970s brought us a slew of overly melodramatic disaster pictures, each one more ridiculous than the last. In 1980, there came a movie which would more or less put an end to all that crap.

Airplane! was the brainchild of Jim Abrahams and David Zucker, founding members of the Kentucky Fried Theater. This was their second film, and it was to be a film that would change the way comedies were made, for better or for worse.

I won't go into great detail about the plot of the film, since the plot is largely unimportant, and if you haven't seen the film, yet, then I have no idea why the heck you're reading a blog devoted primarily to film in the first place. What this film did first, did best, and which many imitators haven't quite able to capture (excepting perhaps Zucker & Abraham's third film - The Naked Gun) is perfectly mix satire with a never ending onslaught of sight gags, puns, double entendres, and literal humor.

The brilliance of this film is the fact that it never lets up for even a moment. The jokes come at a furious pace and often many at a time, its a film that almost demands several rewatches to catch all the gags that are thrown at you. Often, if you pay attention to what's happening in the foreground, you'll be missing the joke the film makers are throwing at you in the background.

What the many imitators of Airplane! have missed, however, is that its not just a movie about sight gags, fart jokes, and overly literal speeches, its also a satire of a genre that hits right on the mark. The comedy works because the actors play everything so seriously. As ridiculous plot twist after plot twist, the actors never crack a smile, they never wink at you to say this is all just a joke. No, Shirley, this is serious.

Its easy to make someone think or cry, to make someone laugh, however is such a subjective thing to do that its nearly impossible to make a comedy which appeals to everyone. This film very nearly accomplishes that incredible feat, and invents an entirely new subgenre of comedy in the process. While I don't think this is the greatest comedy of all time, it is perhaps the most ostentatious, the most accessible, and has the most constant laugh per second ratio of any film ever made. That's what gives it a spot as one of the greats.

"My orders came through. My squadron ships out tomorrow. We're bombing the storage depots at Daiquiri at 1800 hours. We're coming in from the north, below their radar."
"When will you be back?"
"I can't tell you that. It's classified."

Labels: film, list, Movies, reviews

posted by Shaun @ 11:33 PM