Mel Brooks is 90 years young, and he’s a spitfire, a spark plug. On stage at Radio City Music Hall, playing to an absolutely packed house, he reminisced last night about his career and took questions from the audience. This was all following a screening of “Blazing Saddles” that held up beautifully and elicited peels of laughter and applause as if it were still 1974.

Indeed, every star’s entrance onto the screen drew massive applause, from Harvey Korman to Madeline Kahn to Cleavon Little– all gone now. But the biggest and most thunderous ovations came from Mel himself and for Gene Wilder, who passed away just this week.

The movie pokes fun at everything, contains the first fart jokes ever on film and many many uses of the “n” word, sends up race relations and old Hollywood and the studio system, and ends in a big sequence with Nazis and KKK members. It’s insanely funny. I forgot how adeptly it breaks the “fourth wall” and becomes meta, and very modern, for a few minutes where fiction and meta fiction, some form of reality, all meet.

At one point Sheriff Bart (Little) is seduced by Lily von Shtupp (Kahn). It’s all in the dark, you see nothing, but there are noises and funny comments. Lily is supposedly impressed by the Sheriff’s manhood, and asks if it’s true about black men. That’s when the slurping noises come in. But Brooks told the audience after the screening that he excised a moment where Little tells Kahn “You’re sucking my arm.” Brooks said, “It was just too much.”

I asked Mel after the show if he’d slept all day. But he was too busy greeting everyone to stop and say No. On stage he rarely sits, but works like a stand up comedian. At one point he does a lap around the center area where the moderator sits next to Mel’s empty chair. God bless him, he’s like an extra wonder of the world.

In the audience at Radio City: Susan Stroman, who won the Tony for directing Brooks’s “THe Producers” on Broadway, Cady Huffman, who won Best Supporting Actress in a Musical, Roger Bart, star of Brooks’ Broadway production of “Young Frankenstein,” and comedian Nick Kroll. There was also a gaggle of Brooklyn friends and relatives, Mel’s daughter Stephanie, a lot of cousins named Kaminsky including Howard, who once ran Random House, and a first cousin of Mel’s who is 91 and just as lightfooted.

Brooks has been on tour with this screening-Q&A combo, and I can only hope that somehow it’s been filmed somewhere. It deserves to be made into a documentary. Mel Brooks is a national treasure. He has just one Oscar for writing “The Producers” in 1969. He should have received a Governor’s Award by now. Much as I love movies like “Airplane” and “The Naked Gun,” you can see how much Brooks influenced them just by watching “Blazing Saddles.”

The best reviewed film of the year, certified 99% on Rotten Tomatoes, is CBS Film’s brilliant “Hell or High Water.”The sleeper hit will cross $12 million this weekend and start earning money, a rarity among original non-comic book movies or sequels.

“Hell or High Water” stars Chris Pine and Ben Foster as a pair of bank robbing brothers with a purpose, to rob branches of the Texas Midland bank which has threatened to foreclose on their family ranch. Luck was on their side until Texas Ranger Marcus, (the sublime Jeff Bridges) makes it his mission to catch them as his last crowning achievement before his soon-to-be retirement.

Directed by Scotland native David Mackenzie and written by Taylor Sheridan, (who also wrote “Sicario”) this film had me from the first scene. I loved it because it’s a true artistic hybrid; a cerebral bank heist combined with “Bonnie and Clyde” and Westerns of lore. The complicated camaraderie and the love between the troubled brothers along with the action-thriller elements, has made this my favorite film of the year so far. Look for nominations all around for the mega talented threesome, as well as shout outs to Gil Birmingham as Marcus’s long suffering half Comanche partner Alberto Parker and Katy Mixon (who played Melissa McCarthy’s quippy sister on the just ended “Mike And Molly” sitcom) as the loyal, sassy waitress.

I spoke with David Mackenzie and Chris Pine at the recent LA premiere at the Arclight in Hollywood. I asked David how a Scottish director, (he still lives there) got such a magnificent hold on this singularly American story. He answered, “I did research, spent time there a few years before. It happened quickly. The way I like to work is very intuitively and being sensitive to the needs of the film.”

Pine — aka Capt. Kirk this summer– gave his take. “This film is in a unique American voice, like a Paddy Chayesky, or a Jeff Nichols or the Spanish Director Pedro Almodovar. Ironically this is by this brilliant Scottish director who has a mainline into the zeitgeist of what’s happening in America right now.”

What’s the difference, I wondered, between this film and “Star Trek”? Pine said: “It’s all make believe, this just happens to be on a smaller scale and allows for a bit more moments of quiet. I love doing both and this was a way a character that I often don’t get a chance to do.” What’s up next for him? “Next is Wonder Woman.”  (Pine plays her loyal consort, Steve Trevor.) “Then after that I’m craving to sitting in the sun and doing nothing.”

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UPDATE Well, we did say that Gus van Sant’s “The Sea of Trees” was going to be a bomb. And it was.

After playing in one theater for five days, “The Sea of Trees,” starring Matthew McConaughey and Naomi Watts, has made $2,730.

The one theater is the Sundance Sunset Cinema, in West Hollywood.

Here’s the funny part. The movie made about $600,000 in Italy in May. Huh? Maybe it caused the earthquake.

I guess video is next, VOD or iTunes, like “Blood Father.” Unlike with “Blood Father” at least “Sea of Trees” posted their box office.

Reviews are in this morning from the Venice press screening for Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land.” And they are terrific across the board.

Chazelle’s first film was “Whiplash,” at age 28 and now two years later, he’s apparently outdone himself.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone soar in this dreamy, romantic musical that The Guardian likened to Woody Allen’s “Everyone Says I Love You.” J.K. Simmons, who won an Oscar for “Whiplash,” is featured, along with actual singer John Legend.

“La La Land” becomes the first real Oscar race entry, although there are some others floating out there. The Oscar season has begun.