The Blues Brothers

1980 musical comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Following the prison release of one blues brother, "a band lively enough to turn goat piss into gasoline" is put back together in order to raise money to save the orphanage in which they grew up.

This is a great comedy and a great musical, but I have to start this with something controversial--I don't really like John Belushi. It's possibly that, since I didn't see this when I was seven, I'm missing some context. Maybe Belushi was a little more dangerous at the tail end of the 1970's, but watching him in 2015, there's just nothing special there. I think the countless puffy guys who have come along and done similar things has maybe watered down Belushi's legacy a little.

The rest of the cast, including more cameos than a Muppet movie? Aykroyd was never better, and it feels like he wrote (or co-wrote with Landis) something that just fit him perfectly. The band's great, just so lively, and that's even when Belushi and Aykroyd are kind of getting in the way. It's too bad Paul Shaffer couldn't be involved because the way that bald head of his bounces around would have bumped this up another point. Carrie Fisher, in mostly a silent role, is just cute as a goddamn button. I don't know if it's those giant brown eyes of hers or the fact that I could pick her up with one hand, but this late-70's/early-80's Carrie Fisher does it for me. And how about these musical cameos? You've got this wild church scene with none other than James Brown, a James Brown at the height of his fury. You've got John Lee Hooker doing "Boom Boom," Aretha Franklin with a spirited "Think," and Ray Charles imploring us to shake our tail feathers.

You know what this reminds me of? An Americanized Leningrad Cowboys Go America, that Aki Kaurismaki movie that everybody should see but probably not before they've seen other Aki Kaurismaki movies. Man, is that guy good. I guess that was Kaurismaki doing his own Blues Brothers but without as much Chicago.

This really is a Chicago movie, isn't it? I should do a Chicago Movie Fest some time except I can't think of all that many.

Cab Calloway! My God, I could watch that guy for hours. I'd watch that guy drink tea.

This is how I'm going to write all my reviews from now on--incoherently. So you get paragraphs now, but you also get gibberish. Maybe the Blues Brothers drove the Bluesmobile through this blog entry like they did that mall? Great cinematic destruction there. That and the explosions from Carrie Fisher's bazooka. And with that, I'm probably horny.