The Blues Brothers (1980)

Director: John Landis

Cast: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, James Brown, Cab Calloway

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. Having parents who hailed from Mount Prospect, the BluesMobile was always a delightful chuckle growing up. Also put it in my mind that buying an old police car at auction would be a great way to get a vehicle that doesn’t look like much, but still has all the best parts and maintenance.

Maybe I took the wrong things away from this one.

Did I Like It: I look at a movie directed (and in this case largely written) by John Landis, and my immediate instinct is to not like. It sure helps that he hasn’t really made a watchable movie in thirty years, but his early stuff sure does throw me for a loop. You might come to his defense for what happened on the set of Twlight Zone: The Movie (1982), but giving the maximum weight to any kind of acquittal, the man always seemed to be so full of himself, so supremely confident that the movie he is making at that moment is worthy of any (and I do mean any) sacrifice that it gives the entire catalog a sour taste.

And then there’s the whole exercise that is The Blues Brothers. I remember reading in George Carlin’s final book that he had a wide-ranging apathy for a lot of the Saturday Night Live crowd, as he (and I’m wildly paraphrasing) couldn’t see why a bunch of white guys had anything about which to sing the blues. I would have counted myself among the fans of the film up until the moment I read that, and afterwards, wondering if that was part of the problem.

Then, finally, there is the question of whether or not any sketch from SNL should ever be flattened to the point that it runs over 90 minutes. To say nothing of the more than 120 minutes this asks us to endure. Wayne’s World (1992) works, but does anything else really work?

All of that comes together, and I should be firmly ambivalent about the film these days. And yet, the thing moves along at a clip and is a delight. It helps that Belushi and Aykroyd often take a back seat to other legendary musicians as things unfurl. It’s not quite as funny as I might have remembered, but it has more than enough attitude to compensate.

1941 (1979)

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Dan Aykroyd, Ned Beatty, John Belushi, Lorraine Gary

Have I Seen It Before: Yes. I have the strongest memory of sitting in my bedroom and watching the thing on VHS. Why wouldn’t I have done so? Spielberg? Check. Aykroyd and Belushi? More check. Script by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale? Yet more check.

Did I Like It: Well, I suppose Coppola went to Vietnam, and Spielberg decided to instead go to Santa Barbara… Both of them probably thought on some level that they were going to war in their own way.

Spielberg was absolutely right in understanding that he was two-ish decades away from being ready to handle a serious war movie, and so went lighter with the whole affair. Thank God he got the idea that he could do a big, John Landis (if not out-and-out ZAZ-style) comedy out of his system here, or we might have been forced to endure Bill Murray as Indiana Jones or something unfathomably awful by the time he came around to Saving Private Ryan (1998).

And I say this all without trying to say that the film isn’t worth a look. Spielberg is working with that same “Gee, Sammy Fabelman loves movies more than the rest of us ever could” energy that made virtually every other film he’s ever made a classic. The John Williams score is exactly what any reasonable person would want out of one of his score. If the film had stuck with the collective imagination a little (probably a lot) more than it did, it might have joined the pantheon of his great works.

It's just not very funny. I can’t remember laughing once during the thing. That’s okay, there are plenty of great films that aren’t particularly funny. Zemeckis and Gale harnessed similar energy in Romancing the Stone (1984), and yes, even in Back to the Future (1985). Spielberg, certainly in this era, is the absolute, undisputed king of light pop entertainments. But it is impossible for a viewer to look at Aykroyd, Belushi, or even John Candy and think they are supposed to laugh. And when those laughs come, there isn’t a whole lot else to say.