FIRST TAKE CLUB: Writers watch films from the AFI top 100 that they have never seen.
THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)
from June 2019
I’ve no idea how I managed not to see The Blues Brothers. I was exactly the right age at exactly the right time, and the soundtrack LP was fitted as standard in the cassette decks of all teenage cars giving me a lift to parties. But beyond a couple of tropes (“Mission from God”, sunglasses, something to do with helping a nun) I had no idea what it’s about. It’s more of a fancy dress costume to me than a film.
It opens beautifully. Chicago factories farting soot into the sky, a prisoner leaving confinement, shot from imaginative angles. John Landis is doing confident, stylish work. A safe pair of hands in charge of what’s basically an after-show romp for the SNL first team. It looks like it’s going to be fun. Actually, it is fun. What it isn’t, though, is very funny.
The first actual joke is about five minutes in when Frank Oz hands John Belushi a used condom as part of his prisoner’s effects. It’s less a joke, more a crusty rubber placed where a joke would be, but it serves to say “this is a comedy” until the second joke ambles in at about 13 minutes, a frenzied nun attack. And that is funny.
The women in this are brilliant. ‘The Penguin’ Mother Superior, Carrie Fisher’s Patty Hearst-ish assassin, and a barnstorming Aretha Franklin in a cardigan. The women are mainly there to roll their eyes, their standard role in Naughty Bloke Films, but the screen catches fire every time one of them appears. Although Fisher’s flamethrower-toting character - one of the film’s three main antagonists - doesn’t even get a name. She’s ‘Mystery Woman’.
It’s not entirely clear who the Blues Brothers are, beyond that they’re horrible arseholes who steal and break stuff. Everything explodes or falls down in their wake. As they step out of a collapsed building, dusting bricks from their suits, I realise they’re not real people, they’re characters in a Chuck Jones cartoon. A phone box flies into the sky, police cars do somersaults, and a Nazi station wagon drops from an impossible height like Wile E Coyote plummeting into a canyon.
It’s less a love letter to R&B music than Warner Brothers Animation. Bugs Bunny is the model for male 80s comedy leads - laconic persuaders who bend others to their will - think Bill Murray, Matthew Broderick, Eddie Murphy. Everyone wants to be Bugs. Nobody wants to admit they’re Daffy Duck. That doesn’t get the kids on board.
With its car chases and jaunty songs and tearaway heroes, this is a wonderful film for kids, which is why it clangs so much when a bandmember says “motherfucker”. It may explain why it blew the minds of so many ten year olds; the grown-ups have made you a naughty Disney chase movie, complete with the Nice-Old-Lady’s-Home-At-Risk set-up and the baddies-falling-in-the-river “you dunderheads” scene from the Herbie movies. But this time there’s swearing and Ray Charles, so, yeah, it’s cool.
The film is obsessed with cool, not actual cool, but a kid’s idea of cool. The heroes have cool sunglasses and a cool car, and because it’s a Dan Aykroyd script, it’s a repurposed municipal vehicle, like the Ghostbusters’ ambulance. It’s amazing he didn’t ask for his character in Trading Places to drive a resprayed fire engine.
The script injects little bursts of fake jeopardy. An all-white bar crowd is shocked by these white men’s black music, and an auditorium goes chilly - for just a moment - in the face of a back-flipping opening number that would wow the dead. They’re on a mission from God, but nothing’s really in their way, because, hey, they’re cool.
The set pieces are as great as you’d expect from Landis. Fishtailing patrol cars. Whole boroughs cutting a rug. Nobody fills the screen with choreography like him. You can tell this is the guy who was about to do ‘Thriller’. And like that other cool-grown-up-kids-movie, ‘The Italian Job’, it all builds to a toy-cars-on-the-carpet finale that is so much fun that you forget that nothing whatsoever is at stake.
Amongst all that cool, the dullness of the climactic pay-off line - “And here’s your receipt” - works as one of the film’s best gags. It’s delivered by a cameo-ing Steven Spielberg, and as the Brothers hand over the money, for a moment it looks like they’re paying him for borrowing the billion-cop-car climax of his ‘Sugarland Express’ and making it about the square root of bugger all.
The film? It’s very long. It’s very fun. It’s not very funny. Essentially, it’s a mixtape of soul classics given to white suburban kids all over the world by a couple of very cool comedians. They clearly had a blast.
THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)
from June 2019
I’ve no idea how I managed not to see The Blues Brothers. I was exactly the right age at exactly the right time, and the soundtrack LP was fitted as standard in the cassette decks of all teenage cars giving me a lift to parties. But beyond a couple of tropes (“Mission from God”, sunglasses, something to do with helping a nun) I had no idea what it’s about. It’s more of a fancy dress costume to me than a film.
It opens beautifully. Chicago factories farting soot into the sky, a prisoner leaving confinement, shot from imaginative angles. John Landis is doing confident, stylish work. A safe pair of hands in charge of what’s basically an after-show romp for the SNL first team. It looks like it’s going to be fun. Actually, it is fun. What it isn’t, though, is very funny.
The first actual joke is about five minutes in when Frank Oz hands John Belushi a used condom as part of his prisoner’s effects. It’s less a joke, more a crusty rubber placed where a joke would be, but it serves to say “this is a comedy” until the second joke ambles in at about 13 minutes, a frenzied nun attack. And that is funny.
The women in this are brilliant. ‘The Penguin’ Mother Superior, Carrie Fisher’s Patty Hearst-ish assassin, and a barnstorming Aretha Franklin in a cardigan. The women are mainly there to roll their eyes, their standard role in Naughty Bloke Films, but the screen catches fire every time one of them appears. Although Fisher’s flamethrower-toting character - one of the film’s three main antagonists - doesn’t even get a name. She’s ‘Mystery Woman’.
It’s not entirely clear who the Blues Brothers are, beyond that they’re horrible arseholes who steal and break stuff. Everything explodes or falls down in their wake. As they step out of a collapsed building, dusting bricks from their suits, I realise they’re not real people, they’re characters in a Chuck Jones cartoon. A phone box flies into the sky, police cars do somersaults, and a Nazi station wagon drops from an impossible height like Wile E Coyote plummeting into a canyon.
It’s less a love letter to R&B music than Warner Brothers Animation. Bugs Bunny is the model for male 80s comedy leads - laconic persuaders who bend others to their will - think Bill Murray, Matthew Broderick, Eddie Murphy. Everyone wants to be Bugs. Nobody wants to admit they’re Daffy Duck. That doesn’t get the kids on board.
With its car chases and jaunty songs and tearaway heroes, this is a wonderful film for kids, which is why it clangs so much when a bandmember says “motherfucker”. It may explain why it blew the minds of so many ten year olds; the grown-ups have made you a naughty Disney chase movie, complete with the Nice-Old-Lady’s-Home-At-Risk set-up and the baddies-falling-in-the-river “you dunderheads” scene from the Herbie movies. But this time there’s swearing and Ray Charles, so, yeah, it’s cool.
The film is obsessed with cool, not actual cool, but a kid’s idea of cool. The heroes have cool sunglasses and a cool car, and because it’s a Dan Aykroyd script, it’s a repurposed municipal vehicle, like the Ghostbusters’ ambulance. It’s amazing he didn’t ask for his character in Trading Places to drive a resprayed fire engine.
The script injects little bursts of fake jeopardy. An all-white bar crowd is shocked by these white men’s black music, and an auditorium goes chilly - for just a moment - in the face of a back-flipping opening number that would wow the dead. They’re on a mission from God, but nothing’s really in their way, because, hey, they’re cool.
The set pieces are as great as you’d expect from Landis. Fishtailing patrol cars. Whole boroughs cutting a rug. Nobody fills the screen with choreography like him. You can tell this is the guy who was about to do ‘Thriller’. And like that other cool-grown-up-kids-movie, ‘The Italian Job’, it all builds to a toy-cars-on-the-carpet finale that is so much fun that you forget that nothing whatsoever is at stake.
Amongst all that cool, the dullness of the climactic pay-off line - “And here’s your receipt” - works as one of the film’s best gags. It’s delivered by a cameo-ing Steven Spielberg, and as the Brothers hand over the money, for a moment it looks like they’re paying him for borrowing the billion-cop-car climax of his ‘Sugarland Express’ and making it about the square root of bugger all.
The film? It’s very long. It’s very fun. It’s not very funny. Essentially, it’s a mixtape of soul classics given to white suburban kids all over the world by a couple of very cool comedians. They clearly had a blast.