Movie Review: The Blues Brothers (1980)

There are only four reasons to see the original The Blues Brothers movie from 1980, and they are as follows:

1. Scatmaster Cab Calloway delivers a snazzy, smile-inducing performance of "Minnie the Moocher" on a glitzy stage.

2. A hilarious cameo by European supermodel waif Twiggy has the wealthy, beautiful woman ordering Dan Aykroyd to fill up her tank with gas--because in her eyes everyone exists to follow her commands so that she needn't lift a finger. When Aykroyd smoothly informs her that her bill is ninety-nine dollars, her only concern is that she doesn't have exact change. She instead offers him a hundred dollar bill and tells him to keep the rest as a tip, which he graciously accepts. She is the perfect embodiment of the upper crust's complete obliviousness to the workings of reality.

3. James Brown as a singing preacher delivers the full stereotype of what white people imagine black churches are like, complete with a full gospel band, holy spirited dancing, and divine revelations.

4. At an uptight five star restaurant, Jim Belushi, taking on a ludicrous Russian accent, makes an offer to buy "the women" of the appalled gentleman at the table next to him.

Do these four moments justify watching a movie that's almost two and a half hours long? I hardly think so, yet the film somehow landed on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of the thousand greatest movies of all time at position #795. The Blues Brothers was the first of nearly a dozen movies based on "Saturday Night Live" sketches, and while it may be the best of them, that's hardly saying much considering the pedigree includes A Night at the Roxbury. I don't want to waste too much time detailing what I didn't like about this movie because it is what it is and it doesn't try to be much more. It's a series of set pieces and musical numbers. It's entertainment. I personally don't think it succeeds as entertainment a lot of the time, but I'm sure millions of people disagree with me.

For what it's worth, I'll list the basic problems I had with the film.

The Acting. Okay, sure, sure. Nobody really expected that Ray Charles would be able to act. That's not why he's in the film. He's there to play the keyboards and sing, not to win an Oscar. I can accept that. But why is Dan Aykroyd so terrible? He tries to pull off some kind of unshakable coolness, but it comes across as complete nerdiness or autism. John Belushi bears much of the comedic weight, but even he pulls a lot of the punches. I could understand if they were going for a straight man/crazy guy set-up, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Dan Aykroyd is just weird.

The Directing. The film is a comedic fantasy. Nothing in the film is treated with much seriousness--not religion, not love, not crime, not even Nazis. Nothing, that is, except for the opening credits, which feature a slow tracking shot over the factories, streets, industrial areas, and prison of Chicago while a down tempo, somber blues song plays. What way is that to open a comedy? What does that add to the film? What kind of tone is John Landis supposed to be setting? By the time the absurd fantasy stuff kicks in--and kicks in in full force, with cars jumping bridges, women touting uzis, and angry nuns flying through the air--the viewer is completely unprepared for such a turn. On top of that, the pacing is awkward and the film is much too long.

The Writing. Screenwriters John Landis and Dan Aykroyd put some thought into setting up clever set pieces, but the plot as a whole lacks any thread of cohesion. The plot is about two impoverished losers getting their band back together in order to put on a fundraiser to save the orphanage they were raised in from foreclosure. It's never quite clear what the band accomplished in the past, prior to Joliet's (Belushi) imprisonment. Were they huge and popular, or were they always complete nothings? They manage, unconvincingly, to fill a huge arena for their comeback show--were these all former fans, or are they just really excited to see a band they've never heard of before, composed of line cooks, restaurant hosts, and ex-cons? The Blues Brothers is a fantasy that demands that not too many questions be asked about the thrills involved, and that's okay, but the fact that not one tiny string holds the film's scenes to any semblance of reality or consistency just seems lazy. Who pays for the extremely expensive dinner that the duo have while crashing the five star restaurant? Surely their friend the maitre'd can't have the most expensive bottle of champagne comped for two nonpaying troublemakers? How exactly do the stage design and the costumes transform during Cab Calloway's performance? And so on and so on.

The Band itself. The film features a lot of awesome musical numbers by James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Chaka Khan, and others, as well as a consistently entertaining soundtrack, but all of this music builds to the final performance by the actual Blues Brothers--which completely sucks. Despite the thousands of overzealous fans, the brief show is quite horrible. Belushi has an awful voice, and the tall, skinny, awkward Aykroyd made me extremely uncomfortable with his shucking and jiving. The movie made me embarrassed for him. I know that the numerous musicians within the band are all talented, renowned musicians, and I suppose they do a good job, but for the most part a band is nothing without its singer(s), and it helps for the singer(s) to actually know how to sing. The climactic number is an overwhelmingly corny rendition of "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love," made even more unbearable by the mismatched reaction of the ecstatic crowd. The structure of the film dismisses Ray Charles as a pawn shop owner and Aretha as a fryer of chicken, purportedly saving the best for last, and yet the last musical number is by far the worst.

But what can I say? It's a beloved classic that's made millions of dollars. Maybe I just need to stop taking things so seriously.

The Blues Brothers (1980)
d: John Landis w: Dan Aykroyd, John Landis
(John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd)
TSPDT?: #795
5/10

Movie Review: The Gold Rush (1925)

The proper way to eat a shoe.

The easiest type of movie review to write is one about an awful disaster of a film. Writing such a review taps into the insult comic within us all, and it usually consists of quoting laughable dialogue, pointing out absurd plot consistencies, stringing together insulting hyperbole, and deriding any offensive content.

Next on the scale of easiness is the review about a beloved gem, either a recent film or an obscure older film that the reviewer has seen and loved. The reviewer can still take a sense of ownership over such a film because it has not yet been dissected and devoured. Reviewing such a film is like writing a travelogue about previously unexplored terrain; the reviewer, a trailblazer, feels as though what he says can be treated as authoritative gospel because it's never been said before, and this praise isn't hard to put words to because the reviewer desperately wants to share his new-found love, to figure out what has so moved him.

Somewhat harder is the review of a supposed masterpiece that the reviewer didn't like. These reviews fall into two categories. The critic can either stand firm in resolving that the film is horrible, expressing bafflement that the idiotic masses would be gullible enough to buy into it, or he can throw his hands in the air, earnestly wishing to know what went over his head, what other people saw that he couldn't see, what his own problem is that he's unable to recognize a masterpiece.

But the hardest review of all to write is the review of a classic masterpiece that the critic knows is a masterpiece. What hasn't been said before? How many television documentaries, film studies classes, countdown lists, and scholarly books have already explored every facet of such a film. The critic's words, if he doesn't have some fresh new insight into the film, are repetitive, obvious, and irrelevant.

Charlie Chaplin's iconic comedy The Gold Rush came out eighty-five years ago, and yes, it's hilarious; yes, it's well acted; yes, it's memorable and touching and important and a masterpiece. What can I add to the critical material about this movie?

Perhaps it's best to keep it short and stick to the moments in the film that meant the most to me.

There's a classic scene in this film where Charlie Chaplin boils and eats his own shoe. Chaplin is the Lone Prospector, a silly little tramp braving the elements of the nineteenth century Klondike in search of gold. Caught in a terrible snowstorm, he holes up in an isolated cabin with a wanted criminal named Black Larsen (Tom Murray) and a burly fortune hunter named Big Jim (Mack Swain). When Larsen leaves in search of food, the two prospectors wait and wait, slowly starving. When all the food and the candles and everything else edible is eaten and their stomachs can take it no longer--to the point that Big Jim begins hallucinating that the little tramp is a giant, succulent chicken--the Lone Prospector throws his leather shoe in a pot with snow and boils it for dinner.

This is a very old joke by now, and it was even an old joke and a cliche when the film was made in 1925. What makes it hilarious, though, is how Chaplin goes about eating the shoe. With the shoe on a dinner plate, using a fork and knife, salt and pepper, he carefully removes the shoelaces, cuts apart the heel from the top, removes the cobbler nails and sucks on them, and piles the discarded nails, like bones, on a small dish. He eats the shoe with grace and precision, with nary a hint of desperation. He picks it apart as though it were a fish or a steak, as though there were a traditional method for eating a shoe, with customary rituals and procedures. He follows all the rules of etiquette for the eating of shoes.

The scene was shot using licorice and sugar candy designed to look like a boot. Chaplin, a perfectionist and a diabetic, supposedly shot the scene more than sixty times. By the time he had perfected it, he had suffered from insulin shock and needed to be rushed to the hospital. His suffering paid off, though, the scene is one of the most memorable comedic movie moments of all time.

What also moves me about The Gold Rush is the sad romance between the Lone Prospector and Georgia (Georgia Hale), a beautiful dancer who knows she is beautiful and uses the prospector's shy affections to her own advantage, giving him false hope and making him false promises so that she can make her rivals jealous, make her friends laugh, and make herself feel better. The prospector's childlike persistence in loving her and his naive willingness to be duped make the scenes in which he is humiliated especially sad. Here is a good man with a pure heart who hasn't yet realized that love can be cruel.

What's great about the love story is that his persistent faith in love forces her, if only temporarily, to see the ugliness within herself. She, too, though perhaps only for a moment, remembers that love can be something more than a game. Her transformation is visible, believable, and touching. Of course, her decision to be with him is also coupled with the fact that by the film's end he has become a millionaire. Their love may not be blessed with a happy ending in the years to come, but it is undeniable that the flames of love blaze at the film's end.

Charlie Chaplin is said to have wished that The Gold Rush would be what he was remembered for. With the film as his second highest rated movie on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of great films (it's #32, with City Lights at #25), he may have got his wish.

The Gold Rush (1925)
d/w: Charlie Chaplin
(Charlie Chaplin, Georgia Hale, Mack Swain)
9/10

Movie Review: To Be or Not to Be (1942)

Inglourious Basterds got its kicks out of rewriting history, attempting to give viewers the cathartic release that reality denied them: Hitler burning, sooner rather than later, in a well-plotted holocaust of his own. In truth, however, the war went on much too long, Hitler exacted a wide-spread and long-lasting influence, and his death like so many others came at his own hand, excusing him from justice and revenge. Tarantino's mission may be well-intentioned, but because it bears no semblance to history and because it doesn't have any practical application to current events, the triumphant release the film's finale may release in us is at best fleeting. I say "us" meaning twentysomething, non-Jewish, American kids who have in no way been directly affected by Adolph Hitler's atrocities in Europe since I think that's the target audience of the film. I have yet to read any responses to the film from people who actually survived the death camps over sixty years ago.

Recently I came across Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 comedy To Be or Not to Be, a film which I assume exerted some influence over the writing of Tarantino's last picture. Both involve resistance groups staging attacks against occupying Nazis while Hitler enjoys a visit to the local theater. Both involve our valiant yet buffoonish heroes sporting silly disguises while improvising taut dialogues with somewhat more clever enemies. Both comfortably assume that the Nazis will be outwitted by the end. The difference between To Be or Not to Be and Inglourious Basterds, though, is that the former film was made at a time when history was actually being written rather than rewritten. In 1942, Hitler's men actually were in Poland, actors and Jews and unhappy Poles actually were being oppressed and killed, the uprising was in effect and could use support of any kind, and the final outcome was still several years to come. In a historical context, To Be or Not to Be really had "something at stake," a crucial element of storytelling according to any writing workshop instructor. That Lubitsch swore by an Allied victory with such certainty was a move of uplifting patriotism.

But even aside from its context, the film is incredible--suspenseful, hilarious, and moving in equal parts. The movie begins with a stage actor portraying Hitler (Tom Dugan) effetely heiling himself after being "Heil Hitler"ed by so many of his men. It's a perfectly-delivered bit of improvisation from the bit actor, but it's roundly attacked by his director Dobosh (Charles Halton), who wants no humor in a serious film about such a grave subject. When Lubitsch's film was released, it too was apparently attacked for making light of the War, but Dobosh and the contemporary audiences seem not to realize the intense power that humor can have in providing a stark contrast to more serious moments. Adding humor to a film emphasizes just how bleak the moments without humor--the non-humor--are. With just one tone, the whole film risks slipping into melodrama.

So when a Jewish actor, having seen Warsaw destroyed, his play censored, and his neighbors killed, quotes the spat-upon Jewish Shylock of The Merchant of Venice to his friend ("If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"), the moment comes across as raw and sincere rather than laughable and trite. We've already roared at Shakespeare and bad acting; we needn't laugh at a man's expression of grief, outrage, and confusion.

To Be or Not to Be is a fine film, well acted by Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Stanley Ridges, and Sig Ruman, wittily directed, fast-paced, and sharply written by Edwin Justus Mayer. A story of intrigue and disguise, it combines a standard love triangle with a thrilling tale of political uprising and assassination. The revenge of a spurned and humiliated lover surrenders to revenge against an occupying invader, and the inflated arrogance of the cuckold proves the most valuable weapon against the arrogance of the enemy leaders. Twists in one plot influence events in the other, and the audience is left always guessing what tricks will be needed for the next narrow escape and--more importantly--always hoping that the narrow escape will be successful. The characters are broad and silly yet always convincing, and in the course of the film their fortunes earned a place close to my heart.

To Be or Not to Be was dismissed in its own time and is largely forgotten today, but it's a terrific comedy and an important installment in World War II cinema. It ranks #72 on the TSPDT? list.

To Be or Not to Be
d: Ernst Lubitsch w: Edwin Justus Mayer
(Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, Stanley Ridges)
10/10

Movie Review: Some Like it Hot (1959)

At no point in Some Like it Hot does Jack Lemmon look or sound like a woman. Tony Curtis is more convincing in that respect, but then he always looked a little like a woman, even when he wasn't in drag. Maybe in those days people were more easily fooled by crossdressing or maybe his poor impersonation was supposed to be more comical, but it makes the many real women in the film--who never once suspect the truth behind the deception--look rather stupid, especially when some of the men in the film easily realize the obvious. Of course, if the behind-the-scenes stories are to be believed--that Marilyn Monroe took over forty takes to say the line "Where's the bourbon?" because she kept asking for whiskey or for bonbons or forgetting the line altogether--then maybe that stupidity isn't so far off the mark.

Some Like it Hot is the classic story of two jazz musicians in Prohibition-era Chicago who witness a gangland shooting and must flee town in order to avoid getting shot themselves. Penniless and jobless, they don wigs and dresses because the only gig they can find is for an all-girls jazz band in Seminole, Florida. Of course, "Josephine" (Curtis) and "Daphne" (Lemmon) can't help but be titillated by all the women they're keeping close quarters with, and they both fall in love with Sugar Kane (Monroe), a ukulele player, singer, and hopeless romantic who's a sucker for the wrong kind of men.

Being heartless womanizers, the two in cognito gents both take advantage of their inside scoops in hopes of seducing the beautiful, naive musician. Joe uses her private confessions of romance to "Josephine" in order to craft himself into a third identity: the man of her dreams. Donning glasses, a yachtman's cap, and a horrible elitist accent, Joe/Josephine becomes Junior, the extravagantly wealthy heir to the Shell Oil fortune who has everything in life except for true love. Using his inside information, several lucky turns, and a manipulative ploy, he's able to seduce her.

Meanwhile, "Daphne" bags a real millionaire, a goofy, old, persistent gentleman. They dance the tango to a Cuban band, he proposes to her, and she--in the heat of the moment--accepts, so happy for her luck and her fun time that she momentarily forgets that she's not really a she. It's one of the funniest moments in a movie that really isn't very funny.

In the third act, the gangbangers from the beginning--disguising themselves (also not very convincingly) as delegates of "Friends of Italian Opera"--make a surprise appearance. The sleazy don, equipped with an earpiece, has some of the funniest one-liners in the script. Hijinx and chases ensue, Joe's relationship with Sugar and his decency as a human being is put to the test, "Daphne" makes amends with his fiancee, and a happy ending comes not a moment too soon.

Billy Wilder's film is a fun time. It's not as funny or surprising as it probably was half a century ago in 1959. The zingy screenplay by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond isn't as witty or sharp as many other scripts of the time, and though Lemmon picks up the slack in the second half, the chemistry shared by Lemmon, Wilder, and Monroe never quite reaches its full steam. Monroe is beautiful--though a fairly weak character--and her songs are memorable. It's passing strange to me, though, that this movie ranks #22 in the TSPDT? list and that it's considered by so many critics and fans to be such an American classic and a masterpiece. I suspect maybe that esteem has a lot to do with nostalgia, that maybe viewers under a certain age can't reap the same pleasure?

A decent film, but not too much more.

Some Like it Hot (1959)
d: Billy Wilder w: Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond
(Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe)
7/10
TSPDT?: #22

Movie Review: Manhattan (1979) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

Woody Allen considered Manhattan to be a colossal failure when he completed it, offering to do another film free of charge for the studio as an act of penance, and years later, after the film proved to be one of his most successful and enduring films, he still considered the film to be the biggest deception he ever got away with, a disastrously flawed film and his least favorite of all of them.

Manhattan is the highest ranking of eight Allen films on the TSPDT? list, falling quite high at #114. It was a phenomenal box office success, and it was nominated for two Academy Awards. I have to admit, though, I agree with Woody Allen.

What have I taken away from this film? Not very much. A few laughs, maybe. Some gorgeous black and white cinematography shot on location in New York City, and an interesting setup involving pretentious Manhattanites and their overlapping, forever in flux affairs. By the end, I guess, it makes a statement on checking our own egos, our hyperbolic criticisms of ourselves and others, our swollen pretentious, and our certainty in our own maturity and adulthood at the door. As fortysomething Isaac (Allen) frantically makes his way across town to win back the high school girl (Mariel Hemingway) he's recently dismissed as being too young, too naive, and too immature for love, we're supposed to realize that she--unlike other lover Mary (Diane Keaton) with her thousand insecure opinions and neurotic best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) with his mid-life crisis and flighty contradictions--may be the most grown up and least tainted of all of them, with her decent grasp on reality and her calm acceptance of all people and their flaws.

We're supposed to believe that and I guess it's a nice message, but it's more than a little creepy coming from a writer-director with his sexual background, a biased message endorsing the adoration of youth, a naive idea dripping with nostalgia and a bit of sexual perversion. (Personally, I didn't like hearing about what a powerful beast Allen is in bed.)

Not to mention the stilted acting that never quite flows smoothly. Hemingway, who received an Oscar nomination, is perhaps the best at playing the sanest character, but Murphy and Keaton both seem contrived, and Allen seems to be having too much fun reading his own witty script.

And there's also the halting direction and unenthusiastic pacing. And a script that isn't nearly as funny or crisp as it thinks it is, with a distracting subplot involving Meryl Streep as a lesbian ex-lover penning an implausible bestseller.

All in all, I can't see anything that's genuinely amazing about this film. It left a sour aftertaste in my mouth, and it quickly slipped from my memory.

Manhattan Murder Mystery, on the other hand, is hysterical, clever, and rich. Penned by Manhattan writers Allen and Marshall Brickman and again starring Allen and Diane Keaton, Manhattan Murder Mystery is a Hitchcockian satire following the tepid lives of four would-be mystery writers as they attempt to one-up each other in solving the most implausible crime that could ever enter their mundane lives.

When energetic Mrs. House (Lynn Cohen) dies suddenly of a heart attack, Carol Lipton (Diane Keaton) can't bring herself to understand what the paramedic plainly describes. Her chatty, older neighbor, whom she had just met the night before, had never mentioned a heart condition. Though she confesses to loving rich, creamy, French desserts and though the workout routine she does on her new treadmill is perhaps too exhausting for a woman her age, Carol can't fathom that a woman so alive one day can be carried out in a covered stretcher the next. What begins as a denial of life's impermanence escalates into suspicion. Why does fuzzy Mr. House with his soothing baritone and his pedantic stamp collection seem so accepting of his wife's death, so nonchalant about the loss? Does he just have a better understanding of mortality, or could he have murdered the wife he seemed to cherish, have force-fed her cholesterol packed mousse or strapped her wrists to the treadmill in order to induce what doctors would dismiss as natural?

And why is he taking the elevator downstairs at three in the morning?

What's fueling the paranoia is her stir-crazy boredom. She's middle aged and essentially unemployed, surrounded by artists but with no artistic output of her own, dreaming of opening a restaurant but never taking the steps to fulfill that dream. The murder is her chance to get back into the world and to express her imagination.

Larry Lipton (Allen), meanwhile, is a successful book editor, more accustomed to striking out excessive fancies and implausible bouts of wild, melodramatic imagination. He tries to bring his wife back down to earth. The doctor said she had a heart attack. The old woman loved heavy whipping cream. Big, old, harmless Mr. House collects canceled postage, for godsakes.

With her husband the critical voice of boring reason, Carol unites with old friend Ted (Alan Alda), a playwright and theater director who's able to come up with motivations on the spot, and able to constantly twist and change them as needed to fit the ultimate story. The murder mystery is a fun game for him, not nearly as serious as it is for Carol except that it allows him a chance to spend quality time with her, his unrequited, unattainable love of many years.

And so the murder mystery becomes a love triangle, with Larry suddenly realizing that he'll have to play along and become a gumshoe in order to keep up with Ted and save his probably deluded wife as she further embroils herself in breaking into apartments, hiding under beds, and making impostor phone calls to seedy hotels.

One of the funniest scenes (though I won't mention the funniest one, which had me cracking up loudly in an empty room) happens when the three come together with Marcia Fox (Anjelica Huston), one of Larry's controversial, bestselling authors. It's a scene of artistic competitiveness, all of them racing to solve the mystery while veiling hostilities and ulterior motives.

"Well, basically, he got away with the perfect murder. It's as simple as that," newcomer Marcia matter-of-factly reveals with an arrogant amount of boredom to the three stumped sleuths who have struggled so hard to fit together the ridiculous, trivial jigsaw pieces. "And when I get back from the loo, I'll tell you how to catch him."

Ted is mesmerized. The sexy provocateur has pieced together the perfect, surprising plot. Larry is impressed by her cockiness, but overwhelmed by the ridiculous revelation. Carol, meanwhile, is just pissed. Not only has this femme fatale sauntered into the scene in the last act and solved her mystery, but she's also stolen the center stage as well as the two male leads--Ted, who's drooling all over her, and Larry, who seems to have just a little too much history with his client. You're jealous of me liking her, that's untrue but fine, Larry explains to his wife, but why are you jealous of Ted liking her unless you want Ted to like you?

What hangs in the balance of this mystery isn't so much life and death and future crimes as egos, relationships, and escape from the doldrums of middle age. The murder mystery, with its absurd twists and riotously silly climax, is just a red herring.

Manhattan
d: Woody Allen w: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
(Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Mariel Hemingway)
5/10
TSPDT? #114

Manhattan Murder Mystery
d: Woody Allen w: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
(Diane Keaton, Woody Allen, Alan Alda, Anjelica Huston)
9/10