The Blues Brothers
I have to admit, future killer Landis Senior can direct some batshit insane stunts in the heart of Chicago, with a framing musical around it. Seriously, those final scenes are truly great.
Next to the bridge there’s a poster announcing Mao-Tse Tung meetings.
The leitmotif for getting the band back together is the Peter Gunn theme song. Another running theme is that Elwood put the baseball stadium as his DMV address. There’s no continuity on the musical acts.
Then there’s the stupid Carrie Fisher cameos, always blowing shit up. She works in the Curl Up and Dye beauty salon, of course.
The big shots in the cast are big in all senses of the word:
- Cab motherfucking Calloway himself, as the orphanage janitor. Fucking Minnie the Moocher!
- James Brown, as a jive-ass preacher!
- Johnny Lee Hooker, in the street, just playin’
- Is that Aretha fucking Franklin in the diner‽ Motherfucker, are you out of your damn mind?
- Ray Charles as the blind music store owner is great. Playing that coffin piano.
They trash the mall. The cop chasing them is one of the mysterious guys from The X-Files.
They throw the Illinois Nazis into the fucking river, hot damn! They hate Catholics too, how hilarious.
The first gig in the country bar is like Roadhouse, the chicken wire in the stage. The bottles keep flying even when the crowd loves them. Of course, they drink more than the bar paid them, but Jake swindles them in a most Trumpian way. He even deploys the “HUGE” line!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.