Saw The Blues Brothers. It was a lot of fun! The film follows Jake and Elwood as they try to get The Band back together and save the orphanage. The early sequences with the nun reminded me a lot of the Coen brothers' stuff. It's very straightfaced and absurd with a hint of ominousness strength about it. The characters are often starkly framed by doorways and windows. Later on, the film reveals a deeply comic undercurrent, under the self-serious facade. I caught on about the time a random woman fires an RPG round at them and they kind of dust themselves off, unfazed. There's a lot of great jokes throughout (and these aren't heavy-handed, gag-centric jokes, but character and story-driven jokes. You know, the good kind.) They get their first gig playing at a bar that's so depressing a waitress is literally crying. Also, when things start heating up, the endless 20-car pileups of cop cars was always hilarious. Also the spectacular free-fall from above the skyline that the neonazis (neonazis are involved) do after falling off of a bridge. That's just amazing.
There's also cameos from a lot of old soul singers (James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and apparently most of the members of the band are famous although I didn't recognize them (but then, I'm not very musically cultured.)) which are fun but I felt were kind of wasted on me (again, musically uncultured.) The music's great though and there's lots of it. I dug this film. Comedy is tough for me to enjoy because my instincts to tease apart just how it works kind of kills the magic. Maybe I was too tired for analysis this time around though, because I really liked this one. Yeah.
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