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This is simply called Eat My Rotten Tomatoes, a feature where I will watch one of my favorite movies of all time, and then look up the critics responses on Rotten Tomatoes. Basically, what this will boil down to is me yelling at imbecilic critics for giving my favorite movies a bad review. HOW DARE YOU DEVALUE THE WORTH OF MY LIFE!!! Plus, this gives me a forum to respond much longer and openly to critics on RottenTomatoes in a passive-aggressive Internet way that seems fun to maybe only me. "Who cares?" you may ask. Well, I do, so here we are.
The Blues Brothers (1980)
Starring: John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd
If you have never seen this movie, and like to laugh, you should watch it. It's good. THE BEST SNL inspired movie. EVER. PERIOD. We can get into A Night at the Roxbury and Wayne's World (and probably Stuart Saves His Family if I ever watch it) one day, but not now. It has everything. Violence, humor, music... OH THE MUSIC!!! If you hate everything about this movie, but like music, you will like this movie. Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway, the list goes on and on. And that doesn't even include the Blues Brothers Band, which is solid in their own right. And this is before the obvious celebrities were just there for a cameo and to collect a paycheck. They actually play roles that move the story along (I know it's weird to say "celebrities" when referring to a major motion picture, but, for real, when put them up against the main characters of the film at that time, you can say "celebrities" and feel comfortable doing so). It's wacky, yes, but that is the charm of the movie. It's not supposed to necessarily be believable. The Blues Brothers are on a "mission from God," and they go on a delightful quest to fulfill the mission objective. It's a story of wish fulfillment, goal attaining, and human friendships/relationships all right there for everyone to enjoy. It's not like films like Project X or Horrible Bosses in that something actually happens, there is a storyline, a point, and you don't find yourself saying "that's retarded" at something wild and outlandish. IT. IS. AWESOME!
Alas, some pretentious critic-types think they are/were too good for the movie. Here is their lame ass story. (FYI: I only respond to the snippets, because, seriously, you and I have better things to do than read their full dumb comments).
Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine
A demolition symphony that works with the cold efficiency of a Moog synthesizer gone sadistic.Commenter Sam D tells it like it is: "I think you missed the point of the movie."
Yep. Over-analyzation gone awry. A Moog synthesizer? Really? So, you just picked the most obscure instrument name and connected it to your little "demolition symphony" reference to sound cool, or what? You sound like an idiot. Put things in layman's terms if you want anyone to read what you are talking about. Also, "demolition symphony?" What the hell is that? Are you referring to the destruction in the film? Here's a metaphor for ya: You = dumb.
Janet Maslin, NY Times
This essentially modest movie is reported to have cost about $30 million, and what did all that money buy? Scores of car crashes. Too many extras. Overstaged dance numbers. And a hollowness that certainly didn't come cheap.Top comment of them all, and still makes me laugh after having read it many times, from SPR: "what's it like being an idiot?"
What is it like, indeed?
Your first point, which I will get to later on in depth: The "scores of car crashes" are not just something that happen for no reason. If they are, then that's completely stupid. It's not destruction for the sake of destruction (Project X, again, for example). It's missing the point to think that they just spent a bunch of money to do that. There is a theme, a tone, conveyed throughout the whole movie. Of course, though, you missed that point because you were probably so turned off by your second point...
"Too many extras." WHAT. DOES. THAT. EVEN. MEAN? "There were too many people in this movie." Look, if you are referring to random people, whatever, I guess it's pointless to make a city look like a city down to the very last detail... If you are referring to the actual actors, thus the cameo appearances, you have once again missed the point. Remember Homer's Odyssey? That had a sh*t ton of characters too, but so does EVERY quest story in the HISTORY OF EVER!!! Each character, as I have said, moves the story along in some way. Bob's Country Bunker's owner and the Good Ol' Boys become enemies. The Nazis become enemies. James Brown shows Jake the light, which starts the whole damn quest. Aretha tells Matt "Guitar" Murphy to respect her, creating a dilemma/challenge for one of the characters in a unique way, but he leaves anyway to join the quest, etc. etc..... You must hate reading or watching film adaptations of Greek classics, fairy tales, or really anything else written ever that humans have decided to use as a lesson with some moral value.
"Overstaged dance numbers." That's so stupid I can't ever respond to it. Heaven forbid a musical film have dancing.
Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
The humor is predicated on underplaying in overscaled situations, which is sporadically funny in a Keaton-esque way but soon sputters out through sheer, uninspired repetition.For the most part, I have covered, or will cover, all of the stupid crap he talks about already. I only include this one to talk about the commenters. This is the comment section, as of this posting:
"I WILL FIND YOU" is the exact opposite of the passive aggressive way in which I am going about this. It's only made better by a Mooninites avatar.
TV Guide's Movie Guide
A monument to waste, noise and misplaced cool, but it does have its engagingly nutty moments.
Commenter "john s." wins the battle on this one with the response "You must be a total bore in bed." Touche, my man.
The TV Guide's critique is the critique in which I have the most problems, but the one that does not surprise me at all. Story time.
When I was younger, I used to look at the scene towards the end where the Nazis fall off the unfinished overpass, and the camera shows them falling through mid air with the Chicago skyline in the background, as a way to tell the viewer, 'look, they are falling a from a high distance'. It was symbolic, if you will. I soon learned that couldn't be further from the truth. The filmmakers are showing that the car is LITERALLY falling from a height equal or close to that of the Sears Tower. How do I know that? Because the car LITERALLY CRASHES THROUGH THE F*CKING PAVEMENT! Why does that happen? Because it's freakin' hilarious, AND because it just follows with the absurd and surrealist tone of the rest of the movie. That's not to say that the Blues Brothers is a homage to surrealist thought and idea, but that they take the bizarre and the literal to new and interesting places and stick with that throughout the film.
That being said, the best scenes of the movie (chase scenes) are those that deal with destruction on a level just so unconscionable to the point of unbelievability. A car chase, THROUGH A MALL?!?!? Driving through a crowded plaza of people AND STILL NOT GETTING CAUGHT, OR RUNNING OVER ANYONE?!?! The many, many wrecks!!!!
And even the scene at the end, where EVERY member of Illinois combat and police forces are chasing these two guys, and they only catch them AFTER the objective is accomplished. That's absurd! That, my friend, is f*cking absurd in a surrealist way, but it is an awesome ride, and really plays off of the superhero and James Bond-type movie genre, where one guy saves the world from total destruction. In this case, they just need to do something as simple as pay the county assessor, but look at the incredible path of destruction and manpower it takes to try to stop them. It's unbelievable, but they way in which they do unbelievable things is developed so well, it is believable. "We're on a mission from God." Only a higher power (or SOMETHING) could help them avoid destruction themselves in the face of mass destruction, help them elude the hundreds of thousands of enemies they made, accomplish their task, finish their quest, and make it out relatively unscathed after what they went through. And you want to talk about the film's "misplaced cool." You disgust me.
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