A Mission from BLOG - Part II
Previously on BLOG, I had explained the reasons I decided to take a month out of my life to watch and rewatch The Blues Brothers, and to give it the liveblogging snark treatment here. If you missed Part I while traveling home from ComicCon or holding vigil outside of Lindsay Lohan's prison cell, check it out here.
If you've already read Part I, then sit back, relax, and enjoy Part II:
At last, the Blues Brothers are ready for their first gig -- even if there's no gig ready for them. So they go wandering aimlessly through rural Indiana looking for some out-of-the-way shithole whose booked entertainment is running four hours behind. As luck would have it, they stumble upon the set of Urban Cowboy, and Jake and Elwood go inside to check what kind of music they have there. "Both kinds," the bar lady chirps, "country and western!" Relieved that they don't play any of the same shit they do at the Holiday Inn Armada Room, the band sets up on the spot where the mechanical bull is to be set up next Wednesday, surrounded by magic chicken wire. The boys do three songs, drink $300 worth of beer, and suffer zero cuts from flying glass splinters.
Despite playing a great gig to a packed house of happy alcoholics who would have walked out if not for the live entertainment, the brothers manage not only to piss off Bob, the proprietor, but also earn the enmity of the unreliable fucks who rolled into the parking lot at closing time thinking they still had a job. When Jake and Elwood skip out on their bar tab, they take off after them, shotguns blazing. Luckily for the brothers, Officer X of the Illinois State Police is manning the speed trap outside Kokomo, Indiana -- apparently having been sent into exile for the shopping mall incident, and blaming it on the black oil. The Bluesmobile tears by, and Officer X starts in pursuit... only to hit Bob's camper trailer, ripping through it like a food court Taco Bell. Bob, the Good Ole Boys, and Officer X all turn to look down the road to Chicago, shake their fists in the air, and shout, "Hooooo-gan!!"
The next day, Jake and Elwood meet with their old booking agent, Maury Sline, who was given this surname as a gift to the writers at MAD Magazine. He's hesitant to do anything with an R&B act, since this is 1980 and disco has pretty well established itself as the musical genre that will never die (despite the recent accidental loss of the transmission tower at WZAZ). But Jake gets the upper hand when he threatens to tell Mrs. Sline that Maury was hanging around bathhouse steamrooms with ten naked men at a time. Maury relents, and offers the band the 5000-seat Palace Hotel Ballroom up north on Lake Wazapamani, though he doesn't think they'll make any profit.
What he doesn't know, though, is that the brother's have a secret advantage: free child labor!! Curtis sends the current crop of future Joliet inmates out to plaster fliers all over South Chicago, as well as scrawling ads in scummy public men's rooms, at adult eye level. (I hope the kid who wrote that bit of graffiti changed his socks afterwards... eewww....) The Good Old Boys, apparently looking for an excuse to miss their next gig as well, spot this ad and decide to go get their revenge for... whatever.
Likewise, when a flyer crosses Johnny LaRue's desk, he calls up Officer X and asks if he and his partner would like to make it a date. "But, we just got fifty calls about an old police car with a stolen air-raid speaker tied to the roof driving on the beach at 10 mph," Officer X tells him. "We could easily go and grab them right now." Johnny pouts. "Oh. I thought we had fun last time, but if you don't want to go after parole violators with me anymore..." Officer X sighs and agrees to meet Johnny at the Palace... but just for a quick arrest, nothing else.
After covering three counties with their loudspeaker promotion, Jake and Elwood decide to actually get to the show. Irony of Alannis Morrisette ironies, it is at that moment the car runs out of gas. Unfortunately, Elwood can't put the moves on his own brother after pulling the out-of-gas thing, so he saves it for the gorgeous blonde who pulls into the same gas station, and mistakes his black suit, fedora and sunglasses for an attendant's uniform.
(Kids, ask your grandparents what a "gas station attendant" was.)
After several minutes chatting up the supermodel in the convertible, Elwood suggests that he ditch his family and meet her at the pool at a nearby motel. She tells Elwood she'll think about it, and drives off, whispering to herself, "This is crazy, this is crazy,..."
Meanwhile, the standing-room-only crowd at the Palace are getting rowdy, and the band starts to consider putting up chicken wire. But Curtis stops them, saying he knows just how to appease a crowd of 1980s music lovers come to hear classic 50s and 60s blues -- with a 1930s big band production number!! Cab Calloway does a version of "Minnie the Moocher" very much like the one he did for the classic Betty Boop short half a century earlier, which brings the crowd to its feet.
Well, it worked in one cartoon; why shouldn't it work in this one?
As the band distracts the crowd, Jake and Elwood sneak onto the Palace Hotel grounds, past 100 parked police cars, but pause to sabotage the Good Ole Boys' Winnebago. "That'll teach the fuckers to be late to one of their own gigs!" Elwood says as Curtis finishes his song, and the crowd starts growing impatient again.
Officer X then arrives, eager to start making arrests and exposing aliens. But Johnny LaRue asks, "What's the rush? Let's the three of us sit, enjoy the music for a bit." X scowls, then agrees to listen to one song, two tops... but then they start arresting. "Sure, sure," LaRue says. "Buy you boys some drinks? Orange whip?" he suggests, while fingering the bottle of roofies in his jacket pocket.
Finally, everything is in place. Jake and Elwood make their grand, long-anticipated entrance, and the crowd goes absolutely mild, staring in stone silence. "Crap, the handcuffed briefcase bit always killed on SNL," Elwood mutters. But thirty seconds into "Everybody Needs Somebody," the crowd is clapping, cheering, jumping to their feet and displaying the kind of mood swings usually only generated by taking both valium and cocaine simultaneously. "Huh... I wonder what other recreational drugs you could mix," Jake wonders to himself.
What, too soon?
The band goes into their second number, and Jake and Elwood go running for the back door, where the head of a major east coast record label just happens to be hanging out with $10,000 in his pocket. He offers to give it to the guys, to which Jake replies, "Bullshit! You're going to give us ten Gs after hearing one and a half songs?"
"Why the fuck not?" the man answers. "We've already made millions ripping off colored blues artists over the past fifty years; what's a couple thousand for a couple of white clowns if they can revive the genre's popularity? Besides, it's not as if the recording industry is going to start losing money hand over fist and then die out in the next 25 years, right?"
So, with all their other debts covered, and the show box office in hand, the guys sneak out of the theater through an access tunnel. They're almost home free... but then Princess Leia jumps out from around a corner, brandishing a machine gun. The guys hit the ground as she opens fire, but at a range of less than twenty feet, she's easily able to OH YOU HAVE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME!! Even the fucking ricochets are missing them!! Good Christ, not even a half-blind epileptic Stormtrooper could have aim that shitty!
"Why is this woman so uptight?" Elwood wonders aloud.
Leia stops firing, and announces, "I remained celibate for you, Jake."
"Okay, that would explain it," Elwood says.
Turns out her entire family was humiliated after Jake left Leia standing at the altar, though before they all blew up on Alderaan. Jake listens to her vent her anger, and then, comfortably certain she won't be able to shoot him even at point-blank range, approaches her, and then falls to his knees. He grovels, he begs, he proclaims his eternal love, and then he pulls off his sunglasses to flash a pair of big, brown, puppy-dog eyes capable of melting a heart encased in carbonite.
Leia drops both the gun's muzzle and her panties, and gives herself to Jake for a passionate kiss. And having received forgiveness from this woman he had hurt so badly three years earlier, who he once loved and, perhaps in some way, still does... Jake drops her in the mud. Ha-ha, psych, Princess Lame-a!! Jake really pulled one over on you!! She does get up and try to shoot them both as they flee, but that works out just as well as suspected. Leia drops her gun in defeat, and resolves to forget Jake forever... along with most of the rest of the 70s and 80s, as she'll reveal in her books decades later
Back in the Bluesmobile, Elwood notes, in addition to other facts, that it's 106 miles to Chicago. The time is around midnight, as Twiggy Brinkley is seen waiting at the motel for Elwood. That means, even at a leisurely 35 miles an hour, they'd reach Chicago around 3 am. Yet, as they approach the city limits, it is clearly well past dawn. I mention this only to show that, for all of Landis' excesses, at least we can all say a prayer of thanks for being spared what would have been six more hours of goddamned car chasing.
So, morning comes, and just outside Chicago, Elwood does some fancy swerving that results in leaving a smoking pile of ruined cop shocks, cop fenders, cop bones, etc. Johnny LaRue and Officer X end their night together with a soaring jump, penetrating the side of a tractor trailer full of cigars, which Johnny announces over police band with a joyous, satisfied laugh.
Then... more car chase. Here's a fun drinking game: every time a cop car is destroyed, drink a shot. The winner is the player who just mimes drinking, and watches his idiot competitors give themselves alcohol poisoning.
After losing the entire Chicago PD, the pursuit is then picked up by the Illinois Nazis. These guys actually come closest to killing the Blues Brothers, and by using only six men and two station wagons, demonstrate their remarkable German efficiency in doing so. The chase leads to Chicago's then-incomplete Trans-Skyline Expressway, planned to carry traffic over the Sears Tower and other skyscrapers on the way to Gary, Indiana. The Bluesmobile, even crippled by a thrown rod, avoids a tragic plummet when Elwood employs its cop-reverse-flip-turbo-boosters. Instead, it's the two top Nazis who go flying off the edge of the ramp, and as the ground and certain death rise up to meet them, the younger Nazi turns to his superior and admits a shameful secret:
"I never thought Laugh-In was really all that funny."
Finally, Jake and Elwood reach Daley Plaza, and the film pauses briefly for the sole truly emotional moment in the film -- the death of the Bluesmobile.
(bows head)
Once Jake and Elwood rush into the building, we get what feels like twenty minutes of watching the siege of Daley Plaza as the government center and surrounding area are soon full of cops, firemen, soldiers, Marines, sailors, National Guardsmen, the Girl Scouts, Webelos, and to top it off, a platoon of plumbers brandishing kitchen sinks. The Unnecessary Force (that would be a pretty cool name for a superhero comic, come to think of it) barrels into the building, runs up to the guard desk and ask, "Uh, which way did they go, George? Which way did they go?" George points to the elevator, and wonders if perhaps, as a security guard, he really should let so many armed men storm in without making them sign in.
Jake and Elwood reach the county assessor's office to find the clerk is on his break, hiding in the back office lamenting the fact that he'll never do another SF film to top Close Encounters. After ten minutes he dries his eyes he goes to unlock the doors. "Hey!" the brothers shout, "it's the asshole who put us in 1941!" The clerk tries to quickly relock the doors, but he gets picked up by his sweater vest and shoved against the reception counter. Elwood hands him the $5000 from the Palace box office which, despite being collected at $2 per person, is in a single tidy bundle.
"Okay," the clerk says, "as soon as I finish my bologna sandwich, I'll write your receipt."
"Actually, we're kinda in a rush," Elwood says, as the entire building begins to shake. "Could you write that receipt now?"
The clerks gives both brothers a mercenary look. "Will you do another movie for me?"
"Oh, fuck no," Jake says.
"Please?" the clerk begs. "Just a cameo?"
"An uncredited cameo," Elwood counters.
"Fine," Jake relents. "I'll do one in the film after the one where he does his."
A deal reached, the clerk stamps their receipt, just as the Illinois Law Enforcement Community chop their way through the last door, shout, "Heeeere's Johnny!" and slap on the handcuffs.
Then one more number, then the credits. The end.
... Well, whaddaya want for nothin'? A rubber biscuit?
Summary: It's real easy to make fun of The Blues Brothers and to point out the sillier bits and the lapses in logic. It's also easy to point out all the excesses in the script and the direction. But that's all beside the point. This is meant as a fun movie, and thirty years later, it's still fun. And a big part of the fun is all the excess -- yeah, you could chop the chase scenes down, or you could take out the Nazi subplot, but this would be a case where less is less, rather than less is more.
Adding to the fun is the great numbers by some great artists who, as the documentary features on the DVD say, were experiencing careers slumps at the time the film was being made. You would never know it to listen to them, though. The Ray Charles bit in particular was a tough one for me to write, because I would lose focus and start enjoying the performance.
But, to call this film "a Catholic classic"? I'm sorry, but even for an institution that has embraced a lot of illogical ideas over the centuries, this is ridiculous. One of the other non-religious films to make the Vatican list was It's a Wonderful Life, the story of a good, selfless man who spends his whole life sacrificing his dreams to help others. Jake and Elwood? You're no George Bailey.
And that about wraps it up. Push the button, Frank.
If you've already read Part I, then sit back, relax, and enjoy Part II:
At last, the Blues Brothers are ready for their first gig -- even if there's no gig ready for them. So they go wandering aimlessly through rural Indiana looking for some out-of-the-way shithole whose booked entertainment is running four hours behind. As luck would have it, they stumble upon the set of Urban Cowboy, and Jake and Elwood go inside to check what kind of music they have there. "Both kinds," the bar lady chirps, "country and western!" Relieved that they don't play any of the same shit they do at the Holiday Inn Armada Room, the band sets up on the spot where the mechanical bull is to be set up next Wednesday, surrounded by magic chicken wire. The boys do three songs, drink $300 worth of beer, and suffer zero cuts from flying glass splinters.
Despite playing a great gig to a packed house of happy alcoholics who would have walked out if not for the live entertainment, the brothers manage not only to piss off Bob, the proprietor, but also earn the enmity of the unreliable fucks who rolled into the parking lot at closing time thinking they still had a job. When Jake and Elwood skip out on their bar tab, they take off after them, shotguns blazing. Luckily for the brothers, Officer X of the Illinois State Police is manning the speed trap outside Kokomo, Indiana -- apparently having been sent into exile for the shopping mall incident, and blaming it on the black oil. The Bluesmobile tears by, and Officer X starts in pursuit... only to hit Bob's camper trailer, ripping through it like a food court Taco Bell. Bob, the Good Ole Boys, and Officer X all turn to look down the road to Chicago, shake their fists in the air, and shout, "Hooooo-gan!!"
The next day, Jake and Elwood meet with their old booking agent, Maury Sline, who was given this surname as a gift to the writers at MAD Magazine. He's hesitant to do anything with an R&B act, since this is 1980 and disco has pretty well established itself as the musical genre that will never die (despite the recent accidental loss of the transmission tower at WZAZ). But Jake gets the upper hand when he threatens to tell Mrs. Sline that Maury was hanging around bathhouse steamrooms with ten naked men at a time. Maury relents, and offers the band the 5000-seat Palace Hotel Ballroom up north on Lake Wazapamani, though he doesn't think they'll make any profit.
What he doesn't know, though, is that the brother's have a secret advantage: free child labor!! Curtis sends the current crop of future Joliet inmates out to plaster fliers all over South Chicago, as well as scrawling ads in scummy public men's rooms, at adult eye level. (I hope the kid who wrote that bit of graffiti changed his socks afterwards... eewww....) The Good Old Boys, apparently looking for an excuse to miss their next gig as well, spot this ad and decide to go get their revenge for... whatever.
Likewise, when a flyer crosses Johnny LaRue's desk, he calls up Officer X and asks if he and his partner would like to make it a date. "But, we just got fifty calls about an old police car with a stolen air-raid speaker tied to the roof driving on the beach at 10 mph," Officer X tells him. "We could easily go and grab them right now." Johnny pouts. "Oh. I thought we had fun last time, but if you don't want to go after parole violators with me anymore..." Officer X sighs and agrees to meet Johnny at the Palace... but just for a quick arrest, nothing else.
After covering three counties with their loudspeaker promotion, Jake and Elwood decide to actually get to the show. Irony of Alannis Morrisette ironies, it is at that moment the car runs out of gas. Unfortunately, Elwood can't put the moves on his own brother after pulling the out-of-gas thing, so he saves it for the gorgeous blonde who pulls into the same gas station, and mistakes his black suit, fedora and sunglasses for an attendant's uniform.
(Kids, ask your grandparents what a "gas station attendant" was.)
After several minutes chatting up the supermodel in the convertible, Elwood suggests that he ditch his family and meet her at the pool at a nearby motel. She tells Elwood she'll think about it, and drives off, whispering to herself, "This is crazy, this is crazy,..."
Meanwhile, the standing-room-only crowd at the Palace are getting rowdy, and the band starts to consider putting up chicken wire. But Curtis stops them, saying he knows just how to appease a crowd of 1980s music lovers come to hear classic 50s and 60s blues -- with a 1930s big band production number!! Cab Calloway does a version of "Minnie the Moocher" very much like the one he did for the classic Betty Boop short half a century earlier, which brings the crowd to its feet.
Well, it worked in one cartoon; why shouldn't it work in this one?
As the band distracts the crowd, Jake and Elwood sneak onto the Palace Hotel grounds, past 100 parked police cars, but pause to sabotage the Good Ole Boys' Winnebago. "That'll teach the fuckers to be late to one of their own gigs!" Elwood says as Curtis finishes his song, and the crowd starts growing impatient again.
Officer X then arrives, eager to start making arrests and exposing aliens. But Johnny LaRue asks, "What's the rush? Let's the three of us sit, enjoy the music for a bit." X scowls, then agrees to listen to one song, two tops... but then they start arresting. "Sure, sure," LaRue says. "Buy you boys some drinks? Orange whip?" he suggests, while fingering the bottle of roofies in his jacket pocket.
Finally, everything is in place. Jake and Elwood make their grand, long-anticipated entrance, and the crowd goes absolutely mild, staring in stone silence. "Crap, the handcuffed briefcase bit always killed on SNL," Elwood mutters. But thirty seconds into "Everybody Needs Somebody," the crowd is clapping, cheering, jumping to their feet and displaying the kind of mood swings usually only generated by taking both valium and cocaine simultaneously. "Huh... I wonder what other recreational drugs you could mix," Jake wonders to himself.
What, too soon?
The band goes into their second number, and Jake and Elwood go running for the back door, where the head of a major east coast record label just happens to be hanging out with $10,000 in his pocket. He offers to give it to the guys, to which Jake replies, "Bullshit! You're going to give us ten Gs after hearing one and a half songs?"
"Why the fuck not?" the man answers. "We've already made millions ripping off colored blues artists over the past fifty years; what's a couple thousand for a couple of white clowns if they can revive the genre's popularity? Besides, it's not as if the recording industry is going to start losing money hand over fist and then die out in the next 25 years, right?"
So, with all their other debts covered, and the show box office in hand, the guys sneak out of the theater through an access tunnel. They're almost home free... but then Princess Leia jumps out from around a corner, brandishing a machine gun. The guys hit the ground as she opens fire, but at a range of less than twenty feet, she's easily able to OH YOU HAVE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME!! Even the fucking ricochets are missing them!! Good Christ, not even a half-blind epileptic Stormtrooper could have aim that shitty!
"Why is this woman so uptight?" Elwood wonders aloud.
Leia stops firing, and announces, "I remained celibate for you, Jake."
"Okay, that would explain it," Elwood says.
Turns out her entire family was humiliated after Jake left Leia standing at the altar, though before they all blew up on Alderaan. Jake listens to her vent her anger, and then, comfortably certain she won't be able to shoot him even at point-blank range, approaches her, and then falls to his knees. He grovels, he begs, he proclaims his eternal love, and then he pulls off his sunglasses to flash a pair of big, brown, puppy-dog eyes capable of melting a heart encased in carbonite.
Leia drops both the gun's muzzle and her panties, and gives herself to Jake for a passionate kiss. And having received forgiveness from this woman he had hurt so badly three years earlier, who he once loved and, perhaps in some way, still does... Jake drops her in the mud. Ha-ha, psych, Princess Lame-a!! Jake really pulled one over on you!! She does get up and try to shoot them both as they flee, but that works out just as well as suspected. Leia drops her gun in defeat, and resolves to forget Jake forever... along with most of the rest of the 70s and 80s, as she'll reveal in her books decades later
Back in the Bluesmobile, Elwood notes, in addition to other facts, that it's 106 miles to Chicago. The time is around midnight, as Twiggy Brinkley is seen waiting at the motel for Elwood. That means, even at a leisurely 35 miles an hour, they'd reach Chicago around 3 am. Yet, as they approach the city limits, it is clearly well past dawn. I mention this only to show that, for all of Landis' excesses, at least we can all say a prayer of thanks for being spared what would have been six more hours of goddamned car chasing.
So, morning comes, and just outside Chicago, Elwood does some fancy swerving that results in leaving a smoking pile of ruined cop shocks, cop fenders, cop bones, etc. Johnny LaRue and Officer X end their night together with a soaring jump, penetrating the side of a tractor trailer full of cigars, which Johnny announces over police band with a joyous, satisfied laugh.
Then... more car chase. Here's a fun drinking game: every time a cop car is destroyed, drink a shot. The winner is the player who just mimes drinking, and watches his idiot competitors give themselves alcohol poisoning.
After losing the entire Chicago PD, the pursuit is then picked up by the Illinois Nazis. These guys actually come closest to killing the Blues Brothers, and by using only six men and two station wagons, demonstrate their remarkable German efficiency in doing so. The chase leads to Chicago's then-incomplete Trans-Skyline Expressway, planned to carry traffic over the Sears Tower and other skyscrapers on the way to Gary, Indiana. The Bluesmobile, even crippled by a thrown rod, avoids a tragic plummet when Elwood employs its cop-reverse-flip-turbo-boosters. Instead, it's the two top Nazis who go flying off the edge of the ramp, and as the ground and certain death rise up to meet them, the younger Nazi turns to his superior and admits a shameful secret:
"I never thought Laugh-In was really all that funny."
Finally, Jake and Elwood reach Daley Plaza, and the film pauses briefly for the sole truly emotional moment in the film -- the death of the Bluesmobile.
(bows head)
Once Jake and Elwood rush into the building, we get what feels like twenty minutes of watching the siege of Daley Plaza as the government center and surrounding area are soon full of cops, firemen, soldiers, Marines, sailors, National Guardsmen, the Girl Scouts, Webelos, and to top it off, a platoon of plumbers brandishing kitchen sinks. The Unnecessary Force (that would be a pretty cool name for a superhero comic, come to think of it) barrels into the building, runs up to the guard desk and ask, "Uh, which way did they go, George? Which way did they go?" George points to the elevator, and wonders if perhaps, as a security guard, he really should let so many armed men storm in without making them sign in.
Jake and Elwood reach the county assessor's office to find the clerk is on his break, hiding in the back office lamenting the fact that he'll never do another SF film to top Close Encounters. After ten minutes he dries his eyes he goes to unlock the doors. "Hey!" the brothers shout, "it's the asshole who put us in 1941!" The clerk tries to quickly relock the doors, but he gets picked up by his sweater vest and shoved against the reception counter. Elwood hands him the $5000 from the Palace box office which, despite being collected at $2 per person, is in a single tidy bundle.
"Okay," the clerk says, "as soon as I finish my bologna sandwich, I'll write your receipt."
"Actually, we're kinda in a rush," Elwood says, as the entire building begins to shake. "Could you write that receipt now?"
The clerks gives both brothers a mercenary look. "Will you do another movie for me?"
"Oh, fuck no," Jake says.
"Please?" the clerk begs. "Just a cameo?"
"An uncredited cameo," Elwood counters.
"Fine," Jake relents. "I'll do one in the film after the one where he does his."
A deal reached, the clerk stamps their receipt, just as the Illinois Law Enforcement Community chop their way through the last door, shout, "Heeeere's Johnny!" and slap on the handcuffs.
Then one more number, then the credits. The end.
... Well, whaddaya want for nothin'? A rubber biscuit?
Summary: It's real easy to make fun of The Blues Brothers and to point out the sillier bits and the lapses in logic. It's also easy to point out all the excesses in the script and the direction. But that's all beside the point. This is meant as a fun movie, and thirty years later, it's still fun. And a big part of the fun is all the excess -- yeah, you could chop the chase scenes down, or you could take out the Nazi subplot, but this would be a case where less is less, rather than less is more.
Adding to the fun is the great numbers by some great artists who, as the documentary features on the DVD say, were experiencing careers slumps at the time the film was being made. You would never know it to listen to them, though. The Ray Charles bit in particular was a tough one for me to write, because I would lose focus and start enjoying the performance.
But, to call this film "a Catholic classic"? I'm sorry, but even for an institution that has embraced a lot of illogical ideas over the centuries, this is ridiculous. One of the other non-religious films to make the Vatican list was It's a Wonderful Life, the story of a good, selfless man who spends his whole life sacrificing his dreams to help others. Jake and Elwood? You're no George Bailey.
And that about wraps it up. Push the button, Frank.