The Blues Brothers – This Ain’t Rock and Roll

The defining musical of 1980. I was very excited to rewatch this one with Tori.

I’ll waste no time giving you her thoughts.

Pre-viewing:

I don’t know anything about the contents of this movie, but I have a very vivid picture in my head whenever I hear the title. According to Nick my description is spot on. Maybe these two dudes in black suits, bowler hats, and sunglasses will be popular blues musicians. I really don’t know.

Post-viewing:

This gave me big O Brother, Where Are Thou? vibes. And I’m not sure I entirely remember the plot of that movie, but it felt similar. On the whole, I enjoyed this movie. It felt… a little too long. Some scenes could have been shortened significantly (imho) or just cut out entirely. I’m not sure that the whole nazi bit or Carrie Fisher’s scorned woman bit added anything to the plot line. I feel like there might be some period pop culture references being made that were entirely over my head… possibly? Because I truly didn’t understand the addition to the story.

I really appreciated the music throughout the film and loved the supporting roles from Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin. (Side note: I don’t know if it was my sound system or the movie, but my goodness the audio was disappointingly OFF during Aretha’s diner scene). And Dan Aykroyd was before his own time when he said “Who you gonna call?” at some point during the movie… to which my husband and I both looked at each other and said, “GHOSTBUSTERS!”

Nick’s Thoughts:

Sometimes, movies can be really fun when there are no stakes and your characters can be blown up, shot at, and exploded and be totally fine. Usually, that would be a Looney Tunes movie. But for The Blues Brothers, I love it.

The movie’s biggest strength is its music. The songs they perform throughout are so much fun and lead to some great sequences. If you like the soulful genre of blues, check it out.

As my wife said, the runtime on this puppy is insane. At 133 minutes, they needed to cut at least 30 of them. I think they could’ve done it without cutting very many scenes too, they could’ve just cut every scene to be about 25% shorter and it would’ve worked great. I could feel it during the film, almost every scene dragging on too long. Apparently the first draft of the script was 324 pages. The average script is around 95-120 pages. Wow.

The humor of this movie isn’t for everyone, but it is for me. I found myself laughing more than I expected to when I turned on the movie. Overall, I had a fun time and enjoyed myself. I’m glad we were able to watch together!