Hacker Cinema
The Blues Brothers
1980 · Film · 133 min
Directed by John Landis
Just released from prison, Jake Blues puts his old band back together with his brother Elwood to save the Catholic home where they were raised.
12 positive2 negative22 neutralfrom 36 commenters
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37 comments on Hacker News
The Blues Brothers IS the perfect movie.
Every scene has a place. Every exchange has a quotable line.
The soundtrack, however, is like the Library of Congress authorized the American Anthology of Awesome Blues, and hired God to produce it.
American cops, fire, and EMS will go upstream on a one way road, or use the sidewalk or the grass if they have to. The Blues Brothers film may even be the material used to train some of the more ambitious departments.
The Catholics were also smeared as ‘alt-right’, which was an attempt to slide the Overton window left. The Knights of Columbus has been around forever, they perform many charitable acts and have never, ever been accused of anything nefarious.
‘Alt right’ also seems to smell of terroristic accusation, but maybe that’s just my interpretation.
In fact, the KofC has been targeted by the Ku Klux Klan in the past. ( The Klan hates Catholics, as the Blues Brothers movie tells us.)*
Smearing the Knights was a vast overreach.
* If you find your position is in agreement with the KKK, it is a good time to think about it thoroughly.
Milwaukee has a predominantly W-E interstate I-94, and when it hits Lake Michigan it simply turns 90 degrees, fairly sharply, to the south, and gets renamed to 794. Confusingly, there is also a I-94 that also turns south a few thousand feet west of 794, and I94 and 794 run in parallel for several miles. Note that only I-94 goes to Chicago; 794 just kind of "stops" at the Milwaukee airport. If you'd like to see the cancelled "Lake Freeway" you can see parts of the partially constructed abandoned project in the movie "The Blues Brothers" from 1980. There is a long history of turmoil in the story of the "Lake Freeway" in Milwaukee, which seems to have dramatically negatively impacted the economic success of the local area due to generational uncertainty. Its a very poor city and their anti-poverty strategy seems to be periodic infrastructure demolition and reconstruction; it hasn't worked so far but they've only been trying that since WWII so maybe it'll work next time ... (edit: to summarize, if you're trying to get to Chicago from the NW via I-94, if you end up on 794, you are very lost, but at least you've visited a VERY controversial construction project)
Let’s be real, the overwhelming majority of those 500 are straight up terrible. Netflix alone has produced well over 100 movies, and IMO at best some of them are worth finishing not that I can think of any off the top of my head.
Now I’m sure you’ve looked forward to many movies but off the top of your head list stuff you’ve either seen more than once and or actually recommend to someone that came our in the last 10 years vs…
(78) The Deer Hunter, Superman, National Lampoon's Animal House, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (79) Apocalypse Now, Alien, Life of Brian, Mad Max, Escape from Alcatraz (80) The Shining, Star Wars: Episode V, Airplane!, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, The Elephant Man (81) Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, The Evil Dead, Mad Max 2, Escape from New York, Time Bandits (82) Blade Runner, The Thing, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Tron (83) Scarface, WarGames, Star Wars: Episode VI, Trading Places, The Evil Dead
Obviously not all great movies but that’s ~30 classic movies in just 6 years and I’m sure I’ve missed a few as kids movies are largely missing from that list.
I'm surprised there's no mention yet of the incredible scene from the 1980 film "The Blues Brothers".
https://youtu.be/QfN1GRqKXpM?si=-4Mwmipl5sCFtCWN
This practical effect took weeks to set up.
I can't find documentation specifying any special techniques used to create this version of the car. I recall reading an interview naming the builder who set it up, and how no one on set was allowed to touch it except the actors, John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd. Only one take. Can't find that interview now.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
When I was a kid, VHS home recording was a thing... so my sisters and I watched a few movies wayyyyy too many times.
The Blues Brothers Stripes Ferris Bueller's Day Off Footloose Dirty Dancing Amadeus These days, everything comes and goes from streaming. I'll watch these when they pop up again
The Expanse Monty Python and the Holy Grail The Ministry of Time Groundhog Day Dirty Harry Apocalypse Now About Time Time Bandits
Mostly, I will watch a movie a second or third time if I am tired and it's on TV and cannot sleep. So there is only a small intersection of films that I have watched multiple times and would admit to watching even once.
So excluding those, from most to least (probably).
- elf
- the Bourne identity
- groundhog day
- ronin
- Willie Wonka (the original)
- the fifth element
- ghost dog (any Jim Jarmusch)
- the blues brothers
- singin' in the rain
- crouching tiger, hidden dragon
- my friend totoro
I am probably leaving out quite a few, but all these films I have seen enough times to reconstruct in my head, scene by scene.
Just sit and watch, while not doing anything else? Die Hard. At least once a year since it came out in 1988. Die Hard and pizza have been a Christmas Day tradition since it came out on VHS in 1989. (I saw it in the theater in 1988.)
Otherwise, if I am watching a movie more than once, it's wile I am doing something else. Working from home, I often have old science fiction B-movies -- both the MST3K versions and unriffed versions -- running in the background. Others I'll "watch" while doing something else are Animal House, Blues Brothers, the Lethal Weapon films, Patton, James Bond, and some others.
John Landis film The Blues Brothers crashed a reported 104 cars
That's almost enough for one "Blues Brothers" movie!
The Blues Brothers is one of the greatest movies of all time but it’s not a musical, it’s a movie about musicians. There are no examples of the characters communicating plot elements via lyrics they sing.
- The Blues Brothers (1980) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080455/
Even 100.000.000 isnt all songs. There is still loads of music missing, with changes hppening every now and then as labels pulls specific band lineups not covered by their agreements with Spotify.
There is nothing by eg The Blues Brothers outside the two movies and their debut album. Nothing by Spocks Beard prior to Neal Morse leaving the band. Other albums are stripped of specific songs because a guest artist wasnt part of the overall deal.
There are probably countless other examples as well, and as artists are moving away from physical media completely I fear that entire artist will disappear in the future because they happened to be pulled from streaming services.
Probably the re-boot of The Blues Brothers. Even ChatGPT suggested that :)
>What movie is where police vehicles are dispatched and they all crash for seemingly no reason on the way to a scene
The movie you are describing sounds like "The Blues Brothers". In the film, Jake and Elwood Blues embark on a mission to save the Catholic orphanage where they were raised from foreclosure. In the course of their journey, they lead the police on a high-speed car chase through the streets of Chicago, causing numerous police vehicles to crash. Is this the movie you were thinking of?
Are you looking for the movie The Blues Brothers? (Not ChatGPT, I promise)
I've been trying to avoid sequels, reboots, and other Millennial nostalgia-based movies going to a mainstream theater, and I found it nearly impossible. Accidentally watched Uncharted not realizing it was based on... a video game of all things. It wasn't good. Nothing else was good either the past 2 years.
I'm not partial to old movies, but there are some gems, and they show how much you can do without modern VFX. I don't know what modern live-action movies were even improved by fancy effects besides The Matrix, which was awesome. Even when the scene is about action, it's cooler when it's realistic, like the Blues Brothers chase where they're actually driving 118 MPH and 104 real cars are getting wrecked.
I got thrown out of a hoighty-toighty Napa winery once for jokingly asking for a bottle of "Night Train" (note, I only knew it from watching "The Blues Brothers").
I'm a bit surprised that movie had such a large effect, Merlot isn't necessarily a hugely popular wine here but I sometimes prefer it over a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Shiraz since a lot of wine makers here have followed a bit of a trend for "full bodied" (aka sledgehammer) wines from those varieties. It's a bit like the megalitres of India Pale Ale that is virtually undrinkable because the brewers are in a competition to see how much they can destroy the overall flavour with hops.
...so try the Merlot (esp. Australian merlot). It's tasty, affordable and won't leave you feeling like you lost a fight the next day.
> Then there's "it's all remakes now"—but 1) it's not,
It really is, if by "remake" you mean all ways of leveraging existing IP. Here are the top ten box office films of 2020:
* Bad Boys for Life (sequel) * Sonic the Hedgehog (videogame) * Birds of Prey (comic book) * Dolittle (book) * The Invisible Man (book) * The Call of the Wild (book) * Onward (original) * The Croods: A New Age (sequel) * Tenet (original) * Wonder Woman 1984 (sequal, comic book)
Two originals. Now go back 20 years:
* Mission: Impossible 2 (sequel) * Gladiator (book) * Cast Away (original) * What Women Want (original) * Dinosaur (original) * How the Grinch Stole Christmas (book) * Meet the Parents (remake) * The Perfect Storm (book) * X-Men (comic book) * What Lies Beneath (original)
Four originals. Go back another 10 years:
* Ghost (original) * Home Alone (original) * Pretty Woman (original) * Dances with Wolves (book) * Total Recall (short story) * Back to the Future Part III (sequel) * Die Hard 2 (sequel) * Presumed Innocent (book) * Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (comic book) * Kindergarten Cop (original)
Five originals. Another ten years to 1980:
* The Empire Strikes Back (sequel) * 9 to 5 (original) * Stir Crazy (original) * Airplane! (original) * Any Which Way You Can (sequel) * Private Benjamin (original) * Coal Miner's Daughter (original) * Smokey and the Bandit II (sequel) * The Blue Lagoon (book) * The Blues Brothers (SNL sketch)
Five originals again. I'm going by top box-office gross here because I think that's a good proxy for what is successful. You can look at other years, but there is a very clear (but not overwhelming) trend towards movies based on familiar content. It's not clear whether studios are leading audiences or vice versa. Probably some iterative process of both.
There's also a clear trend away from dramas. I think that's because drama (and non-slapstick comedies) tend to rely heavily on specific cultural norms for their effect which makes them translate poorly. There is a very clear trend especially in the last decade or so of Hollywood focusing on movies that will also do well in China in particular.
I'm not sure whether the EFF changed, but the ACLU certainly has.
Once upon a time, the ACLU believed so deeply in the First Amendment that they fought National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie all the way to the supreme court. You may remember the plaintiffs from the Blues Brothers movie, perhaps? The Illinois Nazis? Skokie, the town, was deliberately chosen because it had a large Jewish population, and many Holocaust survivors, yet the ACLU went to court to fight for these bona fide Nazis, and won them the right to wear their Nazi uniforms and their swastikas when they marched, carrying their hypocritical signs about "white free speech."
Can you imagine the ACLU doing that today?
Regarding THC being illegal... Around 2012 I was at a concert in LA at the Palladium (indoor venue-- arguably most famous as the final scene of the blues brothers movie). As the night progressed, the venue was filled with a fog of pot smoke, and I was struck by the a couple of things.
One, the contrast between Orange County where one would not dare to dream to smoke in public. My (minor) career as a weed smoker was entirely indoors-- late nights and Boards of Canada albums, and whispers of, "Do you know anyone?"
Two, as a cigar enthusiast, how utterly unwelcome I would have been smoking tobacco.
Originality? Hah! Even remaking Frankenstein every 20 years or so brought a new take to it, whether Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi or Robert de Nero, they all brought something new.
More than any point I can remember before Hollywood now turn every movie and remake into the exact same movie. There was always some degree of fashion, but there's no contrast any more - it's all highlight, so it drags and drags by being boring and samey (but loud). Highlight is now just the dull background. The loudness wars, movie edition.
Doesn't matter what it is, a current film (or Netflix high budget, Game of Thrones etc) will have:
+ An absurdly overblown inspirational speech inspiring the troops (or children, or escapees, or office colleagues)! This will take 5-10 ear-bleeding, cringing minutes. If unlucky, you'll get two or three of these in one show!
+ An absurdly artificial, but highly 3D friendly chase scene with no production value other than hype. This will take 5-15 minutes. It stopped being interesting after Blues Brothers' piss take of chase scenes!
+ Ditto, ditto fight scene. Super slow motion. I always think of Adam West's TV Batman, complete with music - Zap! Pow! OWWW! Biff! 300 enemies die, town levelled, 342,000 rounds of ammunition spent, hero hasn't broken sweat. Just about the only recent exceptions I can think of are Deadpool and Sin City. Damn, the sequels were disappointing.
+ Ditto, ditto villain's death or capture.
I wait for them to land on Netflix, then go make tea, tidy the kitchen or watch some paint dry in all those "highlights". Independents with next to no budget can still do original though.
yes, it's achievable for folks with disposable income
People living in NC and TX generally have a lot more disposable income than people in CA at the same gross income level. (In that sense, those other places are more free.)
pay for the house in full. A mortgage was not going to be possible.
It's entirely possible for an LLC to lease property. I also know for a fact that there are people in Chinatown who, for a variety of reasons, can't get a mortgage, but they can get alternative financing to the tune of several hundreds of thousands of dollars.
> 9. Buy a boring car.
Very affordable. I just did this.
> 10. Buy a decoy house to fool the D.M.V.
In the Blues Brothers movie, I think one of the characters had Wrigley Field as their address. If you have friends at an organization like a church, you could use that address.
The subject of the article did it with money. There are other people who do some things like this through their connections.
Off topic, but the good old Blues Brothers movie is even better in the version dubbed in German, in my view. The German dialogues are hilarious.
How would I know if it is harder for me to enjoy movies than for somebody else?
I don't like "music movies" such as High Fidelity, 8 Mile, School of Rock, Blues Brothers. They are just average comedy/drama flicks for me. Maybe normal people like them more?
For a while if someone asked me what music I like, I replied film music. I do enjoy film music but maybe just because the music makes me remember the movie?
I'm definitely affected by the music. Maybe music can still emphasize emotions for a musical anhedonic and it just that music in itself does not do much?
The Blues Brothers scene in question is on YouTube [0] (this 5-ish minute version sets up the musical number; the shorter versions don't).
That version, btw, is embedded in this interview of John Landis, the director of the film on Deadline Hollywood. Landis discusses his pleasure at having Aretha Franklin participate in the film and more [1].
He stresses an interesting point which is that the movie came out at a time when disco eclipsed other genres like the blues...to the point that some record companies passed on releasing the film's soundtrack album, thinking that it wouldn't sell (as Landis points out, it wound up going platinum [2]). And he describes how the movie was made to use Belushi's and Akroyd's celebrity to bring attention to the then-neglected previous generation of blues and R&B musicians -- apparently, it worked.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY66elCQkYk
[1] https://deadline.com/2018/08/john-landis-aretha-franklin-the-blues-brothers-reminisces-john-belushi-dan-aykroyd-1202447056/
[2] https://www.riaa.com/gold-platinum/?tab_active=default-award&se=blues+brothers#search_section
As a youngish person who wasn't really into musiic, my first exposure to her and that entire genre was the Blues Brothers. That movie and her scene is an absolute delight.
Those examples should credit Ford and Subway as director. :)
I'm the same. The Netflix version of Black Mirror loses so much impact from the addition of 20 mins of dead filler.
Don't forget overly long and overblown fight and chase scenes that all movies must now have. They just bore me senseless. The first one I saw was fun, probably Blues Brothers, but even back then they were taking the mickey. Never the choreography and humour of Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. Nowadays at home when a movie starts a fight against the hero, or the car (spaceship) chase I tend to do something else for 5.
Breaking Bad was the best series to come out the US in ages. Even they lost the plot with the insanely long shootout with infinite ammo and insanely bad marksmanship. Thankfully that was a one off so very easy to forgive. :)
Brit series go too far the other way and cram far too much into too few episodes. I've been enjoying Last Kingdom but boy are they spoiling it by cramming two books into every season, with fewer episodes per series compared to the US average.
Yeah, that's fair. My surprise came because The Blues Brothers is, in my mind, the Chicago movie. It couldn't really be more Chicago if it tried.
> "Are you kidding?"
I don't think that was necessary. Yes, The Blues Brothers was centred around Chicago, but it might have been a while since GP saw the film, so their memory may have been hazy.
Aside from that, The French Connection featured a famous car chase that included the elevated trains in New York City:
http://youtu.be/2TVyJ-51jzc
> The streaming giant have some highly-anticipated new releases coming out in April, including Jaws, Knocked Up and The Blues Brothers .
I guess 40-year-old movies are considered "new releases"
You may have heard the classic blues song "She caught the Katy" which opens the Blues Brothers movie. It's about this railroad.
She caught the Katy / Left me a mule to ride
I don't agree. The McGuffin (the decryptor chip) is magic, the ethical conundrums are juvenile. It's teenage wish fulfilment for liberal geeks (and I say that as a liberal geek); a high-tech version of the Blues Brothers and just about every gang-of-mistfits-thwart-horrible-landlord film.
Sorry, but I saw it in the theater when it came out and it was just a total let-down - not my idea of a serious film at all.
> And here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be.
Hmm. I went to the theatre (first time since a long time as the experience feels antiquated and overpriced) with friends to see Sherlock Holmes, and the opening scene perfectly exemplifies the point: for about ten second you see a shot of the cathedral of Strasbourg. Half of it consists of a CGI explosion. I live there, and to produce this shot, they locked this part of the city for one week.
Ten seconds. One week. A whole team plus equipment. To the other side of the world. Seriously.
When seeing the scene I found that downright shocking, especially given the 10€ hole burning my pocket.
By comparison it takes Turn10 Studios three days[0] locally to gather enough information on a track to subsequently work on for one year. That's a full-length, five kilometer track.
I know this is not the same, and various other things come into play, but I just can't help but have an alarm bell ringing when I see movie production costs. See for yourself (budget in $):
- 2001 and Star Wars: 10 million each - Independence Day: 75 million - Transformers: 150 million - Kill Bill 1+2: 50 million - Jurassic Park: 65 million - King Kong: 200 million - Blues Brothers: 30 million - Fast & Furious: 90 million - The Fellowship of the Ring: 100 million - Harry Potter: ~150 million each - Full Metal Jacket: 15 million - Jarhead: 72 million - Apocalypse Now: 30 million - Black Hawk Down: 90 million - Terminator: 6 million - The Matrix: 60 million - Terminator 2: 100 million - Casino Royale: 100 million - Quantum of Solace: 230 million - Sherlock Holmes: 125 million - The Godfather: 6.5 million
I know those $ do not mean the same across time, but still, you can see going from simple to double produces crap (CS vs QoS), or produces twice the length at arguably the same 'quality' (whatever that means) for a significantly smaller cost (LotR vs HP). I don't see either why F&F costs thrice as much as BB, and almost twice as much as KB.
Bottom line: MAFIAA, please produce non-crap and control your costs instead of blaming piracy.
[0] http://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/underthehood4/
IMDB reports that 2322 movies were released in 1939 alone, is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?
1980 for comparision, IMDB lists 6007 movies (8000+ if you include TV movies), and contains modern (popular) classics such as Stir Crazy, Superman II, Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, The Blue Lagoon, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy. The Shining, Caddyshack, Raging Bull, Friday The 13th, The Fog, The Blues Brothers.
Hmm, looks like 1980 was a much more 'classic' era than the 40s for hollywood, but you wouldn't have heard that from film buffs in the 80s.
Hollywood has always been a great abuser of the 'sling lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks' approach to 'greatness', they're just slinging a lot more shit these days.
Even if we take a really contemporary year and do the same study, we see a pattern of greats no matter what year, take 2005 at random:
Batman Begins, Sin City, V for Vendetta, Revenge of the Sith, King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter/Goblet of Fire, Serenity, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mr & Mrs Smith, Wedding Crashers, Munich, Saw 2, Hostel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Madagascar, Pride & Prejudice, Land of the Dead.
Ah, but the movie buff will point out that they're not established classics like Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz. Not yet, anyway.
Edit: Btw, for 2005, the number of movies was 28,000+. Is it any wonder that there is a lot of formulaic stuff in there as well?
I've never been able to relate to Lebowski for some reason. Loved many of the other Coen bros films, though. Using Matt's criteria for movie greatness, I can name several other movies off the top of my head that are much more quotable than Lebowski: Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Blues Brothers, Airplaine, Holy Grail, Fish Called Wanda, Napoleon Dynamite, Pulp Fiction.
...I must be significantly older than Matt, I guess.