Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, The Blues Brothers
Rock ’n’ Roll High School (8/4/79)
It’s delightful when a throwaway knows exactly what it is, and that’s how it goes with the brisk, unpretentious, by-the-numbers picture about Ramones-loving high schooler P.J. Soles, garish and strict principal Mary Woronov (a ’60s Andy Warhol star, then a Roger Corman player), and The Ramones themselves, fronted by the tall pale slacker Joey Ramone as the band crunches through its quick n’ dirty tunes.
Soles seems more like a standard cheerleader type than a Ramones diehard, but that’s part of the threat, and she’s a gush of enthusiasm. The subversive actor-writer-director Paul Bartel (another Corman vet, director of the 1975 cult hit Death Race 2000 and auteur of 1983’s cannibal comedy Eating Raoul, which would also feature Woronov — they were frequent co-conspirators) appears as a music teacher who takes to The Ramones. That’s the jolly, against-the-grain spirit.
The project was generated by Corman, written and directed by Allan Arkush, who did indeed direct music videos for The Ramones, Elvis Costello and Bette Midler before settling into a long TV career, and Joe Dante, who had made the exploitation pics Hollywood Boulevard and Piranha (with a screenwriting credit for John Sayles); Dante would break through in 1984 with Gremlins, executive produced by mighty mainstreamers Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. This punchy comic punk chord spins into silliness that makes sense when it all literally blows up, because of course natural teen energy can never really be contained by red-faced disciplinarians.
Watch this low budget lark with the budget-busting anarchy of …
The Blues Brothers (6/20/80)
Plus side: the movie loves the blues and soul, and showcases a gleaming array of stars — James Brown, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway, each of them electric and funny — plus Stax Records cornerstones Steve Cropper (guitar) and Donald “Duck” Dunn (bass), plus SNL band members Tom Malone (trombone) and Lou Marini (sax), with Marini scurrying out of Aretha Franklin’s café when she shoos him off. Everyone is in on the joke.
Minus side: the joke is stretched thin, and the picture’s reputation endures as one of the most over-the-top car crash movies of all time. This is a long way to go to flesh out an SNL skit, and the project fits Jack Nicholson’s definition when he groused in the 2011 Roger Corman tribute Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel that the business anymore makes a dozen or so “circuses” a year, and not many movies. Not to pour cold water on what ought to be a nifty guilty pleasure, especially since the opening sequence is so amusing, with its droll long shots and good sight gags (see the prison door rise on a tiny, gnomish, splendiferously backlit John Belushi as he’s sprung from Joliet), and since the movie utterly loves grubby Chicago. It just gets long as it smashes up cop cars by the dozens and then has the boys being chased by cops, Nazis, the military, and a nutty SWAT unit barking “Hut, hut, hut” as they deploy.
Even with a crackerjack band, the climactic concert isn’t genuinely cathartic, and you can only listen to Belushi sing a Wilson Pickett song for so long. Belushi and Dan Aykroyd look like arrested toddlers whenever they do their musical schtick, dancing with the energy and unbridled awkwardness of hyperactive five year olds. They may love it, but they ain’t got it, even if they are on a Mission From Gahd. The boys are actually at their music-comic best in a flinty version of “Rawhide,” as the blues-soul group tries to soothe a bottle-chucking horde at a redneck bar.
Most amusing cameo: Steven Spielberg, director of Duel and emperor of the new gigantism beginning to change the business, as the Cook County clerk who drily delays the frenzied chase’s climax. (Spielberg had just laid it on pretty thick himself in the hyper-stuffed 1941; comedy, they say, is hard.) Carrie Fisher is funny as she tries to terminate, with extreme prejudice, her ex (Belushi), but screenwriters Aykroyd and John Landis — who directs, you have to acknowledge, with real glee and a sharp eye for every pileup, following his thorough trashing of a college town with another extravagant military siege at the end of Animal House — dump on Fisher unpleasantly as the lovers finally have their reconciliation chat in a sewer.
Nelson Pressley 