Good news! The Chicago Sun-Times is two days into "a five day tour of the greatest movie ever made about Chicago." That's right, it's the 25th anniversary of The Blues Brothers this year, and the paper is observing the occasion with appropriate pomp--and soul.
Here's what fellow Chicago institution Roger Ebert had to say back in 1980:
The Blues Brothers is the Sherman tank of musicals. When it was being filmed in Chicago in 1979--with dozens of cars piling up in intersections, caroming down Lake Shore Drive and crashing through the Daley Center--it seemed less like a film than a war. The movie feels the same way. It's a big, raucous powerhouse that proves against all the odds that if you're loud enough, vulgar enough, and have enough raw energy, you can make a steamroller into a musical, and vice versa.
This is some weird movie. There's never been anything that looked quite like it; was it dreamed up in a junkyard?
So far, the paper has revisited the Plymouth Hotel (the SRO where Jake and Elwood bunked until Carrie Fisher blew it up) and the Pilgrim Baptist Church of South Chicago, which so ably played the Triple Rock under James Brown's electric pastorship. What's next? An appreciation of Chez Paul? One can only hope.
Plus, there's trivia.
Disclaimer: The Blues Brothers made the Third Coast loom so large in the cinematic imagination of the cinetrix that she actually moved there for a time. It is also the favorite movie of both my dad and the Fesser's dad. The Fesser and I even watched it the first weekend we ever hung out together, back in the Pleistocene era. Also, my father would call me at college whenever it was going to play, all swears dubbed out, on some shitty VHS station. This means I may have seen The Blues Brothers more times than almost any other film. Make of that what you will.
