Wednesday, October 11, 2006

You should be happy, John Belushi ...

... because I just saw a few minutes of Blues Brothers 2000 on AMC and remembered that it took a white guy (John Goodman), a black guy (Joe Morton), and a kid (who knows or cares?) to replace you in the sequel to one of your best movies. Couldn't you have stopped this disaster from beyond the grave? Or at least poisoned the kid before filming started? The kid's presence in the movie makes me wonder if Dan Aykroyd and John Landis, the director, couldn't get script approval from Universal Pictures until they added an underage sidekick. Oh yeah, and the sequel's gotta be PG-13, not R like the first one. Gotta broaden the audience base!

Yep, good move, Universal. The Blues Brothers made $57 million in 1980. Blues Brothers 2000 made $14 million 18 years later.

I also saw parts of Summer School Monday morning on TBS. I hadn't seen it in a long time and didn't feel so good when Harmon's character responded to Courtney Thorne-Smith's jailbait tactics by saying, "When you're 61, I'll still be 75." Thorne-Smith's character is 16 in the movie. 75 - 61 = 14, and 16 + 14 = 30. Wait a second—Mark Harmon's supposed to be 30 in this movie?! That's one year younger than I am now!

I should've titled this post "Numbers aren't just numbers." Oh well, 2 bad 4 all of U. (Nice segue into a post about Prince, don't you think? We'll see. I was very excited to find an uncut version of his never-officially-released song "Wonderful Ass" recently on a music blog.)

2 comments:

  1. I feel ya, dawg - though I've actually never seen "Blues Brothers 2000." I just can't bear to see it take the overall project down a notch. The original is so damn good; I got it on DVD a few months ago. It's scary enough to look at what time has done to Dan Aykroyd's waistline. I sure don't want to see a money-grubbing sequel!

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  2. "Blues Brothers 2000" actually starts off okay, from what I remember, with Elwood getting out of jail and an a cappella version of "John the Revelator" playing in the background, but it quickly goes downhill and eventually burrows underground. In fact, the ending takes place in China.

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