I’ve never seen a movie that combined action, music, and comedy as masterfully as the Blues Brothers. It’s really hard to find anything wrong with the movie, and so rather than giving a list of accolades I want to focus on the Washington Post’s review of Blues Brothers. I’ll express my thoughts on the film as a response to this particular review.

Shortly after the film was released in 1980, Gary Arnold published a review titled “Oh, Brothers!” via the Washington Post. What makes this film review stand out is just how scathing it is. His main conclusion is that “‘The Blues Brothers’ offers the melancholy spectacle of [the stars] sinking deeper and deeper into a comic grave.” Surely something must be wrong here.

Now, a lot of the main points of the article are shrouded behind the imprecise and fluffy language that is all too common among movie reviews. But I’ll try to summarize some of the points as best I can and explain my response/thoughts on them.

1) The film is poorly shot

This is evidenced in the first sentence of the second paragraph when Arnold notes that the film is “wretchedly shot.” He never really expands on this point apart from saying that the musical pieces are “undermined technically by [cramped] camera angles, murky lighting, ragged cutting, and tinny sound.” I won’t say much on this point apart from that I disagree. I can see that the cinematography was less than spectacular. But it didn’t seem to detract at all from the film. The camera angles never seemed awkward or limiting and the sound quality didn’t prevent me from appreciating the great music.

2) There’s a lack of material

This is one of the bigger points. Arnold posits that “there is no more material sustaining ‘The Blues Brothers’ than one would find in a silent comedy short running 10 or 20 minutes.” Now, certainly the plot is simple. But for this movie, the plot doesn’t really need to be that complex. The substance of the film is in the action of its scenes (note not just the action scenes, but the action of the scenes, i.e. what actually happens). And to some extent Arnold recognizes this saying that “the format is meant to allow room for both comic set-pieces and musical interludes…” and that the “scanty material might be forgiven if the highlights were irresistible.” But according to him the highlights are confounded by the technical shortcomings some mentioned above (Arnold also throws in the poor “lighting scheme”). This point seems very much hinged on the readers technical expertise when it comes to filmmaking. And if that is what Arnold must do to criticize the film then it’s hard to lend any credibility to his conclusions. I mean the camera and lighting certainly captured the content of the scenes so that the viewer could completely observe and follow what was going on. This may have been captured in a suboptimal way but that doesn’t change the optimality of the content of the film itself (here I’m distinguishing the content of the film from the technical production of it — hopefully this is a fair distinction).

3) The main characters don’t develop into anything interesting?

I put a question mark on this point because I’m not sure if it really represents what Arnold is trying to say. He writes that the movies producers have “failed to transform Jake and Elwood into the comedy team moviegoers had a right to expect.” There’s (ironically) very little development of this point. I actually have no idea what Arnold is saying. Jake and Elwood are very funny in the film. Their actions are unpredictable and demeanor compliments the rest of the events. In fact, one could write an entire article on how great the two are as a comedy team