John Belushi

  • K-9 (1989)

    K-9 (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2019) Let’s appreciate honesty in filmmaking: K-9 is not a good movie, but it doesn’t waste any time in pretending otherwise: Within the first few minutes, we’re quickly familiarized with the film’s casual disregard for anything like subtlety or realism, what with the cowboy cop protagonist racking up what should result in disciplinary actions and lawsuits. The premise consists in pairing up a bad (oops; “lovably rogue”) policeman with a dog in order to … something to do with international drug trafficking. (The script isn’t strong in detail or plausibility.) But the dog is a dog, and the human is even more of a dog than the canine character and you can pretty much script the rest of the script yourself. Once you combine the cowboy cop theatrics with some serious sexism and the low-brow humour of John Belushi (nearly every film featuring Belushi is miscast), the result is almost repellent. K-9 is the kind of film to use when you want to show how the male gaze (and approving representation of toxic masculinity) can damage what could have been a far better film. Not only do we have a typically guy’s-guy character (openly abusing his authority, ignoring the law, roughing up suspects, threatening and sexually assaulting civilians), but the script smiles and aw-shucks whenever he enables canine fornication (with the bitch as the prize, if you’ll excuse the technical language) and reduces his girlfriend to nothing more than a kidnapping target. As the problematic issues pile up, K-9’s amiable potential dissipates and so does our patience with the result. This is no mere “fictional problem”: The Hollywood cowboy cops of the 1980s enabled the bloodthirsty ones of the 1990s, then the real trigger-happy one of the 2000s and 2010s, and K-9 is part of the problem. Even silly comedies can be awful in retrospect.

  • The Blues Brothers (1980)

    The Blues Brothers (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Third or fourth viewing, On Blu Ray, September 2018) There are good movies, great movies and special movies. The Blues Brothers is one of those special movies, capturing something that deserves to be passed on to new audiences a few decades later. It’s a comedy and a really good one at times (especially when it fully embraces its absurdity and unapologetically give more weight to laughs than believability), but its greatest strength remains the music and the musicians it captures. As a musical comedy, there isn’t a single dud in the entire soundtrack, and seeing some of the best R&B stars croon their tunes is like mainlining pure cinematic bliss … even for those viewers who don’t know much about blues. James Brown, Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin … this is a time capsule of them at their finest, singing and dancing memorable pieces. As many of the film’s stars are no longer with us (in the past two years alone, we’ve lost Franklin, Carrie Fisher and Toys’r’Us), the film doesn’t feel sadder but stronger for preserving them in such great shape. I must have seen the film two or three times as a teenager and young adult, so much of the dialogue and sequences are hard-wired in my head, and it was sheer pleasure to run from one highlight to another—whereas other movies struggle to get one or two memorable scene, The Blue Brothers has roughly a dozen of them. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi hit career-high roles here, and the integration of non-actor famed musicians goes better than anyone would expect. If you haven’t seen The Blues Brothers, any day is the right time to do it. If you’ve already seen it, you already know that any time is the right time to see it again. What a classic.