The Last Movie You Watched

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Wired. It's a biopic of John Belushi. This could have made a good movie, but there were a couple problems: First, they chose  to base this on Bob Woodward's book of the same name, which was lambasted by more or less everyone who knew him because it focused on the drug use that killed him to the exclusion of much of anything else. And then, they adapted it into a film. They were more or less banned from using any of his SNL material, so they had to do their own pale imitation of it. The only people whose names were used were Belushi, his wife Judy, Dan Ayckroyd, Cathy Smith, and Bob Woodward. And then, to compound the error, they had Earl Mac Rouch, the same guy who wrote Buckaroo Banzai. While I have no complaints about that film, I have to admit that this resulted in a very confused film, made all the worse by their decision to make an anti-drug angle as subtle as a sledgehammer to the head. If you knew who John Belushi was, you were pissed off by how the film treated him, and if you didn't, you probably concluded that John Belushi was just a guy who did a shitton of drugs and killed himself because of it. Nobody liked it. Well, not exactly nobody, but I'll get to that at the end.

• 0:35: Well, the fact that this movie's been dubbed from an ancient VHS because it was never released on DVD is obvious. Well, at least Michael Chiklis actually nails John Belushi's mannerisms down pat. He had to audition somewhere in the area of 57 times before he finally got the job. He worked hard, it paid off (even though it would be The Commish that brought him to stardom), and, with a better script, he'd actually do good. I think the fact that they started off with the only one of his SNL routines they got the rights to helps. 
  
  
  
• 3:32: Belushi is dead, and they choose to play it like some sort of schtick routine.
  
• 5:05:  John Belushi's apparently back from the dead and he escapes from the morgue.
  
• 10:00: So, we have a Puerto Rican cabbie named Angel carrying Belushi in his cab as they carry away his body and clear out his home.
  
• 11:36: Why am I dead, because you're officially stupid.  Could you tell that this movie was made when people actually believed the War on Drugs could actually work? And that blatantly kicking users when they were down was seen as a viable option?
  
• 18:00: Okay, fun fact, this song was also used in The Blues Brothers 2000. 
  
• 21:57: Why the fuck is Baldar Richard Nixon? Because they were both played by Dan Ackroyd on SNL? And why are they making it a Shakespeare pastiche?
  
• 32:36: So, John Belushi is being autopsied, while screaming and fully conscious, by a sushi chef, while a laugh track plays. WHO THE FUCK THOUGHT THIS WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA? And then, they follow up this scene with the Blues Brothers performing "Soul Man." Normally, this would be welcome, but with it just following the autopsy, it's basically this:
  
  
  
• 38:21: And we're back to the autopsy? And he's pretending to be Brando?
  
• 40:59: And they're not even trying to get into the spirit of the Samurai sketches, with his extreme actions unnerving straight man Buck Henry, instead we have him acting insane while an announcer talks about Pitcher Phil Latio, wiener jokes , a little boy named Yoko (!), and threatening to commit seppuku with his tanto in a hot dog bun and mustard (that has to dull the blade).
  
• 45:27: Now he's going on the Just Say No version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Dan Ackroyd? And why didn't he just drive to Las Vegas when he had the chance? Why does one scene follow another in this film?
  
• 53:40: Woodward's going to do for Belushi what he's done for Nixon. I'm shocked they got away with that.
  
• 56:17: For what it's worth, John Landis denies this ever happened. And, surprisingly, this is what opened the original book.
  
• 58:12: "Then stop, especially the cocaine." Well, that was unusually dismissive for a doctor.
  
• 59:20: You'd think they'd tell him to "Assume the Position." Of course, that was ROTC, not Delta.
  
• 64:40: And they're making a comedic scene about how the coffin's too big to fit on the plane? 
  
• 69:16: The Ventures are apparently metal music now.
  
• 73:47: Is that "Love Kills" by Joe Strummer? The song from Sid and Nancy? The film that's also a biopic of a famous drug casualty and ends with a taxicab as a metaphor for the afterlife? Is this where Rouch got the idea for this horseshit framing device from?
  

You know what, I'm going to take a break. I'm going to take a bath, finish watching Das Boot with Alison, and then I'll come back and watch the last half hour of this shitfest, talk about the one person who actually liked the film, and hopefully at some point, I'll get myself caught up with the Deep Hurting Project Awards. Jah knows how many genre cycles it's been since the last one.