S4E43: The Blues Brothers

**Devon** (0:01)
Use of unnecessary violence in the apprehension of the Blues Brothers has been approved.

**November Kelly** (0:25)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly, I am joined, as always, by my friends Abigail Thorn and Devon.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:32)
Hello, listeners.

**Devon** (0:33)
Cowabunga!

**November Kelly** (0:35)
Yes! Good vibes!

**Devon** (0:37)
How are we doing?

**November Kelly** (0:37)
Oh, I'm doing great. I love this movie. This is an all-time favorite. And I assume we all feel that way about the Blues Brothers.

**Abigail Thorn** (0:46)
No, listeners, I'm afraid that I am... We all feel so full-warm. I am the villain of this episode. Again, making a habit of this, apparently. I'm taking my big ship, and I'm crashing it into November and December.
Because this is the Blues Brothers, and I didn't like it. I didn't like it.

**November Kelly** (1:05)
Here's the thing. Obviously, we're gonna spend about an hour and a half just yelling at you, screaming. All the comments are gonna be that as well.
I think that what this bespeaks is a kind of... it's an alignment thing, right? Like, not to get too, like, crystals about this, but sometimes when I'm watching a movie for work and I'm not feeling it, it's like, it's because I didn't do my little kind of, like, pre-movie ritual, you know? I didn't draw all of the blinds. I didn't put some incense on. I didn't think, you know, here laughing feels good, or whatever the thing is. And so it throws me off. And so maybe what it was is just you weren't just aligned with the Blues Brothers because there's something wrong with you.

**Abigail Thorn** (1:52)
Maybe, but I mean, I like parts of it. There are individual moments and scenes that I like, but I think it's less than the sum of its parts. I think it has major problems with editing, with scene-to-scene editing. I think the pacing is atrocious. I think it's like, it didn't make me laugh other than, like, twice. It's just not very funny.
Yeah, I'm sorry. It just, as a film, it doesn't work. As a series of disconnected TikToks and musical numbers that you can watch on your phone, great. But as a two-hour, 45-minute cinematic experience, I'm sorry, I think it fails.

**November Kelly** (2:25)
Well, so one of the things is... Sorry, Devon, have you had something?

**Devon** (2:31)
I was just gonna say, the thing is, I am, as is typical, about halfway between the two of you. Because I was, as you say, aligned, I was energetically in the right place to receive what the Blues Brothers was putting out. But at the same time, this seems like a real, joyful celebration of a culture that I don't know a fucking thing about. So there's a bunch of things that are on the screen, and you're supposed to understand them completely and read a whole bunch into this. And I just don't, I don't know what's going on.
Some scenes drag a little, because I'm like, why are you spending all this time with this person that I don't know about? And it turns out that they're unimaginably famous. And I'm like, okay, that actually makes more sense now.

**November Kelly** (3:13)
The Blues Brothers is a film that I think I'm meant to have seen for the first time at an impressionable age. And when you see it, okay, maybe you don't know who everyone is, but then you go and look it up and it decides your musical taste for the rest of your life, right?
I think it's also a thing.

**Devon** (3:30)
You're like, that's Rachel.

**November Kelly** (3:31)
Yeah, exactly. Also, we in this country, we've had Saturday Night Live, the American comedy show for a year. Whereas Americans have been dealing with it for, oh, thousands of years. And so they're used to overgrown Saturday Night Live bits, which this is.
And so maybe we don't have the kind of natural immunity to it.

**Devon** (3:58)
Yeah, I always get very confused at those.

**Abigail Thorn** (4:00)
I have to go and look this up. So there's, I don't know who Dan Ackroyd is, but there's, so Dan Ackroyd and this other comedian, Jake Belushi, John Belushi.

**November Kelly** (4:10)
John Belushi. History's greatest Albanian.

**Abigail Thorn** (4:14)
Okay, they have these two characters from the show, Saddle Ney and I, which I've never seen. The characters are called the Blues Brothers. They're in a band.
That appears to be the extent of their entire characterization. And indeed, the characterizations get even flatter when listening to this movie. But also, they were in a band in real life. They were like, they are sincere musicians. And I think the love of music and musicianry comes from a sincere place, which is one of the things I like about the movie. But they were in a real band.