Simon's Movie Reviews

“We’re getting the band back together.” Never have scarier words been spoken by men with darker sunglasses. When The Blues Brothers, the iconic duo played by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, hit the road for a gig there isn’t going to be much road left. They are on a mission from God, and like most men believing they are doing the lord’s work they end up doing more damage than good. Still, if there were more religious men who were into music by James Brown, drove a police car while the Peter Gunn theme is playing in the background, and wore cool black and white suits, I just might be tempted to believe in a higher power. I first became familiar with the Blues Brothers when the long belated sequel, Blues Brothers 2000 , came out in 1998 while I was living in South America. I caught it on TV and had never seen anything like it. Fun fact, for some reason the Spanish translation was Los Hermanos Cara Dura 2000 , which literally means the Tough Face Brothers. Also, I am pretty sure in C...

Nowadays the movie branch of the National Lampoon magazine is mostly associated with straight-to-DVD comedies that the general public will barely notice. However between the late 1970s and 1980s they were responsible for two classic Chevy Chase films and for National Lampoon’s Animal House , the king of gross-out comedies. Starring a cast of then unknown actors and directed by John Landis, it tells, not so much the story, but the antics of the craziest fraternity to ever be allowed on a college campus. The point of this film is to deliver laughter on a minute-by-minute basis and boy does it deliver. Is there any better place to watch a movie like this than on a university campus? I watched it as part of a double feature organized by the film club at the University Sherbrooke and I believe the other half of that double feature was The Kentucky Fried Movie . Suffice it to say we laughed our asses off that Friday night. I also realized how tame my university experience was. How com...