A Chicagoan's look at...
The Blues Brothers

There are moments in this movie that ring with a certain melancholy among people who have lived in Chicago for as long (or in my case, almost as long) as this movie has been around. It documents the city as it was then and that is a hell of a lot different than it is now. When the Blues-mobile cruises along Randolph Street downtown toward the beginning of the movie, we see grindhouse theatres that are no more, a Greyhound station -- which, by the way, had a very seedy bar where they were very lax about checking the ID of grateful college freshmen -- that has long been closed down, and electronics hawkers that have mostly either shuttered their doors completely or moved elsewhere.

There's another scene in the movie where the great John Lee Hooker does a ripping rendition of his classic "Boom Boom" in the middle of a giant flea market hawking discount clothes, tapes, and big polish sausages. Well, that's how Maxwell street used to be before it was redeveloped as luxury condos and it was every bit as fun a place to go as it appeared in the movie. Blues bands really did just jam on the street there and this scene bristles with the manic energy of the place back then. In the original version of the movie, the song was cut a little short, but in the extended version on side A of this disc, it plays out in its entirety and even features a funny little exchange between the venerable Mr. Hooker and a heckler in the crowd.

The extended version of the movie has quite a few extra shots and a handful of extra scenes that are mildly amusing. And since it's recut from footage that was actually shot during the original shoot, it's not quite as jarring as movies that are recut with footage created on a computer twenty-some years later. There's an extra bit at the beginning of the movie that does have a minor payoff at the end. But the payoff is that both this and the theatrical version (both versions are presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with the theatrical cut on side B) come with the option of just watching the musical numbers and it's kind of fun to kick back with numbers that feature great talents doing what they do best.

The sound for the extended version is 5.1 and 2.0 for the theatrical. I guess they put the low-fi number on the B side. Either way, the sound is mixed with the proper clarity to deliver the musical numbers and the quotable lines (after all these years, I still smile at "Oh, we have both kinds, country and western" and "without your dry white toast, without your four fried chickens") the way they should be.

Side A also contains the longer of the documentary features, "Stories Behind the making of the Blues Brothers" and some footage from the interviews that appear in the shorter featurettes on Side B such as "Remembering John," which plays down wild man John Belushi's demons (they've already been documented so thoroughly elsewhere, it's not really all that necessary) and features co-star and best friend Dan Aykroyd, Belushi's widow Judy, his brother Jim, director John Landis, and some of the boys in the band reminiscing about just how funny the guy was, on or off camera.

There's also a documentary of Aykroyd and Jim Belushi doing a Blues Brothers tour. I'm not really sure I wanted to hear them perform "Hard to Handle," but it's there if you want it. Thankfully, this is brief (7 minutes or so), but you have been warned...twice. -- Christopher Hyatt