By ZoneCreative @Adobe Stock
Rich Lowry of the National Review tells his readers that if you’re a devotee of the movie or a fan of the early Saturday Night Live, you’ll enjoy The Birth of The Blues Brothers thoroughly. He writes:
If you’re wondering whether the subtitle of this book oversells it a bit, as far as I’m concerned, the answer is a resounding “No.”
If memory serves, I first saw The Blues Brothers with my mom. After the kids had gotten older, she was getting a master’s at George Mason University when it was still a tiny place out in the far reaches of Fairfax, Va. The school showed heavily discounted movies for students, and she took me along to see the John Belushi classic (this is how I saw Animal House for the first time, too — perhaps the only ten-year-old kid in the country who watched it with his mother).
I was instantly taken with The Blues Brothers. When it showed up on HBO, my friends and I taped the songs and memorable dialogue on a cassette recorder so we could play them at will (the miracles of technology). […]
If you’re a devotee of the movie or a fan of the early Saturday Night Live, you’ll enjoy this thorough, authoritative, and lively book. If you’re not, it’s going to be a bit much; even I could have done with less of the John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd origin stories and didn’t need to know quite so much about the filming of every crash scene in the movie.
That said, once author Daniel de Visé works his way up to the start of SNL, this book is a lot of fun and ably recounts a truly important episode in American pop culture. […]
The final part of this book is the depressing tale of Belushi’s march toward the overdose that would kill him at age 33. For several years, he was at the very pinnacle of American pop culture in multiple media. His contributions were brief but unforgettable, despite the sad end that surprised no one around him. When Lorne Michaels saw the body at the funeral, he remarked, “I’ve seen him look worse.”
Read more here.
