Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by J (A) on February 11, 2004 at 09:46:30

In Reply to: Which guy? posted by Victor Khomenko on February 10, 2004 at 06:08:25:

>I would submit to you that George Innes and Gershvin have just a tiny bit more to do with American art than your beloved Hollywood.

That's a matter of opinion that cannot be 'proven' one way or another; and in fact I have a feeling many, if not most, would disagree with you on this. You've got an easy answer waiting, though: you can blame it on the degradation of American culture.

>if our kids learned just a little bit less about food fights, orgies and crushing beer can on their forhead, and just a tiny bit more about math

Give me a break, please. You're sounding to me like someone who is not aware that the National Lampoon was founded by people who wrote for the Harvard Lampoon. That's right, Harvard. One of these was one of the men MOST responsible for 'Animal House'--Douglas Kenney. He was one of the original founders of the National Lampoon. To attend Harvard, I do believe, you have to be at least marginally educated. That you claim to have seen Animal House several times means little, since the point seems lost on you. It's a satirical look at college fraternity life, meant to poke fun at the people who did the sorts of things that Belushi did in that movie, not to celebrate them. Belushi's character gets expelled, which is a lot more believable than the success his character is said to achieve later on. The sensibility of the National Lampoon seems completely lost on you. That's okay, most of the rest of the country didn't get it, either.

You're castigating Belushi, which is something I could do to the Marx Brothers if I decided I didn't like the political comedy of, say, 'Duck Soup,' and I wanted to pick on the off-screen problems that Chico Marx endured in his lifetime. Was he a 'social moron' for his gambling problems any less than Belushi was for his drug problems? Belushi met with the President of the United States, did Marx? Belushi was also a guy who went out of his way, in every way possible, to educate his audience about the music he loved. Social moron, indeed. Take a good look at the resumes of the players that were hired for the various Blues Brothers projects, and try to get an idea of how unknown they & their music were at the time. Then go back & look at the things you've said about a guy who brought a wealth of forgotten music to the masses, and in fact had woefully underappreciated players performing for larger audiences than many of them had ever played before. This was Belushi's doing.

>a pig who created some of the most revolting characters

What characters did he create that you had such a problem with? He did NOT create the character he played in Animal House, nor was it all that much of an exaggeration on an earlier incarnation of that same character, who went under a different name, in Chris Miller's 1975 'Adelphian Lodge' story. If you have a problem with the character he played in the Blues Brothers, then you're getting into a musical realm in which I'm going to have a VERY LARGE problem with anything you have to say about that character, which did a great deal for blues music in this country during a time when it was all but forgotten. Even that character had been spun off from a 'Bees' sketch on one of the very first episodes of 'Saturday Night Live,' prior to the show even being known under that particular name. Belushi did not create the Bee character; he hated it, in fact. And I'm not even sure whether or not the Blues character was completely his, either. Are you?

>I do believe that Hollywood started and led the trend towards the dehumanization of the movie art

Fine. So start a boycott then. Belushi was an actor, not a producer, director, or much of a writer, to the best of my knowledge. A comic actor, for the most part. If you know where he bankrolled any of the projects he appeared in or was responsible for pictures you didn't like getting made, then I stand corrected. Otherwise, I would suggest that you turn yr attention towards the people who were actually responsible for Belushi having made it to the big screen, for surely they deserve more blame than he. It was their decision to use him, not his, and in projects such as Animal House where he had little creative input. I'm actually quite surprised you'd reserve this much venom for a guy who is only marginally responsible for most of what you're blaming him for.