Blues Brothers is a better crafted film than Trading Places. It deploys a mixture of musicians and comedians skilfully enough to disguise the lack of serious acting chops in the cast. Lots of material was discarded, what was used is carefully selected, and the result is well balanced and paced. It's fundamentally silly and the music is not to my taste, but that's by the by.
Trading Places indulges its cast too much and it loses its way as soon as the leads start to cooperate. It's just not that good.
This whole exercise has been very depressing. I'm going to save a splenetic rant about 80s cinema for the final. The winner will deserve both barrels.
Trading Places reminds me of an Ealing comedy
Yes, that sounds about right. Doesn't that damn with faint praise rather? You're administering perhaps one of the most prestigious film awards in Spurs online fandom, and a film which might as well have featured Will Hay is about to go through to the semi finals.
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This whole exercise has been very depressing. I'm going to save a splenetic rant about 80s cinema for the final. The winner will deserve both barrels.
I like Ealing comedies. Passport to Pimlico, the Lady Killers, the Man in the White Suit and the Lavender Hill Mob are great films.
Indeed, this thread has reminded how many crap films were made in the 80's.
And at least I'm a looking back at it from a distance. We know that the 80s search for the lowest common denominator was succeeded by the indie sensibility of the 90s. Hollywood came to understand that its market was fragmented, that auteurs could be trusted, and that grown-ups were worth chasing. But imagine being there at the time, and not being (as most of us were) precisely in the callow teenage boy demographic that the studios were all shooting for. How bleak the future must have looked. Nothing but Short Circuit, and Police Academy, and Rambo, and electric boogaloo sequels stretching into infinity.
There were plenty of good indie films in the 80's, some of them got voted out early in this. I think that the 80's blockbusters are better than what followed, the lowest common denominator get very low after this.
The final four in the best of the 90s competition will be better than the semi-finalists we end up with in this contest. Surely.
Would probably be*,
Jurassic Park
Goodfellas
Reservoir Dogs
The Big Lebowski
So, yes better than our final four here, but possibly not the four it should have been.
*Unless we let GG vote on it.