Just curious, do you as a Chicagoian have any feels for Blues Brothers (the original, not the one who must not be named)? I was rewatching it recently and just wondered.
Well, bear in mind I didn’t grow up in Chicago, so I’m a transplant, not a native. The first time I saw Blues Brothers I was probably in my early teens and really only retained a couple of things -- the diner scene with Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway’s magical realism musical number, and the chase scene through the mall. I didn’t see it again until I watched it with R, sometime around 2008 or 2010, and then I really loved it, but I was the proper age and in the proper situation to sincerely appreciate it, and that was more because it was an amazing movie than because it was a Chicago movie.
Mark Twain said about Chicago that “She is novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.” Chicago is a very changeable city, and seeing the Chicago of 1980 was a weird experience while living in the Chicago of 2010. Some things were familiar (I now actually live about half a mile from Elwood’s flophouse at the start of the film and often walk past where it was when I go into the loop) but a lot was very different.
There are some “Chicago” movies that I love in equal parts because they’re fun movies and because they’re closer to a Chicago I recognize, like While You Were Sleeping and Stranger Than Fiction (which is not set in Chicago but was filmed primarily here). I feel like nobody really sets a movie in Chicago unless they know the city, so you tend to get a lot of flavor bleed through. But the Blues Brothers was so regional and so tied to a specific era of Chicago’s existence that the flavor has changed, so it’s more of an artefact than a touchstone.
But I still love it, just as a movie. Also there’s a fucking AMAZING article about it that you might enjoy here. (VF paywalls after a certain number of articles, sorry for the limited access.)
