“Belushi”, “The Joyful Epic”, “Wine Red Alert”… Weekend Reruns

THE TOMORROW LIST

This week, back to the future with John Belushi, the Blues Brother gone too soon. A tribute to Lars Vogt, who also left too quickly. And two red alert issues: asbestos, the killer fiber that continues to be produced in millions of tons on the planet, banned in only sixty-seven countries; and wine, whose alcoholic strength continues to rise due to global warming. More a message of hope, in these difficult times: the Happy Cafés and their “happy team members”, who suffer from mental or cognitive disabilities, true “good organizers” of a society in social change and solidarity.

Portrait of a comic genius with self-destructive impulses

RJ Cutler places in his artistic orbit the most gifted actor of his generation, the protagonist of the legendary film the blues brothers, died of an overdose in 1982, at the age of 33. Until the worldwide success of the John Landis film in 1980, John Belushi remained a quintessentially American phenomenon. The documentary not only draws the forced trajectory of a comic genius, with the self-destructive impulses inseparable from this talent. It meticulously reconstructs the thread of an existence, based on recently found audio recordings, with the testimonies of those close to Belushi: his friends from “Saturday Night Live” – ​​the NBC entertainment program in which all the future stars of comedy-: Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell…-, Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd (with whom he formed the duo of the blues brothers); directors John Landis, Michael Apted, Harold Ramis and Ivan Reitman; actress Carrie Fisher; the comedian’s widow, Judy Belushi Pisano.

Here emerges the portrait of an artist aware of his unusual talent, inhabited by an unusual self-confidence, confronted from the beginning by demons that he will never be able to tame. Within cabling (1984, translated into French, in 2015, by Capricci, under the title John Belushi. The crazy and tragic life of a Blues Brother), benchmark survey of comedian Bob Woodward, the journalist for the Washington Post, stigmatized a drug culture shared by the actor’s entourage, a microcosm that did nothing significant to get him off that path. Belushi serves as a national treasure, whose chubby, expressive face haunts the best comedies of the latter half of the 1970s. samuel blumenfeld

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