Word: belushi
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WIRED. The saddest thing about John Belushi's death might be this requiem & -- the movie Hollywood tried to stop. Next time, guys, try harder...
Well, they sure could have called it Weird. After all, the main characters in this bonkers biopic are two people John Belushi never met during his brief, explosive life: Bob Woodward, the actor's biographer, and John Belushi dead. You have to cherish the daredevil idiocy of a movie whose climax is a parody of Woodward's legendary deathbed chat with CIA director William Casey. The journalist visits the hotel room where Belushi took his fatal overdose and hallucinates an interview with the dying star. "Breathe for me, Woodward!" the samurai comic cries. And it's hard to hate...
...karma. Wired wants to turn the story of the Saturday Night Live comedian and gonzo movie star into a cautionary fable about celebrity in the fast lane -- and never mind that some powerful people in the movie business were not eager to see the picture made or released. Reprising Belushi's career without being able to use clips or skits from his most famous work should be challenge enough. But nooo! Wired insists on merging the complex flashback devices of two favorite old movies. So on one swerving narrative track, Woodward (J.T. Walsh), like the reporter in Citizen Kane, gets...
Woodward's best seller, though it traced Belushi's last days with a doggedness that would have done the Evangelists proud, was a turgid read that had little feeling for its subject and found no broad meaning in it. At least adapter Earl Mac Rauch (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai) knows that the only way to pin Belushi and Hollywood is to wax satiric and surrealistic. When the dead Belushi prowls his old haunts in a morgue sheet that looks like a toga out of the Animal House closet, the film almost has style to match its guts. So does...
...exactly, though the distinction eludes Wired. Professionally, Belushi was a gifted TV sketch artist who found the wide-screen format confining. Personally, he was a middle-class white kid with an anarchic urge to play the cool black jazzman -- so he partied and bullied and ODed just like his heroes. Early death was only the last piece of the legend this blues brother created for himself. In the film's one good laugh, a physician elicits Belushi's pharmaceutical history and then asks, deadpan, "Next of kin?" Belushi was delivered to his humongous family of fans, who mourned a talent...