Just wanted to resurrect this thread for a sec and make a confession. Ready? OK...
Last night I watched The Blues Brothers for the very first time.
In response to your obvious question, no I've only been living under a rock for the past 10 years, so I really have no excuse for myself.
Anyway, I'm left stunned and amazed. How...how did they do this? How do you have your main characters with apparently so little substantive dialogue (never mind their faces covered the whole time) and yet you always know exactly what they're feeling and even find yourself empathizing with them at key moments? Normally I'd scold a movie that relied so little on dialogue as thin, shallow, or lazy. But with Blues Brothers, it feels absolutely deliberate and amazingly well crafted. This is a movie where a character can run the gamut of emotions while only saying two words ("the band") over and over.
I'm going to go out on a limb here. If the Academy ever got over itself and acknowledged that comedies existed, this is the kind of movie they would have had to pay attention to. Wow....Just...
how?