Undescribable Perfection

Absolutely Fantastic

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

This is an epic comedy that has a lot of good points but unfortunately it's weighed down by how it doesn't really know what it wants to be. Is it a comedic film trying to be dramatic or a drama trying to be comedic? A lot of the content just seems off place here. It's hard to tell what's meant to be taken as a joke. There's some pretty weird slapstick in this movie. You'd think a film based on World War II wouldn't have the disclaimer that any similarities to real people would be included. Well, I guess the story is pure fiction.A lot of the characters just come off as mean in this. They just randomly have soldiers and sailors fight each other. The fights don' even make sense. Still, it's definitely a big nice looking film. It's great to see an all star cast of John Belushi, John Candy, Dan Aykroyd and Christopher Lee in this. They're not at their best, but these are all fine actors. I guess it might be worth it for a quick Christmas watch. There's a lot better and lot worse stuff out there. **1/2

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor paranoia swept across the nation as the United States was swept into World War 2. One of the most prominent areas of paranoia following December 7th was the West Coast, in particular California cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Nothing like the films events occurred in real life, but at the time it was a real concern. The plot of 1941 is in the context of this paranoia. While the film isn't great (especially by Steven Spielberg standards), to say the film is boring would be false. One of the best things about the movie is the characters. There are a few throw away characters but those played by Dan Akroyd, John Belushi, Toshiro Mifune, Christopher Lee, Ned Beatty, John Candy, Warren Oates, and Slim Pickens are a lot of fun to watch, even if some of them aren't in the movie very long. There's also a bunch of great gags. But the flaws are pretty prevalent as well. As funny as some of the jokes are, there's also other ones that are just painful or awkward. In conclusion, the film is relatively enjoyable but the flaws can leave you imagining how it could have been a better movie. I do recommend it as it is very entertaining, but the flaws exist.

I remember really looking forward to this movie when it came out. It was hyped like crazy and it starred pretty much everyone I thought was funny at the time. I also remember sitting there trying to will myself to laugh as it sunk in what a terrible movie it was.I recently re-watched it, and it's even worse than I remembered, because even the stuff that was mildly entertaining 40 years ago hasn't aged well.Where to start? One word: cocaine. That's the only thing that can possibly explain the frenetic misfire that is this movie. First of all, there's an absurd number of characters in an absurd number of subplots. On top of that, the subplots have bizarre details thrown in. For example, Treat Williams' "hilarious rapist" (rape is funny, right?) character has a weird phobia of eggs. What does this have to do with anything? Absolutely nothing.The movie relies excessively on Three Stooges-style spit takes and prat falls. There's also a lot of screaming: "Japs!", "Invasion!", "Someone help! (this guy is trying to rape me)".This time, I watched the extended version, and even at 2 1/2 hours (!!), it seemed like a lot of stuff was left out. A couple of the threads are wrung out in excruciating details while others seem to have missing chunks. There's a big build up to Warren Oats' appearance, but then it just comes and goes. Did he have more scenes on the cutting room floor? One guy has a ventriloquist's dummy for....some reason. Did they plan to do something more with it? like, something funny? How exactly did John Belushi end up flying around alone "looking for Japs"? So much of the humor is badly misplaced. I mentioned the attempted rape. We're not talking Brutus chasing Olive oil. We're talking Treat Williams dragging a woman under a car as she screams for help - and this is basically played for laughs, with another woman disappointed he's not trying to rape her. Also, the big fight is clearly supposed to be the zoot suit riots (which actually happened in 1943). There was absolutely nothing funny about those. Soldiers and white civilians were straight up assaulting Mexican-American youths while the authorities looked the other way, or even joined in. A solid half of the movie is devoted to destruction of property. In fact, I'm pretty sure Spielberg started with a list of who he wanted in the move and another list of the things he wanted to destroy and just sort of wrote the movie around them. All this destruction was impressive when the movie was made, but now the whole thing literally looks like a Universal Studios tour.I can't think of another example of this much talent being wasted in a single movie. There was all the hot comic talent at the time: Dan Ackroyd, John Candy, John Belushi, Tim Matheson, etc, and classic stars like Slim Pickens, Christopher Lee, and Japanese star Toshiro Mifune, and lots of other big names at the time, like Nancy Allen and Treat Williams. Not to mention a few characters recycled form Spielberg's other movies. Everyone was tripping over themselves to be in a Spielberg movie. It took real work for that cast of characters to turn in something this awful.Weirdly, John Williams' score is quite good. Too bad it wasn't used for a better movie.

I suppose that every great director has to have at least one movie that tests the patience of the audience. For Spielberg, that was a comedy misfire known simply as 1941. Perched uncomfortably in his filmography between Close Encounters and Raiders of the Lost Ark, it was a bizarre free-for-all that started at level 10 and never never dropped for a moment. This was a noisy, relentless, overbearing bit of comedy tripe so obnoxious that Spielberg would later claim that audience members at the first test screening were holding their hands over their ears.Set amid the paranoia of the Pearl Harbor attacks, the focuses a group of misfits in Southern California, 1941 doesn't really have a plot structure so much as a gaggle of insane characters let loose on each other to do apparently whatever they like within the span of 90 minutes. The problem, I discovered, is that none of the comedy sticks. It's just a series of nutty people allowed to say and do whatever they please in a sort of war-time version of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. The comic invention is to gather together all sorts of wonderful actors, both serious and comic, and let them run around like idiots and make a lot of noise. This, a comedy does not make.Comedy has to have rules, it has to have structure, it has to have set up and payoff. Even the Marx Brothers' brand on insanity was written and rewritten, rehearsed and re-rehearsed. It was perfected down to the last detail so it seemed to come from their guts. That's not the case here.The movie has a cult status that I don't understand. I sat stone-faced through this whole production. Not just stone-faced, but also frustrated as I watch a bilious amounts of comic invention burn on the screen. It is one of those movies where you sense that it might have been funny in the moment, on the set, or in the screen writing sessions. But when you're sitting there watching joke after joke fall over and die, you are left with the inevitable question, "what's the point of all this?"