The Films of John Landis

Three episodes of the Indiana Jones series for example. He can do comedy when he wants but uses it as punctuation to break up the tension of a scene rather than using it as the text of the scene.

Landis is great too with at least 3 classic films but went off the boil after Coming to America (Blues brothers 2000 anyone) however his latest one Real Men looks interesting.

Also 'Dream On' is overdue for a re-run here in the UK

Wikipedia says:

See You Next Wednesday is a fictional film that is the trademark of film director John Landis. He typically includes a reference to it in most, but not all of the movies he directs. Usually the reference is just a movie poster for the film in the background. See You Next Wednesday is never the same from film to film.

See You Next Wednesday was the name of the first screenplay that Landis ever wrote as a teenager. He took the title from a line in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

References
In Landis' first film, Schlock (1973), SYNW is mentioned twice and shown as a poster. Brief casting and plot descriptions are given each time it is mentioned, making it clear that this is in fact two different films both entitled See You Next Wednesday.
In the sketch comedy film The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), the film is a melodrama presented in "Feel-Around," a technique where an usher stands behind each movie patron and does things to them as they occur in the film, enhancing the movie-going experience, at least until the scene where the woman puts a knife to the man's throat.
In The Blues Brothers (1980), SYNW is glimpsed on a billboard.
In An American Werewolf in London (1981), SYNW is a porn film being shown in a seedy London porno theater. Advertised as "A Non-Stop Orgy," scenes from the movie are actually shown as the characters talk in the theater.
In Trading Places (1983), a poster for SYNW is glimpsed in Ophelia's (Jamie Lee Curtis) apartment.
In the Michael Jackson video Thriller (1983), it is spoken by a character in the movie Michael and his girlfriend are watching.
In Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), a German character says "see you next Wednesday" in German.
In Into the Night (1985), posters for the movie are shown.
In Coming to America (1988), a poster for SYNW is shown on a subway station.
In Innocent Blood (1992), SYNW is shown on a marquee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_You_Next_Wednesday

one of the best things said about '...werewolf...' was the comment from a lady who got up and walked out at a test screening, and is quoted on the dvd. 'it's not that i don't like the film, it's just you can't bear to see that happen to people you care about'.

landis *rocks*.

..but yeah vic morrow.

See You Next Weds was also the name of a short film John made as a kid. It's not in all of his films - it's not in Animal House for instance. Spies Like Us is, along with Trading Places, quite synoymous of Landis' politics (he's fiercly anti-Republican). I love both of them to bits.

There are comedy sequences in E.T. and Temple of Doom that kick Landis's entire career.

I do recall An American Werewolf in London being genuinely frightening.

sturges! ffs.

Modern filmgoers only want comedies to mimic bad TV.

roffle

don't be so childishly defensive of your heroes calum; he's made a great many very funny movies but come on.

For the record, Landis Vs JL Goddard is fucking easy... Landis wins hands down. I HATE Goddard so much it is not even funny. First rule of filmmaking: Make something that ENTERTAINS the audience. American Werewolf in London = the most entertaining film ever.

"American Werewolf in London" is entertaining, but the most entertaining ever? Come off it.

I'm not saying filmmaker that makes X amount is better than filmmaker that makes Y amount because that would make Michael Bay or George Lucas the greatest directors in history. The point I was trying to make is that film is a personal experience and - judged from an entertainment POV - Landis is one of my fave directors. Argento as well - up until Opera anyway.

populism is a tired road, calum, and doesn't mean what you want it to mean for very long (xpost) as you've just said! so wtf, think of something else. it's for cowards--you always turn to "WELL LOTS OF OTHER PEOPLE AGREE WITH ME YOU MEANIES" whenever anything you've submitted gets the slightest scrutiny. get some fucking balls, kid.

Seems like Landis and Hughes had kind of parallel careers: box-office kings; the generation after the 70s auteurs; hitting the mark consistently and prolifically, and then...

helped kill film comedy

there's something amazingly sexy and charismatic about JL.

Landis' son Max made a cute little viral vid promoting his new superhero movie, with booze and a justified rant and a Simon Pegg cameo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PlwDbSYicM

All they're asking is $200:

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiffbelllightbox/2013/2550007760

No Hologram Belushi?

Or, for $200, tiny pieces of cloth from his Delta Tau Chi sweatshirt.

Good audio Landis interview:
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tt/tt120118john_landis_monsters

seems like landis is in the process of being rehabilitated by critics

dave kehr wrote a really brutal negative review of trading places when it came out, now he says it's an american classic without acknowledging the about-face.

i don't know how i feel about this guy. like a bunch of other directors of his era (spielberg, zemeckis, dante...) his stuff looks almost "classical" compared to today's commercial films. but i'm not sure that's really a compliment so much as a basic observation.

(btw i once posted on kehr's blog, when he was discussing landis, asking him what made him change his mind about trading places in particular and landis in general.... and he deleted my comment! some revisionism going on here. i wonder if they are just best buds now or something.)

btw

Trading Places
116 minutes
Rich boy and poor boy swap lives. The only reason for using a plotline as primitive as this is to give two improvisational comics like Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy plenty of room to maneuver. But director John Landis is so deficient in basic storytelling skills that he must spend hours explicating the most elementary plot points while Aykroyd and Murphy are sidelined. Like Arthur, this 1983 film re-creates a screwball comedy format and then eliminates everything but the crudest audience-gratification elements; any incursions into the more morally complicated side of the genre are quickly curtailed. Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche, as the two unshaded villains, provide the appropriate 30s reference point; Jamie Lee Curtis, a strong and intelligent performer elsewhere, here succumbs to Landis's penchant for turning all his heroines into busty bunnies. With Denholm Elliott and Jim Belushi.
By Dave Kehr

kehr wrote a good piece on him a couple years back:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/movies/homevideo/blu-ray-releases-animal-house-and-blues-brothers.html

Landis had a really nice run through Coming To America. i'm honestly not sure if he lost it after that or if he just never had it and it was the material that started sucking. watch anything he made in the 90s or later and you're just overwhelmed by the ineptitude. he might've been a right time, right place kind of guy - like, someone had to be the guy to make Animal House

he seems like a really unpleasant guy on a personal level too

watching american werewolf recently, i was struck that the film was at its absolute liveliest when people were being murdered by automobiles. hmmm

I like Animal House and American Werewolf quite a bit. But boy, Trading Places at the time struck me as absolutely lame.

I'm not an Ackroyd fan at all, but love him in Trading Places, no trace of 50s Dragnet or Sci-Fi.

Landis fans? check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGZ1Jx9XSBY

Good interview:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/john-landis-rails-studios-theyre-659222

"And the studios are no longer interested in making good movies -- they're interested in movies that will bring you in. So you have movies like Avatar, or Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity. It's wonderful to look at. Now, is it a good movie? No! But it's entertaining, and it's a spectacle and technically astonishing."

That's nice until you realize he thinks The Blues Brothers is a good movie.

vic morrow.

― latebloomer: But when the monkey die, people gonna cry. (latebloomer), Friday, April 29, 2005 12:12 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Why use all that fancy CGI when you can use real kids and chopper blades?"

Landis otm

Fuck him for Morrow, and for that racist "primitive cultures" cutaway in Animal House.

Plenty of shit in his CV. I was just referring to this interview.

Into The Night:

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lg2kpeKC6E1qbao74.jpg

I have a lot of thoughts about that film

Remake of?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYFlQWL7u6U

For some reason I expected Into the Night to be a lot weirder or quirkier or just...something than it is. Basically a conventional chase picture with the occasional oddity of seeing Jim Henson or Paul Bartel or whoever occasionally hanging around the edge of the frame. Pretty dickish use of animal violence for yucks as well, but that's kind of a Landis trademark, isn't it?

I don't remember the animal violence...?

the weirdest thing about it is its flat tone, how it just kind of meanders from one thing to the next aimlessly and then oh look there's a cameo

human violence is always a good laugh, let alone that vs dumb beasts

xpost

There's Jack Arnold's dog that gets shot in the elevator, as do Paul Mazursky's three parrots (Larry, Curly and Moe).

More than once I could picture Goldblum's character being played by Chevy Chase, for some reason.

Orson verbally punching John Landis in the balls so hard it might begin to explain Max Landis

Landis, John pic.twitter.com/uxukyvM2ae

— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) August 27, 2019

Classic orson

that thread is gold

i really should own a copy of that book