1941

1941 is a Stephen Spielberg action farce about a Japanese attack on Hollywood.

Emily: Sounds great right? Ha ha wrong it sucked. The entire film was like one of those interconnected lives movies where, at the end, all the stories come together, but instead of it being a good example of a film like that (such as Magnolia) it was crappy. The whole premise was that a Japanese submarine, left out of the glory of the attack on Pearl Harbor, sailed (is that the right word for a submarine?) to Los Angeles to try and annihilate Hollywood. The Japanese, led by Akira Kurosawa's favorite Toshiro Mifune, bumble along

Kamala: In a fitting tribute to Jaws, the opening scene was the same actress who played Jaws' first victim skinnydipping at night and ending up stuck on the top of the surfacing submarine's periscope. I say fitting because Jaws' success in box offices across America led to the drive to create movies like this. Interestingly enough, this was one of the movies that helped to make studios realize that maybe they shouldn't give their directors all the freedom in the world. The film was intended as a blockbuster, but really did rather poorly at the box office.

Emily: It was one of those "action-packed" appetite for destruction movies where the last 30-40 minutes consist of the plain and simple destruction of everything possible on the set. Movie theatres, airplanes, gas stations, cars, tanks, ferris wheels, there is even a shot of an entire house falling off a cliff. I am not a person who hates action films, but this was excessive and pointless.

Kamala: I thought it might be funny because Dan Aykroyd was in it and I generally think he is a pretty cool guy, but there was little humor that wasn't that kind of unfunny crude stuff.

1941 is a perfect example of the difference between the interesting films of New Hollywood that pushed the envelope in at least some way, and the schlock produced by studios during the blockbuster boom of the late 1970's.