THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAFFIC JAM (1980)

THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAFFIC JAM (or TGATJ as it’s called in the ‘hood) is a great title for a movie. It conjures up all kinds of awesome images of thousands of cars wrecking and people dying. Freezing or burning to death in their whips. Donk rims dripping with blood and intestines. Human drama all over the place! Unfortunately, the reality of THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAFFIC JAM is more like watching an orange 1986 Ford Escort sliding, at 2 mph on an ice covered road, into a tree and then the passenger door falling off.

Originally broadcast on October 2, 1980 (according to IMDb), TGATJ tells the stories of various people in Los Angeles whose lives are affected by a gigantic traffic jam. There are two main stories that everything else kinda revolves around.  One is about a guy (Desi Arnaz Jr.) who needs to get to his pregnant wife.  The other is about a separated guy (John Beck) who is trying to get back in good with his family, but his job as a highway traffic controller takes up all his time. There’s a bunch of other characters (Charles Napier as a truck driver, Ed McMahon and Rue McClanahan as a bickering married couple, Paul Wilson as a biker, etc.), but they're all just tossed together like in an episode of The Love Boat, which was popular at the time.

As entertainment, THE GREAT AMERICAN TRAFFIC JAM is pretty weak, but the curiosity factor for the whole thing (at least for movie nerds) is there because I couldn’t help but be amused at how the cast could have so many recognizable faces, but still be made up completely of C-List (or lower) celebrities. There isn’t any big names at all. Ed McMahon and Noah Beery Jr. would probably(?) be the two biggest names here, but I can’t imagine them drawing a big audience on their own. So, I guess, the selling point to the film was supposed to be the traffic jam itself or the wrecks that caused it. If so, audiences were probably disappointed as fuck, because the wrecks sucked and the traffic jam itself sucked. And the humor was completely dead on arrival.  Unless, of course, shit like people selling traffic jam t-shirts or seeing Al from Happy Days at a drive thru ordering "6,000" hamburgers cracks you up.  And I'm sure that Butterfly McQueen reference had home audiences dying with laughter.

It sucks that there's so little information about this film online, because I would like to know more about it.  But at the time of this writing (04/27/2021), I can't really find fuck about it. I did enjoy seeing Paul from Cheers riding on a motorcycle with Ed McMahon. That's something you don't see everyday.

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

There's a new serial killer on the loose and as the partially skinned corpses of women continue to wash up on the shores of local rivers the FBI is getting more and more desperate to catch the killer. They're doing everything they know to do, including interviewing killers with similar M.O.'s already in custody. But the one they want to talk to the most, Dr. Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, isn't interested in talking to them. So they send in a young, attractive FBI Academy recruit, Clarence Starling, to talk to him, because they know that she's "his type". It works and he talks to her, but only because he has something sinister in mind.

I'm sure at this point in time everybody on the universe has seen THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and they should because it's excellent movie. Watching it again for this review was interesting, because even though I've seen it dozens of times I still got wrapped up in the story.  The construction of the story is brilliant, the acting by the entire cast is mind-blowing and the editing is so sharp that it's hard to believe the filmmakers where able to cram so much emotion and detail and character development into 118 minutes!

If you haven't seen this movie, then you really should. Not only is it an excellent movie and massively influential, but it's one of the rare times the Academy Awards actually got it right...mostly.  Ted Levine wasn't even nominated for his performance!  But it did sweep all of the major awards, including Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins who was absolutely perfect as Hannibal Lecter. So perfect, in fact, that I still think of that role every time I see him.

Part 1 - Manhunter (1986)
Part 3 - Hannibal (2001)
Part 4 - Red Dragon (2002)
Part 5 - Hannibal Rising (2007)

Same few paragraphs over and over.