Cinema: A Great Rock-‘n’-Roll Caravan

THE BLUES BROTHERS Directed by John Landis

Screenplay by Dan Aykroyd and John Landis

CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC Directed by Nancy Walker

Screenplay by Bronte Woodard and Allan Carr

ROADIE Directed by Alan Rudolph

Screenplay by Big Boy Medlin and Michael Ventura

Halfway through Roadie, some earnest environmentalists get a court injunction to block a rock concert, claiming the amplified music wastes energy. “Hell,” shouts one good ole boy, “don’t they know that rock ‘n’ roll puts more energy into the air than it takes out of the ground?” Energy is the operative word in rock, and in three new rock movies. But The Blues Brothers, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi’s elephantine expansion of their Saturday Night Live routine, expends that energy on simple aggression. Can’t Stop the Music, which charts the fabled rise of the Village People, turns it into misdirected motion. Only Roadie powers itself like an eight-wheeled, diesel-fueled rock-‘n’-roll caravan.

The most impressive thing about The Blues Brothers is its numbers: a budget in the $30 million-$38 million range, a cast of 91, a crew of 191, a stunt team of 78, and the cooperation of nearly every able-bodied Chicagoan except Dave Kingman. Elwood (Aykroyd) and Joliet Jake (Belushi) are out to reunite their band and raise enough money to keep their old parochial school open—and to do it they are willing to turn the Second City into an Indy 500 junkyard. Too rarely, the movie relaxes to let some fine rhythm-and-blues artists (James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles) show what they can do; in the process they show up the two stars as glum shimmers, with no characters to inhabit and little feeling for the music. But the songs are mere interludes; the movie’s gigantic “production number” is a ten-minute chase sequence that has Aykroyd and Belushi careering into Chicago with most of the local and state police force on their tail. The Blues Brothers is a demolition symphony that works with the cold efficiency of a Moog synthesizer gone sadistic.

Assume for a moment that Director John Landis means to subvert the twin genres of musical comedy and action melodrama. He fails there, since periodically the film stops dead in its headlong rush toward satire and puts on an ingratiating face, mugging and mewling to win over its audience. Landis seems no surer of his visual style than he does of his movie’s tone, so he tries everything: shots angled from a dog’s-or a god’s-eye view, eerily lighted special effects, more dancers, more extras, more noise, more cars and car crashes. Alas, more is less, and The Blues Brothers ends up totaling itself.

Can’t Stop the Music aspires to nothing more radical than providing a raucous good time, and not so coincidentally promoting the Village People’s new album. (The title song consumes the final eleven minutes of screen time.) It is hard to get angry about this harmless, weightless enterprise, an attempt to blend the spirit of the opulent old MGM musicals with the jackhammer sound of disco. The movie brings a certain chaotic zest to the group’s Y.M.C.A., transforming it into a lavender update of a Busby Berkeley danceathon; and Paul Sand performs comic wonders with the role of a manic music executive. But there is no style here. Producer Allan Carr’s guiding principle seems to be: shoot everything that moves, throw it on the cutting-room floor, give the editor a vacuum cleaner and hope that it will all work out. It doesn’t: Can’t Stop the Music is overkill, all noise and motion.

“Anything worth doin’s worth overdoin’,” says Meat Loaf, the 260-lb. rock singer and star of Roadie. But this is one movie that knows how to overdo it—with speed, elegance, wall-to-wall raunch and a flaky, sidewise wit. Meat Loaf plays Travis W. Redfish, a north Texas naif with the soul of Candide and the hands of an expert mechanic. He hooks up as the “roadie” (bus driver and equipment manager) for a sleazy rock entrepreneur and falls immediately in love with Lola Bouilliabase (Kaki Hunter), a snaggletoothed, anorectic groupie whose mission in life is to sleep with Alice Cooper. “Isn’t she one of Charlie’s Angels?” asks Travis. Says Lola: “I can’t believe you never heard of Alice Cooper! Don’t you read T shirts?” Guess what? Travis becomes a roadie superstar and deposits Lola with Alice himself. But she follows the course of true love into the front seat of Travis’ pickup truck—just as the spaceship from Close Encounters alights with a request for Travis to perform a quick lube job.

Director Alan Rudolph, whose Welcome to L.A. examined the West Coast music scene from a perspective so distant it seemed almost Martian, has fashioned Roadie into a kind of live-action Road Runner cartoon and added the exuberant bad taste of Russ Meyer’s redneck sex movies. Roadie has bar brawls, earth quakes, sloppy eaters, hair-rollered harridans, fire-engine-red panties and lots of loud rock ‘n’ roll. In its second hour, the movie loses some of this mad enchantment: Guest Stars Alice Cooper and Deborah Harry (Blondie) do not jell with Rudolph’s genially grotesque surrealism. But Roadie is still the weirdest, funniest movie of the summer, with the genuine energy of good pop music. Half a Loaf is better than none—or, as the star himself would croon it, one-half outta three ain’t bad.

—By Richard Corliss