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April 10, 2002:

CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC

Bruce Kimmel Photograph bk's notes

Well, dear readers, we broke a new record yesterday. Yes, you heard it here, dear readers, we broke a new record yesterday. First of all, how did we even find a new record to break? I mean, they haven’t made records since the mid-eighties and yet we broke a new record yesterday. Well, these things happen here at haineshisway.com. In any case, we had a new record of thirty-one posts yesterday. I know this may seem like chicken feed to some but it seems like thirty-one posts to me. Chicken feed seems wholly different – have you ever seen chicken feed? It doesn’t look like thirty-one posts at all. Well, we can’t stop there, we must have more posts, we must be the most popular site on the internet, we must be loved and adored by one and all and also all and one, for then we can celebrate and have a party and eat cheese slices and ham chunks and dance the Hora and the Hokey Pokey and sing the songs of Meltz and Ernest and whoa Nellie if this hasn’t turned into one of those damnable run-on sentences I hate when that happens because these run-on sentences have a life of their own they cannot be controlled they are like juvenile deliquents they will just do whatever the hell they want and the words just come tumbling one after another like broken records and chicken feed and won’t somebody toss me some punctuation so I can put and end to. Thank you, whoever tossed me that period.

Last night I dreamed I was at Manderley. In my dream I was visiting with the Broadway actress and singer Crista Moore. She was showing me photos of some show she’d been in where she’d played Santa Claus. She looked very good in the outfit and had a nice white beard. Then she told me that she’d dated three doctors since I last saw her in December. Then I woke up. The weird thing is that I didn’t see Crista Moore in December, I haven’t spoken to Crista Moore since last summer and she hasn’t crossed my mind in months, so why in tarnation was I dreaming this dream? Oh, well, dreams have their own peculiar logic and at least it wasn’t a nightmare. Advice to Crista: Stop with the doctors already.

Well, dear readers, yesterday there was a DVD release that slipped quietly into the stores with practically no fanfare at all, yet I feel it is one of the most important DVD releases of the year. I watched it last night and am here to tell you about it now. Well, after we all click that Unseemly Button, that is.

The DVD in question is Mr. Allan Carr’s production of the musical extravaganza known as Can’t Stop the Music. The film stars Mr. Steve Guttenberg, Valerie Perrine, a weird assortment of co-stars and guest stars and, of course, The Village People. It was written by Mr. Bronte Woodard and Mr. Allan Carr himself, and directed by that fine comedienne, Nancy Walker. To say that this film is bad would be doing it a great disservice. It goes way beyond mere bad, it goes into a whole other critical universe. It is so gaily surreal, so from another planet, so weird and wacky, you simply can’t approach it as you would other films. In fact, the only way to approach a film like this is to understand first and foremost that the film is a fairy tale. Once you understand that, everything else has some kind of logic.

The choice of Miss Nancy Walker as director is an interesting one. After all, she’d never directed a film before and to place a twenty-million dollar musical comedy in her hands was a strange thing to do, but no one ever accused the late Allan Carr of not doing strange things. The script by Mr. Woodard and Mr. Carr is amazing in its badness, its storyline so perfunctory, its jokes so predictable and feeble, and yet one sits there absolutely glued to the screen (no mean feat). You sit there glued to the screen for a very long time, because this film runs 123 minutes – apparently Mr. Allan Carr did not want to lose one scene, musical number or joke. Miss Nancy Walker’s direction shows absolutely no aptitude for knowing where to place a camera or how to stage a scene, but she does have everyone talk loudly and that’s a plus.

Can’t Stop the Music was released in 1980 as the disco craze was in its last death throes. The film tells the “story” of how The Village People came to be. I might be wrong, but I feel this is a highly fictionalized version of their story. Steve Guttenberg plays a wanna-be composer who writes classic disco music. At the beginning of the film he’s working in a record store, and yes, Virginia, he does actually break some records when he quits his job two minutes into the film. He lives with Miss Perrine for reasons I don’t remember. She decides one fine day that she will take his music to a record company and make him rich and famous. She wants him to make a demo tape for her, but his voice is so terrible that she says she’ll get some singers to do it for him. There is an Indian who’s already hanging around her apartment, so she recruits him. Then, as she does her daily doings, she recruits various other people she runs into, a construction worker/model, a policeman, a person of leather, a cowboy and a military man or something. Well, it all is quite dizzy and daffy, and they all become rich and famous.

It’s hard to know where to start when talking about the performances. Steve Guttenberg has the manic energy of someone who’s taken a little too much speed, he plays everything loudly, as if he were in a Broadway theater. Valerie Perrine is fine, never a great actress, but she has good humor given what’s going on around her, and the fact that she has to say lines like, “I’m going to eat two Snowballs and a Ding Dong (to which Guttenberg replies, “Anyone who can swallow two Snowballs and a Ding Dong can get the job done” or something like that). Tammy Grimes is in this thing, playing Sydney Channing – I love Tammy Grimes but here she looks like a man in drag and speaks in a voice lower than all the Village People combined. Then there is Bruce Jenner, who looks like the proverbial deer caught in headlights. The Village People do their thing and the music is infectious. The most amusing thing in this Allan Carr fever dream, is that while the Village People are doing their numbers and even in scenes where they’re not doing numbers, women are going crazy over them and they seem to even go crazy over the women. And yet, in every shot of the film there are young men running around in short shorts and tight t-s giving sidelong glances to each other. The are boys in bathing suits, boys in underpants, boys, boys, boys. All the other characters in the film speak as if they were cast-offs from All About Eve (but of course without the wit). The musical numbers have horrid Arlene Phillips choreography (was this woman the worst choreographer in the history of the musical?) and they are shot quite ineptly, but the whole thing is so of a piece that, as I said, you remain glued to the screen just to see where it’s going. Of course, it’s going nowhere and it certainly takes its time getting there, but the whole thing is like a dream, an alternate world. In fact, it is my opinion that if you removed Nancy Walker’s name and replaced it with David Lynch, people would think this a masterpiece.

Anyway, it’s an absolute must have. The transfer (enhanced for widescreen televisions) is very nice, albeit a tiny bit out of focus, which only helps the overall effect. After it was over, I put on my cut-off jeans, a tight t and I danced around my house, singing YMCA at the top of my lungs.

What am I, Ebert and Roeper all of a sudden? Well, tomorrow we’ll have more in the continuing biography of Meltz and Ernest, because I’ve used today’s notes all up writing about Can’t Stop the Music.

Of course, today is Wednesday and you all know what that means. It is Ask BK day, so that is today’s topic of discussion. Ask me anything your little heart’s desire, anything at all. And I will answer all those questions in tomorrow’s notes. You can ask about albums I’ve made, singers I’ve worked with, composer/lyricists I’ve worked with – you can ask me how I look in cut-off jeans whilst singing YMCA, you can ask me what were Donny and Marie really like, oh there are so many questions and I know you will come up with some fine ones. Ask away. Perhaps one day we will break our record of thirty-one posts and if we do it will not be chicken feed, let me tell you that.

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