Netflix Friday – Can’t Stop the Music
Most weeks, if I write a Netflix Friday offering it’s some old horror / sci-fi movie, which makes sense since that’s 99% of what I will watch on Netflix. However, every once and a while I’ll get a weird impulse to watch something out of the ordinary, and my Netflix recommendations queue loses its mind and I get some recommendations that I can’t help but check out. Well, a few weeks ago I felt like watching some documentary on the New York Dolls, and afterwards I got a whole bunch of other music recommendations. Most of them were rock / punk concerts and documentaries, but towards the end I saw something that I couldn’t possibly not choose — there was a Village People movie.
In case you are too young to remember the Village People or just barely know them as the Y.M.C.A. group, all you need to know is that the Village People were a popular disco act, and they’re EXTREMELY gay. I know that some members deny that they are gay, and I can’t personally say that I’ve had a homosexual experience with any of them, so I suppose I can’t prove it… but that said, watch this movie or any video of the Village People and tell me with a straight face that you don’t believe they probably prefer the company of other men. Just look at them in the video for “Macho Man.”
Nope, nothing gay going on over here.
The Village People are the very image you probably think of when you think of gay musicians (although I would accept Nickelback as a close second). How could people of the era not know that they were probably gay? Aside from looking like an assorted cast of extras from cheaply produced all-male adult films, they were popular for singing songs like the previously mentioned “Macho Man” and “In the Navy.” Their biggest hit was “Y.M.C.A.,” which as far as I can tell is about hanging out in the Y.M.C.A. because you’ve hit rock bottom and are looking for sex with random men to kill some time until you eventually wither away and die. As far as Disco goes, it’s a pretty catchy song, which is a statement that applies to their entire music catalog.
Before you start sending me angry comments, there’s nothing wrong with being gay. However, in the late 70s early 80s it was far more taboo in mainstream America than it is today, and unfortunately most of the country isn’t really accepting of the lifestyle even in 2011. Disco in itself was a pretty gay-friendly music / movement, so I’m not really surprised that the group did fairly well as musicians, despite appearing to be dressed as extras from Dudes That Like Dicks 7: Hard at Work. I was surprised to see that in 1980, after disco was well on its way to its decline, someone spent a good deal of money making a movie about the rise of the Village People, starring the Village People, and including a handful of musical numbers, Olympic champion Bruce Jenner, and a pre-Police Academy Steve Guttenberg. That’s a ridiculous proposition to even write a script about, but someone went ahead and spent $20 million dollars making it. Unsurprisingly, it was a massive failure, and one I would have never even heard about if it wasn’t for Netflix.
If this trailer doesn’t tempt you, you’re reading the wrong website.
It’s a horrendously bad movie, but at the same time a completely watchable one. It’s got annoying characters, horrible dialogue, almost none of their earlier hits (except Y.M.C.A., in a scene that proves it’s a song about hanging out with strangers in showers), and isn’t even a very accurate portrayal of the background of the Village People. There’s a whole bunch of other songs that appear to have been created solely for the movie, including a song about making milkshakes (cleverly titled “Milkshake”), and the title track “Can’t Stop the Music” which is played repeatedly for the last 10 minutes of the movie, and is probably the least enjoyable of all their songs. Plus, it starts with roughly 5 solid minutes of Steve Guttenberg rollerskating, which really would have sold this movie by itself.
There’s not a whole lot to the story, but I’ll do my best to explain the little bit that I haven’t blacked out. Steve Guttenberg is an aspiring DJ / songwriter, and he wants to start the next big craze in music. One of Steve’s friends is his roommate Samantha, who is some sort of supermodel with connections to the music industry. One of Steve’s other friends is the Indian from the Village People, who inexplicably dresses like an Indian despite working as a waiter in New York City and not yet being in the Village People. Somehow (and I can’t really remember the specifics), Bruce Jenner shows up and falls in love with Samantha, and because he’s a lawyer he somehow sets up interviews for Steve Guttenberg’s Village People project. From there, the group somehow gets a massive show in San Francisco (obviously) and they use that to get a record deal and then sing “Can’t Stop the Music” for 10 minutes until I got up and stopped the movie.
There’s a lot more going on outside of watching the Village People wandering around proving that before they were a music act they were definitely not actors. There’s a collection of older high society women who somehow get involved, and an ex-boyfriend of Samantha’s who runs a major record label, and at one point the Village People make a commercial for milk (unsurprisingly, an extremely gay commercial for milk), and pretty much everyone is annoying the whole time through. However, I couldn’t stop watching it. I can’t imagine that there is one person who didn’t think the Village People were gay just from their music and television appearances, but there is no way in hell that anyone watched this whole movie and didn’t know it. I refuse to believe it happened.
If somehow people STILL didn’t know, in 1985 they put out this video about hot gay phone sex. This would be an ordinary youtube video here but they are too good for allowing anyone to embed it.
Still, if you’re looking for something different to torture your friends / loved ones / pets with this week, I highly recommend this movie. There’s so much going on you won’t get bored, the music is painfully catchy and unbelievably full of double entendres, and there’s even a little bit of full frontal nudity. Pair this one up with the Ramones’ performance in the ill-conceived Rock and Roll High School and you’ve got a full night of amazingly bad music-based cinema.
