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.