Screen Queen: ‘Can’t Stop the Music,’ starring the Village People; plus, Criterion’s ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch,’ ‘Gloria Bell,’ ‘Blue Velvet’

Can’t Stop the Music
Three Men and a Baby actor Steve Guttenberg is on roller skates, and that’s just the beginning of Can’t Stop the Music, the quasi-autobiographical film about the Village People. The 1980 film is a gay wonderland from another time, another place, another gay galaxy: when guys used to rock crop tops (oh wait...); when full-frontal male nudity could apparently be seen in a PG-rated film (for some swinging softies, watch those guys in the locker room during the extravagantly gay "YMCA" number); when Caitlyn Jenner, playing a Daisy Dukes-clad lawyer named Ron White, was an actor. It’s the movie Olivia Newton-John turned down. The one Cher passed on too. They were wise to do so, of course; it certainly wouldn’t have done their careers any favors. (Instead, Valerie Perrine was cast in the role of the famous supermodel with a full Rolodex; to Guttenberg’s Jack Morell, an aspiring singer-songwriter, she says things like "Mama has connections.") It’s a bad movie that became a cult film because it’s a joke, but you wish that everyone involved...