Movie Review: "Rock of Ages": Distilling 1980s Musical Godlessness Into One Big, Glitzy Mess (3 Stars)
MOTHER JONES
By Asawin Suebsaeng
Even taking into account spandex trousers, the aerobics craze, the rise of Anthony Michael Hall, the "anti-bureaucratic revolution," Psycho III, the crack epidemic, Reagan death-squads, and Muppet Babies, there is absolutely nothing I dislike more about the '80s than the music. Music from the '80s is the lunatic ex-wife of American pop-rock that will not stop dropping by America's quiet suburban home to angrily demand joint custody of the country's collective listening consciousness. Which is why I was surprised to find certain parts of Rock of Ages so epically winning. [link]
By Asawin Suebsaeng
Even taking into account spandex trousers, the aerobics craze, the rise of Anthony Michael Hall, the "anti-bureaucratic revolution," Psycho III, the crack epidemic, Reagan death-squads, and Muppet Babies, there is absolutely nothing I dislike more about the '80s than the music. Music from the '80s is the lunatic ex-wife of American pop-rock that will not stop dropping by America's quiet suburban home to angrily demand joint custody of the country's collective listening consciousness. Which is why I was surprised to find certain parts of Rock of Ages so epically winning. [link]
Comments
“Rock of Ages,” directed by the former dancer and choreographer Adam Shankman, is based on a musical — nicely described by Lina Lecaro, a Los Angeles scenester, as a “headbangin’-to-the-oldies revue” — that originated in a Hollywood club in 2005 and eventually migrated to Broadway, where it continues to pull in fans at the Helen Hayes. (Mr. Shankman directed the 2007 movie “Hairspray,” which was based on the Broadway musical that was, in another testament to entertainment industry self-cannibalization, based on the 1988 John Waters film.) Like the musical, the movie “Rock of Ages” is set in 1987, the year that “Appetite for Destruction,” the first album from Guns N’ Roses, and Tipper Gore’s book “Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society,” both hit the cultural fray.
Written by Justin Theroux, Chris D’Arienzo (who wrote the original show) and Allan Loeb, the movie resurrects these two forgotten events through a pair of opponents: an Axl Rose-like rocker, Stacee Jaxx, played with uncharacteristic heat and an undulating bare torso by Mr. Cruise, and a crusading neo-Puritan, Patricia Whitmore, energetically embodied by an underused Catherine Zeta-Jones. Whitmore has vowed, as part of the campaign to have her husband, Mike (Bryan Cranston), elected mayor, to clean up the Strip. In actuality it was Prince’s album “Purple Rain” that triggered Ms. Gore’s outrage over rock ’n’ raunch, an indignation that led to the Parents Music Resource Center, Senate hearings about dirty minds and government regulation, and eventually her wider pop-cultural attacks. Bringing in Prince would have made the movie listenable, but it would have complicated its white-bread world.
That’s less a reference to the picture’s homogeneous racial and ethnic makeup, which debatably reflects that of the music milieu it seeks to replicate. (Mary J. Blige, as Justice, the owner of a strip club, and the character actor Angelo Donato Valderrama, as a club busboy named Chico, are among the movie’s few tokens of diversity.) Rather, this Wonder Bread banality comes from how thoroughly Mr. Shankman has vacuumed his rock-scene simulacrum of anything recognizably rock, including the lust, juice, heat, bad behavior and excesses that characterize its real-life analogue. There isn’t any grit to these people or their art, not a speck of dirt anywhere. It looks like Disneyland and sounds, well, like a bad Broadway musical, with all the power belting and jazz-hand choreography that implies.
To put it another way, there’s way too much Journey on the soundtrack, and Foreigner. There’s also an REO Speedwagon ditty, a few from Twisted Sister, Def Leppard and Poison, and at least two hits that were released after 1987 (“More Than Words” and “I Remember You”). All the songs are sung, mostly without shame or distinction, by the actors themselves, who slide into the warbling as if into a conversation. A grizzled, bewigged Mr. Baldwin enunciates through his songs, in the Rex Harrison mold, to play a rock survivor, Dennis Dupree, who runs the Bourbon with his sidekick, Lonny (Mr. Brand). They make their stale buddy routine and romance amusing and, as with the rest of the adults, make the movie bearable. A whispering and writhing Mr. Cruise makes it watchable.