Rock of Ages

 Wanted by PETA, Dead or Alive

Grade: C –

Director: Adam Shankman

Starring: Diego Boneta, Julianne Hough, Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Paul Giamatti

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 3 min.

Although a child of the 1980s, I never wore a mullet or a Def Leppard T-shirt. My only exposure to Whitesnake was watching Tawny Kitaen gyrate on the hood of a Jaguar in their music video for Here I Go Again. But while my youthful musical tastes skewed toward R&B and pop, there’s an underappreciated lyricism to much of ‘80s glam metal: “An’ here I go again on my own/ Goin’ down the only road I’ve ever known/ Like a drifter I was born to walk alone.”

So, anyone lookin’ for nothin’ a good time may feel that it don’t get better than the jukebox musical Rock of Ages, a celebration of ‘80s pop metal and the Sunset Strip music scene. Anyone lookin’ for a good movie, however, bought tickets to the wrong show.

This story of a countercultural nightclub trying to thwart outside forces bent on shutting down them and their “Freedom, man!” is as hoary as vinyl records. Set in 1987, Dennis Dupree (Alec Baldwin) and his right-hand manager Lonny (Russell Brand) run The Bourbon Room, a rollicking Hollywood dive, and they are feeling pressure from the city’s new gentrifying mayor (Bryan Cranston) and his Bible-thumbing wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Dennis’ last hope is the big gate he’ll earn when the band Arsenal returns to give a farewell concert before Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise), their loopy lead singer, goes solo.

Against the backdrop of a municipality trying to stamp out vice, Julianne Hough plays Sherrie Christian, a small-town girl who falls for city boy Drew Boley (Diego Boneta). Yes, it sounds just like Footloose, much as you might remember Burlesque when Sherrie resorts to working in a strip club under the tutelage of its madam (Mary J. Bilge).

While the soundtrack may have your head banging, that makes Rock of Ages little more than Pandora with a pulse. The songs are shoehorned into an already rickety plot, and director Adam Shankman’s staging is slapdash and silly, as if he was assembling a hair band-themed amusement park ride. Although the storylines for musicals are typically broad, screenwriters Justin Theroux, Allan Loeb and Chris D’Arienzo make a number of regrettable alterations to D’Arienzo’s original book, most of them designed to make Sherrie more virtuous and Stacee more redeemable. Not to mention the substitution of Zeta-Jones’ haughty harridan as an easy conservative punching bag.

The performances, already drained of the essential energy of a live setting, are hit-or-miss. While Hough’s voice is lithe and uneven, Boneta ably carries his tunes as a squeaky-clean busboy and aspiring singer. Brand and, unsurprisingly, Bilge hold their own; Baldwin and Paul Giamatti (as a skeevy record producer) make cats howl. But the unquestioned savior of this inert revue is Cruise’s portrayal of the Dionysian Stacee Jaxx as a cross between Bret Michaels and Jim Morrison. Besides ably executing vocally demanding numbers like Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive,” Cruise nearly salvages the show as a baked, self-obsessed talent clad in furs and a satanic codpiece, accompanied everywhere by a pet mandrill named Hey Man, and barely in touch with reality, much less the spirit that made him a star in the first place.

Unfortunately, such it is with Rock of Ages, a detached revival geared more for Generation Glee than Gen X.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com 

It's Complicated

You're old...isn't that funny?

Grade: C

Director: Nancy Meyers

Starring: Meryl Street, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, John Krasinksi, and Lake Bell

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hour, 58 minutes

“It’s Complicated” is, indeed, but just not in the way one would expect. At its rail-thin best, it is a leisurely tale about two former spouses who – years after he, Jake (Alec Baldwin), left she, Jane (Meryl Streep), for a younger set of abs with a conspicuously natty name, Agness (Lake Bell) – begin to rendezvous in secret at sundry bedrooms and her kitchen. Being that the ways to a man’s heart are through his stomach and other lower extremities, it is little wonder that Jake begins to long for the comforts of what might have been instead of weekly trips to the fertility clinic with his headstrong trophy wife. There is something relevant here to ponder: The vain hunt for eternal youth versus the earned dividends of hearth and home.

It’s a universal story, really. Oh, unless you don’t own a boutique bakery and live in a sprawling Santa Barbara ranch house that you want to remodel with a new kitchen and bedroom (sledgehammer irony alert…). Or, if you’re not a Porsche-driving attorney who can apparently spend every waking minute jetting from coast-to-coast to jump in the sack with your ex-wife. Or, unless your grown children aren’t a gaggle of lobotomized Stepford kids who can emote either hurt or hilarity, but only on cue, and who have married and/or graduated college but always seem to be around for dinner parties and sleepovers where the whole family dons their pajamas and munches popcorn while watching The Graduate.

In truth, It’s Complicated is more the insular perspective of writer-director Nancy Meyers, whose innocuous parables of independent women that she wrote while married in her 20s and 30s – Private Benjamin and Baby Boom –have given way to pseudo-feminist pap the now-divorced Meyers spins about high-strung, self-pitying SoCalers of privilege with “problems” the average moviegoer could only hope to have the chance to suffer – Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, and now this.

Poor Jane feels a bad case of empty nest syndrome coming on, despite her bustling business, creature comforts, dalliance with Jake, and the non-threatening advances of her architect, Adam, played by an emasculated Steve Martin. All the while, she is cheered on her middle-aged coffee klatch – including the suddenly ubiquitous Rita Wilson, happy to walk-through only her third-worst film of 2009 behind Old Dogs and My Life In Ruins.

Movies are about escapism, and perhaps some will identity with scenes in which Jane and Jake both mourn and guffaw how time (and, in Baldwin’s case, bad eating habits) have ravaged their once-youthful bodies. But, jokes like Jane and Adam rediscovering the joys of getting stoned are overbroad and simple-minded – usual only to allow Martin to flash some glimpse of his inner wild and crazy guy. Almost every one-liner, sight-gag, and screwball set piece falls flat, none of them advancing the film’s purportedly complex tableau.

Fans of Baldwin and John Krasinksi will barely recognize them as the same talented comic actors from 30 Rock and The Office, respectively. For her part, Streep is in full Mamma Mia mode, trying to use her trademark chortle to mask the film’s numerous cinematic sins. Alas, this task proves too complicated, even for one of our greatest film actresses.

Neil Morris