Safe Haven

Do you hear banjos playing, too?

Grade: C +
Director: Lasse Hallström
Starring: Julianne Hough, Josh Duhamel, David Lyons, Cobie Smulders and Mimi Kirkland
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 55 min.

There are three essential elements to a Nicholas Sparks’ story: death, tears and North Carolina. Safe Haven, the eighth Sparks film adaptation but only the third filmed entirely in the Tar Heel state (following A Walk to Remember and Nights in Rodanthe), is set in the sleepy real-life village of Southport, situated at the confluence of the Cape Fear River, Intracoastal Waterway and Atlantic Ocean. We see depictions of open-air restaurants along the marsh, nights spent gigging for fish and a recreation of the town’s renowned annual Fourth of July festival.

This idyllic setting is also the impromptu hideaway for “Katie” (Julianne Hough), the assumed name adopted by a perky blond on the run from flashbacks of a bloody knife and a prone victim, along with Kevin, an alcoholic Boston detective (David Lyons) giving dogged chase. Katie wants to lay low, so naturally she rents a remote, delipidated shack that everyone knows about, which needs repairs that send Katie trodding into the middle of town every day in search of supplies.

No bother—Katie is immediately embraced by the natives, particularly Alex (Josh Duhamel), a 30-something widower and father who looks like, well, Josh Duhamel. Despite knowing little about Katie (like her true identity, for starters), the wanted poster with her face on it hanging in the local police station (this film isn’t very kind to the Southport PD) and the fact that she attracts all manner of mayhem to town, Alex decides Katie is the one to replace his recently deceased wife and raise his two moppets, including a daughter played by Raleigh native Mimi Kirkland.

In fairness, there’s enough chemistry between Duhamel and Hough to carry this Hallmark Movie Channel refugee through its many banal patches. Director Lasse Hallström—helming his second Sparks adaptation (Dear John)—competently captures the beatific coastal tableaux, although his crosscuts to Kevin’s manic search back in faux-Boston are drab filler.

Still, while there’s the proverbial death along the way, you nearly make it through without any tears … until a jaw-dropping, Shyamalan-ian denouement that’s just as liable to prompt eye-rolling as it is to send sniffles echoing throughout the theater. Ultimately, the big beneficiary here is the Southport-Oak Island Area Chamber of Commerce. The rest of Safe Haven plays it safe.

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 

Footloose

Coming soon: The Dukes of Hazzard 2

Grade: B -
Director: Craig Brewer
Starring: Kenny Wormald, Julianne Hough, Dennis Quaid, Andie MacDowell and Miles Teller
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 53 min.

The opening moments of Craig Brewer’s Footloose gives something old and something new. It begins with a static close-up of sneakers stomping on a beer-smeared dance floor strewn with crushed Dixie cups, gettin’ footloose to the familiar strains of Kenny Loggins’ smash title track. The nostalgic mood is abruptly interrupted, however, when a carload of teenagers leaving the dance party are killed in a head-on collision.

In response, the city council of sleepy Bomont, Ga., led by Presbyterian minister Shaw Moore (Dennis Quaid), whose son was killed in the crash, passes a series of ordinances intended to prevent the teen revelry town elders blame for the tragedy. Restrictions include a curfew and prohibitions against loud music, public alcohol consumption and, most of all, lewd and lascivious dancing.

Brewer (Hustle & Flow; Black Snake Moan) places his affinity for Southern settings front and center. He transplants the original film’s fictional Utah locale to a Georgia burg perched, like so many cities in the Deep South, on transcending its traditional race, class and religious divisions.

The impetus for Bomont, GA’s prohibitions are more believable than the sheer fundamentalist bent at the heart of the 1984 film. And, while Brewer goes to great lengths to incorporate the original soundtrack throughout - sometimes in their original form, sometimes rerecorded with new artists - he also mixes in a contemporary blend of country, rock and hip-hop, backed by performers ranging from Blake Shelton to Smashing Pumpkins to Wiz Khalifa. The hoofing itself now runs the gambit from parking lot krumping to country line. Even the memorable tractor battle is changed to a school bus demolition derby.

Still, despite this tinkering around the edges as well as Brewer’s distinctive gritty palette, Footloose’s basic plot remains otherwise unchanged and just as hokey. Boston boy Ren McCormick (Kenny Wormald) moves to town sporting shades, a 21 Jump Street hairdo and a big-city attitude. Trouble comes his way after he plays his music too loud and, more precariously, dances too close with Ariel (Julianne Hough), the preacher’s flamboyant daughter who fancies halter tops and red cowboy boots.

It falls to this rebel without to rumba to woo Ariel, beat back her roughneck boyfriend and try to convince the council to rescind its bans via a speech that finds Ren quoting Psalms and Ecclesiastes. As in his previous features, Brewer’s characters often veer into caricature, especially Ren’s new friend Willard (Miles Teller) and the rest of the hayseeds in Bomont, a place where folks still work at the cotton gin and call each other “darlin.” And, for all the director’s heightened attention to verisimilitude, the town is some alternate Southern universe where there is no hint of racial tension.

Wormald and Hough make an alluring pair, and while their acting won’t wow audiences, their energetic bump-and-grinding will titillate viewers of both sexes. Is it all corny? Yes, but Brewer makes it OK for everybody to cut Footloose...just fight that feeling of deja vu.

Neil Morris