“Rock of Ages” hits rock bottom
By: Clarise Ng
THE premise of Adam Shankman’s new comedy musical movie, “Rock of Ages,” sounds all too familiar. It is set in the 1980s, the age of rock and roll. As in the Journey song “Don’t Stop Believin’,” small-town girl Sherrie Christian (Julianne Hough) sets out to Hollywood to fulfill her rock star dreams. On her first night in the big city, she meets handsome aspiring artist Drew Boley (Diego Boneta) who gets her a job waiting tables at the crumbling haven of rock and roll, the Bourbon Room. This sparks a stormy love affair that would inspire many a song and a singing career, among other things.
Such is the stuff of rock and roll history. Innumerable musical stars were launched through the same fairy tale beginning. Coupled with a mélange of canonical rock songs such as “I Love Rock and Roll,” “Anyway You Want It,” “We Built this City,” “Every Rose Has its Thorn,” and “I Want to Know What Love Is,” the movie shows much promise, indeed. Not surprisingly, the audiophile would, at a glance, think that the movie is a nostalgia piece, representative of the phenomenal and thunderous epoch of rock. He would be mistaken.
Truth is, “Rock of Ages” is more “High School Musical” than Bruce Springsteen. It is amazing how one is able to take an age so singular for its pain and grunge and political ambivalence and turn it into fluff fitting for Disney channel audiences. Where did “Rock of Ages” go wrong? The problem is that the movie is half-baked; it cannot quite make up its mind whether it wants to be a cute and glitzy variety show or a truthful, ardent memoir of the age of rock.At the heart of the movie is the story of Sherrie and Drew, who find love in their common ambition of superstardom. To put a love story at the core of the plot is okay (For, after all, what greater human pursuit is there than love?), but the exploration of the two main characters’ relationship is downright juvenile and all too reminiscent of Vanessa Anne Hudgens and Zac Efron’s star-crossed lovers. First, Sherrie and Drew fall in love at first sight and passionately, through a montage of romantic record store, beach, and bedroom scenes and a medley of love songs. And then just as quickly, the guy, armed with flimsy evidence, suspects the girl of infidelity and proceeds to slander her pure spirit. The girl does not bother to explain and instead packs her bags and dissipates her life away in a strip club. The estranged lovers’ reunion is, as one would expect, just as sensationalized. The movie overdoses on melodrama and mush to compensate for its lack of pathos and depth.
Surrounding the two lovers is a lineup of some of current cinema’s more effective celebrities— Alec Baldwin as the Bourbon Room’s proprietor, Catherine Zeta-Jones as the mayor’s conservative wife who is out to eliminate rock from the face of the earth, Paul Giamatti as the money-obsessed agent, and Tom Cruise as plummeting rock star Stacee Jaxx. The movie’s crowning glory is that they sing their numbers undubbed and quite effectively, and this is a treat indeed. Tom Cruise is a pleasant surprise in “Paradise City,” “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” and “Rock Me Like a Hurricane.” Zeta-Jones is especially laudable for her dance bit, which deludes one into thinking that perhaps only a couple of years and not a long decade has passed since “Chicago.” Their unexpected musical talent aside, however, the actors play characters drawn so shallowly and vapidly that they become laughable caricatures.
Everyone is reduced to a stereotype. Each character is but two-dimensional and attempts to add layers to their personalities are hopelessly weak. Paul Giamatti as Stacee Jaxx’s talent agent Paul Gill is so in love with money that he resorts to bilking and utter self-deprecation but the audience never understands why. In almost all his scenes, Alec Baldwin as Dennis Dupree, the hippie owner of the cash-strapped Bourbon Room, is shown fretting about his bankruptcy. In the latter part of the film, he is finally given a side-story—in the middle of his woes about his finances, suddenly and out of the blue, a homosexual love affair is ignited between him and assistant Lonny Barnett (Russel Brand). The two burst into a quite amusing rendition of “Can’t Fight this Feeling.” This plot development, however, is abandoned just as spontaneously and abruptly as it started.
Most depressing is Tom Cruise’s Stacee Jaxx. While it is clear that the movie aspires to take inspiration from the world’s greatest rock icons, Stacee Jaxx effortlessly reduces the rock star to nothing but a vodka-swigging, heroin-dependent, hedonistic sex god. To be fair, the movie does make attempts to toss in humanizing layers to his personality. Amidst his sexual orgies and alcohol intoxication, the rock star laments his slavery to his music and a perennially broken heart. In the ultimate act of humanization, one even finds him in the end finally able to fall in love and settle down and strike a balance between his love for rock and his desire for a life he may call his own. Sadly, all this is executed so blandly that it becomes, all at the same time, pitiful and amusing. What the movie does is make a caricature of an extraordinary and fecund period in musical history, stripping it of its soul.
The age of rock, after all, may be thickly laced with alcohol and drugs and cheesy when it comes to the subject of love, but it is more than that. What the movie fails to acknowledge is how rock went beyond the Bourbon Room and concert halls and, in fact, transcends music. It is an ideology that changed the world. Perhaps the filmmaker has forgotten the spiritual dimension of the rock concert, and how it was, for its followers, a primarily religious experience. Stacee Jaxx is a god in the movie, yes- girls swoon and faint at the sight of him and even the principled journalist played by Malin Akerman cannot help but shed her uptight old maid clothes for him- but there must be more to that.
The BBC documentary “Seven Ages of Rock” proclaims rock stars as American heroes because their music has, in a very real way, informed the people’s social and political sensibilities. US President Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s, applauded rock for its message of hope, subliminal or otherwise, that moves the hearts of millions. Rock music, after all, is not just about love and histrionics. Its songs, like “I’ll Be Watching You” and “Born in the USA,” for instance, are actually political commentaries that play a huge part in mobilizing global audiences to action. The movie, in its oversimplicity, equates rock music to partying and chilling and the rock star to sex. It has taken for granted rock music’s undeniable affiliation with pertinent political causes or, as the documentary puts it, its role as the hypnotic Pied Piper.
Perhaps in his preoccupation with the production value of the musical numbers-which were not that spectacular anyway- the filmmaker has failed to give the movie meaning and depth. True, “Rock of Ages” does not make one feel cheated of his time and money when he finally leaves the cinema, but it does not make him feel that he has watched something truly important, either. The musical numbers of “Rock of Ages” are entertaining, but that is all.
One cannot help but compare it with “Singin’ in the Rain,” that iconic movie about the birth of the talkies. Now this is what one might call the perfect musical film, if only because it exhibits a beautiful love affair between the movie’s musical numbers and story. The musical numbers in the movie, of course, are sublime. Gene Kelly pitter-pattering down the street with his sunny umbrella will inspire audiences for years and years to come. So will Donald O’Connor’s “Make Them Laugh” and Debbie Reynolds’ cheerful “Good Morning!” Each may be plucked from the film and watched in its solitude and it will make perfect sense because it is whole and cohesive and a story on its own. Put in the grander scheme of the movie, however, these musical numbers become even more beautiful because they lend the story more heart. Because of the music, every scene is more profound, more meaningful, and more alive. What results is not just timeless music but a movie that is definitive of a significant era in the film industry, a truthful yet romantic encapsulation of the good old days.
This is where “Rock of Ages” falls short, most of all. Its story and music are not given equal attention and are not intertwined as gracefully and seamlessly that it has become a little more than a hodgepodge of delightful production numbers. One will remember Catherine Zeta Jones’ fine singing and dancing to “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” but it will not strike a chord in his heart. One will not remember the movie as a poignant artifact from a beautiful but lost era because it does not speak truths about that era. “Rock of Ages” strips the musical genre of its heart and soul and reduces it to a variety show—something rock and roll is absolutely not.
