![]() You know, she, her voice in this movie is, she just gives it this incredible warmth, and she’s just this person who blows out of the screen.” (Queen Latifah, by the way, plays the Queen Latifah character in Hairspray.)Ħ. Blige: “It’s you know, that wise black woman who’s always there to give us some help. Here he is explaining the character of Justice, played in Rock of Ages by Mary J. Shankman’s one of those guys who finds gentle ways to nudge Hollywood to places it doesn’t often go he’s described, for instance, his goal with Rock of Ages as “doing a musical for straight guys.” (I can’t decide whether that’s mildly progressive or insanely conservative - it’s certainly a good description of The Book of Mormon.) Shankman doesn’t seem to have much of a filter. That movie has Zac Efron as a variety-show dancer who leaves his beauty-queen girlfriend for an overweight integration crusader and Amanda Bynes in a life-imitates-art turn as an outspoken devotee of black men. Rock of Ages is directed by Adam Shankman, the man who cast John Travolta as a woman in the not-entirely-watchable-but-still-sneakily-subversive 2007 remake (of a remake) of Hairspray. And Rock of Ages, which was written in part by Tropic Thunder screenwriter Justin Theroux, is pretty much predicated on this kind of joke - there is no other reason for the script to call for Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand to awkwardly kiss, or for Paul Giamatti to sing a few killer bars of Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again.”ĥ. Look at the famous man dance to Ludacris! Amazing! 1 This type of humor requires an enormous investment in the brand of Tom Cruise or whoever - since the joke comes at the expense of that brand - an investment that seems cruel and narcissistic to ask audiences to share. Think of Les Grossman, the balding, profane studio executive played by Cruise in Tropic Thunder, in which the entire joke is that Cruise is balding, profane, and playing against type. There are Hollywood comedies, which are made all the time, and then there are movies like Rock of Ages, in which Hollywood people try to be funny. Jaxx never wears a shirt and travels everywhere with a monkey named Hey Man, which apparently was Cruise’s idea, to give the monkey a name that is the most succinct unit of rocker speech.Ĥ. His character is called Stacee Jaxx and Jaxx is the front man of Arsenal, a band we’re supposed to read as a sort of Poison–Guns N’ Roses hybrid. His pitch-perfect vibrato is basically the devil’s music - the hair on the back of my neck and arms actually stood up and shook when he nailed the falsetto on “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Cruise’s intensity in this film is such that there is no way it wasn’t terrifying to be in the same room as him while they were making it. You hear him right away, singing “Paradise City” over the opening credits. The Avengers: Last Summer’s Best Blockbusterģ. Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator: Requiem for a Comedianĭark Shadows: How Tim Burton and Johnny Depp Lost Their Way Men in Black III and the Barely Average Blockbuster Season Snow White and the Huntsman and Kristen Stewart Prometheus and the Weirdest Summer Franchise As Rock of Ages is a musical, most of this information is conveyed via song - in one crucial scene, our two lovers converse by trading lines from Extreme’s “More Than Words” and Warrant’s “Heaven,” which is unsettling. It’s about two young lovers trying to make it on a stage-set version of the ’80s Sunset Strip, with Alec Baldwin as their lank-haired boss and benefactor and Cruise as the dead-eyed, be-codpieced rock star they both aspire to become. Rock of Ages, adapted from a jukebox musical named for a Def Leppard song, is pretty much the “Cee Lo Green Presents Loberace!” to the rest of the cinema marquee’s Soul Food - the ersatz, Vegas version of a Hollywood film, with 10 lead actors instead of one, and Foreigner songs in lieu of a plot. It’s the platonic ideal of summer cinema: You are going to go to the theater, and people are going to entertain you inside of it.Ģ. Just Tom Cruise in leather pants, with a tattoo of a heart above his actual biological heart. We as summer moviegoers should probably be grateful for Rock of Ages, the first big film of this blockbuster season to signify nothing other than good old-fashioned Hollywood narcissism - no knotty questions about the soupy, staple-y origins of man and xenomorph no referendums on anyone’s increasingly perplexing career no hyena laughing about the misfortune of the hubris-salted studio executives who greenlighted John Carter.
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