ROCK OF AGES

On the plane to Portland last week with my 9 month old son passed out on me I took full advantage of the six dollar screen rental and was like “I GET TO WATCH A MOVIE! WEE! WHAT SHALL I WATCH?!” And got to the movie pickins and lo the options of unseen films were either The Watch which in the perhaps 90 seconds I watched, I understood immediately why it was a total flop. Vince Vaughn screaming about how his neighbors are outerspace aliens want to take his skin and expecting us to believe is really one toke over the line, Hollywood. My other option? MOTHERFUNKING ROCK OF AGES. The other option was the most recent Batman, but I wanted to save it for the flight home, when I really needed it, you know? So, Rock of Ages which I saw from the mid-beginning until the start of the end is really a movie about Tom Cruise’s clawing attempts to remain young in our collective memory. Contorting and twisting about the stage, Iggy-like, arching his body so as to keep his torso taut. As an aging Sunset Strip metal dude, he was supposed to be carnal and nasty and lithe and I just kept thinking that he seemed like the only person in the movie not in on the joke and not playing it for laughs. He was going at it as serious as Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot, meanwhile Alec Baldwin and everyone else just plays it like this chance to wear bad wigs and sing and be super ridiculous. And ridiculous it is. It is a musical adapted from the Broadway stage and it keeps a lot of the cheap “humor” intact. If you like montages, you will love this movie, it’s contstantly montaging out during every big number, with the girl character going from angrily swabbing the blush off her face in a strip clusb dressing dressing room defeat scene to crumbling a few dollars in her hands after her shift angrily stomping on Hollywood Boulevard to her strip club boss/Madam in harem pants MARY J BLIGE (good lord girl what did you do to deserve this) singing a lecture about just how tough life is while 12 pole dancers raise their asses in punctuation. You want it to be mindbreaking but mostly it’s a very over confident kind of silly.