Rock of Ages

Rock of Ages is the story of a sweet young blond girl (Julilanne Hough) who arrives in the big city with dreams of one day becoming a star only to end up paying the rent through stripping.

Wait, I think I've already seen this one...

She quickly gets a waitress job at a bar owned by Alec Baldwin, whose appearance right from the outset makes me wonder what he spent the cheque on.

At least, being an an actor skilled enough to deliver the dialogue of David Mamet on stage, he has the good sense to phone this one in, unlike another recent non-singing actor taking a crack at the musical genre, not to name any names:

He's on the verge of losing his bar and needs a way to make money quick. Wait, I think I've seen this one too:

Thankfully he has his trusted sidekick, played by Russell Brand, who, I shit you not, declare they are queer for each other during a rendition of I Can't Fight This Feeling:



Baldwin's plan is to pack the house with the appearance of rock god Stacey Jaxx (Tom Cruise) who he gave his first gig to way back in the day.

Jaxx is managed by this:

Yes, that is indeed Paul Giamatti...

Jaxx however, underneath it all, is a boozey hack and is told so by Malin Akerman, who then rocks his world PG-13 style to I Want to Know What Love Is. I'm not sure you'd consider this figuring it out or not?

This is at least the second time in history that a Tom Cruise character has had bullshit called on him by a female interviewer:

So the little blond falls for the handsome male bartender who also dreams of making it big and finally does when he's given a last minute shot. The taste of fame quickly lures him away, leaving miss Hough to crash up against walls while belting 80s hair-metals cheeseball songs from the very centre of her (heavily automtuned) soul:

I wonder if that's the way Seacrest used to like her?

Anyway, Jaxx packs the house for a thoroughly gayed-up rendition of Def Leppard's Pour Some Sugar on Me, during which he jerks a huge jizzlob out of a water bottle and onto the audience:

 

As these things go, the girl becomes a stripper, the manager robs the house leaving the club in trouble again, an ultra conservative advocate that someone should have had the good sense to cut from the script before Catherine Zeta Jones was cast, tries to end Jaxx's career, the hunk gets a gig in a boy band that makes him miserable and so on and so forth.

 

All the while the songs do nothing to advance the story in any real meaningful way.

 

Rock of Ages was constructed under the, what I would assume to be incredibly soft, hands of Adam Shankman,

 

 

A choreographer who also made the much better Hairspray musical a couple of years back. I'll give him this, from an aesthetic standpoint, these two films are shot, edited and choreographed better than most of the big budget Hollywood musical trash heaps of late.

 

But the story sucks, the songs have never been my personal cup of tea and all of the actors (save for Mary J. Blige) are all autotuned so heavily  that one wonders if they even needed to show up to the studio to record their parts.

 

Wait, I think I've seen that one before too...

 

 



This is Not Mission Difficult Mr. Woo...

Looking back 13 years, it's interesting to wonder if John Woo made Mission Impossible 2 awesome or if Mission Impossible 2 made John Woo less awesome.

And John Woo, just to set the record straight, is pretty fucking awesome.

Take a look at this:

And This:

And This:

And This:

Do you see that white pin-stripe 90s power suit? Awesome!

In a sense Mission Impossible 2 was a strange gamble on Paramount's part. Could Mr. Woo's hyper stylized Melville-meets-gay-Asian-gun-porn aesthetic really translate into a major Hollywood franchise?

And so when star Tom Cruise as secret agent Ethan Hunt and the apple of his eye Thandie Newton share what, without much hyperbole, can only be considered one of the strangest moments of zen-enlightenment-while-speeding-towards-our-deaths in Hollywood history, North America kind of sat back and said: Huh?



But come on, that's about how people establish emotional connections in John Woo movies.

And this wasn't the first time Woo made Americans sit up and scratch their head:

Huh?

Huh?

Wait, did Tom Cruise just share an epic scene in a major Hollywood blockbuster with a dove?

Huh?

Yet, besides a silly convoluted and ultimtaley meaningless story about a deadly virus known as Chimera and the bad men who want it, it's strange to see just how much of Woo's trademark awesomeness manages to sneak into the finished product, which is, needless to say:

Guns:

Motorcycles:

 

Beautiful women being caressed like delicate lotus flowers:



And shooting guns while driving motorcycles, leading up to explosions:


One word: Fuck Yes!

(ed note - The writing of this article has been temporarily halted while the author breaks to inquire into how much motorcycles cost).

And thus about describes the substance of MI:2. No one did action better or with more style than John Woo, even if Hollywood took away his tales of honour, brotherhood and loyalty and replaced them with tales of foreign espionage and spycraft.

So is MI:2 an awesome Hollywood action movie done right or a really dumb John Woo movie?

I don't know. It's a pretty empty, meaningless movie, but did I mention:

 

Knight and Day

Knight and Day is everything the The A-Team failed to be. It’s an action comedy that is, oddly enough, both funny and exciting. It has characters and not broad types. It’s about movie stars having fun with each other. It has a ridiculous plot and knows how to use that to its personal advantage. It’s the sign of a promising director being able to play the big money game while still delivering a quality product. It has moments where the characters, between chases, shoot-outs and explosions actually get to talk, about things! Who would have thunk? And, most importantly it has action that is made up of stunts, bullets, squibs and explosions made from gas, heat and oxygen all coming together to complete a scientific triangle. Even towards the end, when there is an electrifying motorcycle chase down the streets of Spain, it looks remarkably like two people actually riding a motorcycle. You couldn’t ask for more. June (Cameron Diaz) meets Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) at the airport after they bump into each other twice. They then find themselves on the same flight. But something is strange about Roy. He’s being watched. On the plane, which is nearly empty, she has one too many tequila’s, chats Roy up, goes to the bathroom to compose herself, and exits to find everyone on the plane dead, including the pilots. At first she doesn’t notice and thinks Roy is joking with her when he tells her he is going to land the plane. Joke’s on her. On the ground Roy drugs June and before she passes out explains to her that some agents will probably come looking for her, saying that he is dangerous and deranged and they are there to protect her. He warns her not to trust them. She wakes up the next morning in a foggy daze, but whaddya know… Turns out Roy is in possession of a Maguffin known as the Zephyr, a battery of unlimited power that could, he helpfully explains, run a small city or a large submarine. It was created by a young scientist who Roy was put in charge of guarding along with his partner Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard) who wanted to sell the battery to a Spanish weapon’s dealer and walk off with a big payday. After Roy steals the battery and hides the kid from Fitzgerald, he is framed, deemed to have gone rouge and is being hunted not only by Fitzgerald but by the arms dealer as well. What results is a collection of high intensity action sequences as Roy tries to clear his name, find the kid, save June from her pursuers and take out Fitzgerald, all while having time to stop for a swim on a tropic island where he appears, shirtless, from the ocean, carrying a bundle of prize fish in one hand, not a spear or harpoon in sight. That my friends, is the kind of talent they don’t teach at any agency. The film is a flight of fancy that ultimately comes down to the chemistry of its stars. Cruise and Diaz are both likable, funny and smooth together. They exchange banter, trade one-liners, crack wise in each other's direction and maintain a flirty mystery throughout the entire film: they think they like each other, but both are too busy dodging bullets, cars, motorcycles, stampeding bulls, etc. for either of them to make a first move. Sometimes life is hard like that. Diaz once again proves herself a welcome comedic presence. She plays June as a girl both naive but intrigued by the world of violence she has entered. She has a sort of disconnected quality in her performance in which she is shocked and surprised by what is happening around her, leading to many of the film’s funniest moments, but also remains aware of her surroundings, excited by the possibility that adventure could lurk around any corner. Cruise, one of the few remaining movie stars that became so because of talent and versatility, does the right thing by playing the Miller character totally straight. He’s an action movie every man. When June is taken in by Fitzgerald he speeds by on a motorcycle, ramps it, lands on the hood of the SUV transporting June and takes out all the bad guys, but not before pausing to tell her how much he likes her dress and compliment her driving skills after being forced to take the wheel. Cruise as an action hero is cool and sophisticated but also delivers his lines as if he were a regular guy and these feats of ridiculousness are but a part of some daily routine. This off-handed approach gives the film a warmer, more human quality than a typical run-of-the-mill action picture and also allows the characters to develop believably during the down time between big stunts, deepening the story beyond a clothesline of endless action. Knight and Day is thus possibly the first true big entertainment of the summer. Where action movies seem to have gone the way of crowding human actors out with oodles of computer generated effects and shaky action sequences that are impossible to comprehend, it’s nice to see one in the traditional vein of big Hollywood excitement. It’s smooth and crisp, using stars to create likable personalities and only using computers when it needs to. Special effects were once thought of as a way to enhance reality not constitute for it and that’s the order of the day here, allowing James Mangold to create the feel of action that is actually happening, while also capturing every glorious detail of it in the process. Knight and Day may be a light-hearted experience but it’s a big step in the right direction.

One Minute Review- Legend

You ever get the sensation of too much tranquillity? Like being in the woods on a beautiful day with butterflies fluttering and birds chirping and other miscellaneous things floating about and it just takes it out of you? It reminds me of a famous Richard Pryor quote, "There's something about the woods that just makes you want to...s**t." Ridley Scott's Legend from 1985 suffers from tranquillity overload. It has golden hues, unicorns galloping in slow motion, fairy's glowing in the sky, pedals falling in slow motion, water glistening, Mia Sara, and enough soft focus to make the lightest of eyelids hang heavy.



That's the light side of the story. As the opening credits reveal, the universe exists due to a balance between light and darkness, this balance creating legends. Think about this though, if light came along and banished darkness into an underground abyss, how is that balance? Isn't that light triumphing over darkness and casting it aside? If there were balance wouldn't the two get along and work towards achieving the same desired ends? Forget it. The darkness is ruled, no kidding, by The Lord of Darkness (Tim Curry, under so much make-up that it's of little consequence whether it's actually him or anyone else). The darkness is made up of hammers thundering against metal, sparks flying and fire bursting out in every direction (which is kind of the opposite of darkness if you think about it, but no matter). The story involves some such business about how unicorns keep the world in light and Lord wanting to kill the last two.

This is all undermined by the fact that the hero (Tom Cruise) is an afterthought behind Scott's relentless visual muck. Legend is a film comprised of nothing more than thin air. There is not one meaningful thing that happens in it; not one speck of continuity and not one character who is remembered long enough throughout the duration of the film to amount to anything meaningful.

There is though, an interesting Celebrity Connection:

Could that fairy really be Taylor Swift in disguise?