All apologies for neglecting to write up the weekend arena last week, but my rationale is simple and is offered here: I could not bring myself to write anything about Rock of Ages or That’s My Boy. Some of you might be wondering, What’s hard to write about two crappy films? – something totally justified by the weekend hauls of about $14million each. The answer is simply that I couldn’t pinpoint precisely why both films would be highly mediocre bordering on terrible. I suppose the easiest target would have been the leads for each.
In Rock of Ages, Tom Cruise plays Stacee Jaxx, a name that annoys me simply on its blatantly non-clever contrivance. Jaxx is a rock god who sweatily saunters on stage, his long hair tossing about, his voice emerging from behind sunglasses and beaver-felt cowboy hat. The problem here is twofold. First, eighties rock stars didn’t look like this. Sure, they wore makeup and nail polish, but their hair was big; their clothes were metallic; their appearance was loud; and, their makeup covered a rough exterior of sleepless nights and long submersions in bottles of Jack Daniels. Here, Cruise is too pretty. His face bespeaks androgyny forced into toughness with a bandana and aviator glasses straight out of Top Gun. His body is cut like a sculpture, but this suggests an obsession with fitness, not one with performance.
The second issue here is Cruise himself. In addition to being to pretty, he’s anachronistic to this film. Cruise himself was an eighties icon, so I suppose there’s a connection, but the fifty-year-old cruise is not an eighties icon in an eighties-centric film. In other words, he’s too old to play this role. Set in 1987, Rock of Ages supplies the soundtrack for two young lovers seeking blah blah blah in California.
However, there were no fifty-year-old rock gods. Pat Benatar, Joan Jett, Bon Jovi, Dee Snider, Steve Perry, Joe Elliot, and Bret Michaels were in their late twenties and early thirties in their primes. To see them play now would be an exercise in aural nostalgia, but little else. For a direct example, see Bret Michaels and his few incarnations of Rock of Love, where the battered former front man hawks himself on an MTV dating program in search of “love” and relevance. Or, take the most recent Stanley Steamer ad, where Dee Snider arrives at a man’s home and screeches out the jingle for a carpet cleaning service. To see them live would bring a smile to my face and remind me of why eighties fashion will never make a comeback among those of us who were alive during its peak, but would not encourage me to don my Poison t-shirt and hit the closest tavern. In the end, the casting is nonsensical.
Something else that is a touch wonky about this film is its transition from stage to screen. The fervor for the Broadway musical is understandable. To build from a previous point, Stacee Jaxx is played by Jeremy Woodard, who is far less than fifty and looks thirty at most. He fits the time period. Second, the big hair is ubiquitous, so there’s little “constructed hip” happening here. Thirdly, seeing this performance live would actually be like attending a concert, whereas seeing this performance on a screen is diluted by the natural separation in cinema. The screen itself is a wall. There’s a safety; there’s a distance; we become voyeurs, not an audience able to rush a stage, get sweat on, smell sweet colitas or tobacco creep its way above the crowd, or reach out and touch the singer’s boot with our finger tips.
The film version offers none of that and bases itself on spectacle, assuming that nostalgia will keep it adrift in a sea mistakes and miscasts.
