OhNoes

Review – Rock of Ages

Angus the Beef and I saw this last night at the Buck-Fiddy:

Rock of Ages was silly. It was hokey, it was camp, it was frivolous. Loved it. We had a lot of fun with this movie and will probably go back to see it again really soon. For $1.50 a ticket, this is not a steep investment.

Review with spoilers below the jump.

We didn’t know going in what this was about or anything. If I’d ever seen a trailer, it had fallen from memory. But it was either this or the digitally animated pirate movie, and neither of us really had an interest in that. Beef told me that someone who worked at the Buck-Fiddy said it’s a comedy about a club. That was sort of true. It quickly became apparent that it’s a musical, which caught me a bit by surprise.

Likes

  • Her: “I’m a stripper.” Him: “I’m in a boy band.” Her: “You win.”
  • Tom Cruise playing, apparently, himself. That’s terribly funny.
  • The energy between Russell Brand and Alec Baldwin. Especially in the scene where everything changes. We hurt ourselves laughing so hard. That was fantastic!
  • I am not an Alec Baldwin fan, yet I really like how he plays this character.

Dislikes

  • “Open your mouth.” I do not find this sort of thing hot.

Comments, Questions, Etc.

  • Several occasions I made a comment that turned out to be a character’s next line. For instance, when Sherrie encounters Drew at the Hollywood sign right after he has joined a boy band, she asks exactly what I asked, “What are you wearing?!”
  • The Beef burst with laughter at the prices in Tower Records.
  • Beef thought it a sign of some kind of warpedness on his part that he knew all the music in the movie. I told him it’s nothing to worry about; it’s culture.
  • Some of the sexy stuff is really sexy. I had thought of recommending this movie to a heavy metal enthusiast friend, but then we hit some of this stuff and I reconsidered. Metalhead friend is LDS and may not be cool with exploding condom machines, among other things.
  • I was young and naive in 1987, just graduating high school. Yet I was a fully functional teenage girl with all the hormones and everything. I don’t recall the music + sex dynamic being tied quite this tightly together in my world. People talked about it, sometimes yelled about it, but of all the mating frenzy I ever encountered, rock music played perhaps an incidental role at best. Something weird to reminisce on while Tom Cruise and Malin Ackerman writhe about on the air hockey table.
Double Feature Suggestion
If I were going to slot this into a double feature, I’d pair it with Rhinestone.