To Shankman, the period - 1987 - was all bad hair and flicking tongues.
#Will there be a new rock of ages movie movie
After that, the movie is pretty much a debacle. The number hints at the community that rock ‘n roll could forge in a group of strangers. and the other passengers join in on the chorus. Shankman, who directed the perky film adaptation of Hairspray and says he grew up with the Whiskey and the Tower Records store on Sunset as his twin cathedrals, expends his one decent idea for visualizing the music in the first scene: when the Oklahoma refugee Sherrie Christian (Julianne Hough, from the recent Footloose remake) starts singing Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” on a bus to L.A. (READ: Corliss on Mamma Mia!and The Jersey Boys)Įven for those too young or too old for ’80s rock - one teen I know thinks Dee Snider’s band was called Hitler’s Sister - might enjoy the spectacle of Rock of Ages, if the movie’s energy didn’t seem so desperate and cynical. Seeing the show was like returning to your high school prom without having to meet all the cool dudes who’d devolved into fat cats. Music that once exuded the musk of danger and rebellion now provided a soothing flashback for folks in their 50s with long memories and expense accounts. Rock of Ages, which opened on Broadway three years ago and is still running, fit this trend of nostalgic appropriation. Producers found it easier simply to lift song catalogs from individual groups (ABBA’s Mamma Mia!, The Four Season’s The Jersey Boys) or from a particular subgenre (the Sun Records sound for Million Dollar Quartet, ’70s-’80s concert rock for Priscilla Queen of the Desert). In the ’70s, two musicals - Grease and The Rocky Horror Show - tapped the sounds of proto-rock, but even these faux-oldies, or foldies, took decades to find a descendant (the 2002 fake-’60s Hairspray).
The result was that, as the years passed, and rock fans got old and rich enough to patronize Broadway, there were few old shows to revive for them. (READ: Corliss on the Encores! 2001 revival of Hair) Broadway musicals went the serioso route, and rarely generated songs anyone under 50 would want to remember. Hair, the “love-rock musical” that spawned four top-five hits when it landed on the Great White Way in 1968, might have restored the connection, but that was a fluke. For three decades, from the 1920s through the ’50s, Broadway songs were top-of-the-charts hits then Elvis and his kin sent radio music into the mixed-race vernacular, while Broadway composers hewed to the old models, or went artsy à la Stephen Sondheim. One of the minor tragedies of Broadway in the past half-century is that it almost never tapped into the pop music of the rock ‘n roll era. Though it has moments where it rises to fun-awful status, with a hideous giddiness that turns moviegoers into rubbernecking motorists at a crash site, it’s mostly just awful. If the film were a Broadway-bound show, it would have closed out of town. But director Adam Shankman’s movie - based on Chris D’Arienzo’s Broadway musical that was filled with ’80s anthems and set in the teeming West Hollywood rock scene of the Whiskey a Go Go nightclub (here called the Bourbon) - is so willfully bad that not even Cruise’s valiant CPR can help.
An icon and parody of the preening pop star, he might be mad - his roadie says, “He just told me to turn the radio off… the radio in his head” - or simply weary of inhabiting the lurid cartoon that is Stacee Jaxx.Īs played with an awesomely deranged intensity by Tom Cruise, Stacee has the creepy-sexy pulse that might have given Rock of Ages some cinematic life. Sporting an autobiography of body tattoos (pistols at his hips, a flying bat on his upper back), Jaxx struts like a centaur with the back end cut off and admits emotional intimacy to no creature but his pet baboon. Front man for the ’80s hair-metal band Arsenal, he has plunged deep into the pool of his legend and hit bottom. Follow fear the aging rock god Stacee Jaxx.
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