Watch Rock of Ages Movies Online, Free Movie
The phrase “80's rock” calls certain things to mind: big voices playing big arenas singing big power ballads to big crowds with big hair. Bigness in all its forms, in other words, was the key to the era. Watch Rock of Ages Online And it’s this part of the 80s rock scene that the new musical ‘Rock of Ages‘ gets right - maybe a little too right.
This film is one towering tribute to excess. Clocking in at over two hours and featuring 900 songs (approximate), it feels like an entire decade of music crammed into one supremely excessive movie. They didn’t pour some sugar on this thing; they poured the whole friggin’ box. And then they lit the box on fire and threw up some mock-sinister devil horns.
The cast is so huge it makes ‘Nashville’ look like ‘Secret Honor.’ There’s the idealistic young bartender (Diego Boneta), who wants nothing more than to rock (ROCK!!). There’s the idealistic young waitress (Julianne Hough) who wants nothing more than to watch the young bartender rock. There’s the washed-up rock club owner (Alec Baldwin) and his sidekick (Russell Brand) who want nothing more than to own their bar and not pay their back taxes. There’s the difficult pop singer (Tom Cruise), out of inspiration, exploited by his oily manager (Paul Giamatti), lost in a fog of booze, who wants nothing more than to pull himself up from the bottom of Act 2 of his own personal episode of ‘Behind the Music.’ There’s the mousy Rolling Stone reporter (Malin Akerman) who wants nothing more than to interview Cruise’s Stacee Jaxx, and maybe also to have sex with him. There’s the mayor of Los Angeles (Bryan Cranston) who wants nothing more than to fool around with his secretary, and his wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who wants nothing more than to make you think of Tipper Gore and her anti-hip hop crusades whenever she’s onscreen. If you’re sick about reading about all these characters, imagine how I feel: I had to type it all.
That’s a lot of people and plotlines for a movie already, and that’s before you throw in wall-to-wall musical numbers. There were a lot of great, schlocky pop songs in the 80s, and ‘Rock of Ages’ features every single one. Some of the cast can sing, like Boneta and Hough (who deliver a version of Foreigner’s “Waiting For a Girl Like You” that’s sultrier than the original) and some of the cast is Alec Baldwin. The hits come at you fast and furious, sometimes two or three at a time in manic series mash-ups. None of the characters in ‘Rock of Ages’ do cocaine, but the film is shot and cut in such a frenzy of song and dance, you may wonder when the editors did.
The only real time the movie pauses for breath happens when Cruise’s Jaxx saunters in to the film in the second act. Unlike everybody else in ‘Rock of Ages,’ Cruise isn’t just milking the setting for kitschy laughs, maybe because as a genuine icon of the 80s, he’s got a little more respect for that period. He takes the thought of Jaxx like a washed-up has-been seriously - why is this so? Until ‘Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol’ some time ago, Cruise was beginning to look like a washed-up has-been himself. He brings pathos to his drunken stupor and honest-to-God star capacity to his musical performances. It’s as though Cruise saw Jaxx as his opportunity to go the Mickey Rourke route in ‘The Wrestler’ - to tackle his fame and his struggles and his weirdness head-on - the industry bold choice in a movie that introduces his character while he’s wearing leather chaps, a thong, along with a metallic codpiece in the shape of a demon.
Everything Cruise does has clear purpose: gestures, posture, tattoos, even his voice, perpetually raspy from an excessive amount of boozing and screaming. He oozes a lot carnality you realize why Catherine Zeta-Jones is so determined to destroy him (that is good, because the Sunset Strip of the remaining movie is so PG-13 cutesy it wouldn’t offend a nun). With long, probing stares, uncomfortable pauses, Cruise draws you directly into Jaxx’s world. He’s mesmerizing. He’s also in a completely different, if arguably superior, movie than the remaining cast.
‘Rock of Ages’ is dependant on a Broadway “jukebox musical,” in which a story is written to support a score of preexisting songs, as well as in bringing that musical to the screen, director Adam Shankman made simply no accommodations to audiences who might similar to their power ballads in slightly smaller doses. Everything here's big: both successes (a duet between Baldwin and Brand scores huge cheeky laughs, along with a sex scene between Cruise and Akerman) and also the failures (Boneta’s character’s serious problem - stage fright - is really a weird phobia for a guy who loves to sing “Juke Box Hero” in the center of a crowded Tower Records to possess).
Overlooking the crazily extensive soundtrack, it occurs to me that the majority of the titles describe the experience of watching this occasionally amusing but ultimately exhausting film: “Any Way You would like It,” “Here Time passes Again,” “Heaven Isn’t Too much Away,” and, obviously, “Don’t Stop Believin’” - particularly the line that goes “Oh the movie never ends, it is going so on as well as on as well as on
