Rock of Ages

Cecil says:  I kind of knew this was going to be about the music industry before I sat down to watch it, and the opening scene looked fairly normal at first: young teenage girl gets onto Greyhound bus in small town America.

Then she begins singing. And my first thought was: well, that's not very realistic, is it. But then the whole bus full of passengers takes up the chorus, and we're off...And it dawns on me: we've come to a musical. OH MY GOD. I wasn't ready for THAT!!

It's probably the first time I've been to a musical since Stayin' Alive in the 1970s. But you know what, this film grew on me as it found its way through the ups and downs of kids trying to make it on the music scene in LA.

Alec Baldwin was brilliant as the ageing night club owner; Russell Brand almost as good as his side-kick and partner (and I'm no fan of Russell Brand in real life, so that's quite something coming from me); and Catherine Zeta-Jones adding a bit of evil to the storyline, kind of like one of the villains in a Batman film ("we're gonna clean up this city", but in fact they're the evil ones).

And Tom Cruise does a pretty good job as the idiosyncratic mega-star, but I'm sure others will rave about him, so I'll leave it at that. My one question is: did he do his own singing or was it dubbed??

A feel-good film, but not the slightest bit thought-provoking. But, hey, for a bit of innocent fun, worth seeing.

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Bea says: Working too hard? Endless UK rain getting you down? Worries? Troubles? Go and see this film, it's the perfect antidote. You can disengage your brain and forget all about real life completely for a couple of hours, and you'll leave with a smile on your face.

I had read a review of Rock of Ages the week before we went to see it, and it was on the strength of that  review that I suggested it to musical-hating Cecil - I had been under the impression that it was the story of a struggling nightclub which was about to go bust and whose entire future hung on legendary ageing rocker Stacee Jaxx (played by an apparently 29 year old looking Tom Cruise), and featuring music from the 1970s. After the film, I told Cecil this and we both fell about laughing - had the reviewer actually seen the the film at all?

Rock of Ages is kind of about a struggling nightclub, and a gig by Stacee Jaxx (played by the very under-rated, and very funny Tom Cruise, who looks awesome, although not 29!), but it mostly about two young people trying to make it in Hollywood, like so many before them, and features a quite hard (although not heavy) rock soundtrack from the late 1980s - think Bon Jovi and Aerosmith, whose frontmen I gather Stacee Jaxx is based on. I was young in the late 1980s and I wasn't into this kind of music, or those kinds of men, at that time, but these were big hits and I remembered all but one, and Cruise was fantastic. Great fun.

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