Cruise stakes image on Rock of Ages

It is one of those interesting coincidences where a Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise and a Broadway star MiG Ayesa would fight it out with the same material, Rock of Ages, showing at exactly the same dates in Manila. Cruise is a world famous multi-awarded Hollywood film actor-producer whose outspoken and, at times, peculiar behavior has caused him to straddle the ranks of “most popular” to “most hated” in the course of his career. Pushing, 50, Cruise has now staked his reputation on live singing for the first time as the over-the-hill rocker Stacee Jaxx, a decision typical of the many such options he has chosen in his life.

We rushed to the theatre prepared for a fun musical, not too many critics enjoyed. All the audience was interested in was how Cruise fared in his singing. On a scale of one to 10, we would state eight, to Mary J. Blige’s 10 playing Justice Charlier, owner of The Venus Club (New York Undercover TV series, Prison Song film)… Quite familiar with some of Cruise’s movies like Top Gun, Born on the Fourth of July, The Last Samurai, Mission Impossible, it seemed to us that the actor was simply raring to play a rock star. We had read somewhere that his forebears had been opera singers. This could have pushed him to train for four months to sing convincingly.   

The film is an adaptation of the 2006 Chris D’Arienzo jukebox comedy rock musical hit on Broadway with a romance told through the hits of Jon Bon Jovi, Guns n’ Roses, Def Leppard, Foreigner, Journey, Poison, Europe, Twisted Sister, Night Ranger, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Whitesnake, and others.

The critics love to hate Rock of Ages. The Associated Press feels there’s too much Foreigner on the soundtrack. No one ever needs to hear Starship’s We Built This City played in public and Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin has grown tiresome with its inclusion in Glee and The Sopranos.

With everyone speaking of Stacee when the motion picture opens, he can’t help but be impressive by the time he shows up, states Nick Pinkerton. Although he finds the “dissolute rock-god gags old hat…Cruise is a dynamic, kabuki-esque, full-body performer and he gives Stacee something between the boozy silverback swagger of The Doors’ Jim Morrison and Glenn Danzig’s (varied punk rock, heavy metal, industrial, blues, classical) armored-car physical presence.”

From a J. Miller of LOUD Media, “Great performances by Alec Baldwin and Paul Giamatti and that’s about it.”

Sandy Schaefer reviewing the trailer is convinced “the film is more about selling the movie’s huge personalities, colorful ’80s atmosphere, and new thematic spins on cherished tunes that were all the rage during the ’70s and ’80s… and offering an early sample of Cruise’s rock music singing capabilities — and to be fair, he doesn’t sound half-bad.”

On opening day at the Shangri-La, the attendance was grim. This makes us even more curious to watch the play on which it was based.

Ramdom News:


Details :
Submited at Sunday, June 17th, 2012 at 4:00 pm on music by Gillan
Comment RSS 2.0 - leave a comment - trackback