Our requisite antagonist is the mayor's wife, Patricia Whitmore (Catherine Zeta-Jones) she sees the Bourbon as the manifestation of the city's moral rot, clouding the minds of the young with "the" metal music, and her top agenda is to see the place shut down.Īlthough having three different stories intertwined with each other, it isn't a complicated plot to follow. But every cloud has a silver lining, and here it seems Arsenal will play its last gig there before Jaxx goes solo, making a big payday for the club, as long as Jaxx's agent, Paul Gill (Paul Giamatti), plays fair. With the Bourbon itself, owner Dennis Dupree (Alec Baldwin) and his technician Lonny (Russell Brand) have fallen on hard times. With nothing to her name, Drew persuades Sherrie to find work at The Bourbon Room, a legendary club on the LA Strip, its claim to fame that of giving rock idol Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise) and his band, Arsenal, their first gig. It should have you singing along to a whole host of recognizable hits that have stood the test of time.īased on the hit Broadway show, the movie follows wannabe singers Sherrie (Julianne Hough) and Drew (Diego Boneta), who meet just after Sherri arrives in town and are promptly mugged. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to raw edge of 1980's rock music, mixed liberally with the associated lingo, leads to a fun-packed, two hours of movie fun in the form of Rock of Ages. If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15.
We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives.
We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. Grade: C (Rated PG-13 for sexual content, suggestive dancing, some heavy drinking, and language.)Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: Warning: If you have an allergic reaction to songs like “Take Me Home Tonight” and “I Want to Know What Love Is,” do not venture within 10 miles of this movie. Paul Giamatti, as Jaxx’s sleazoid manager, does his utmost to give a real performance amid all the retro ridiculousness. Cruise is always at his best when he’s playing against type (in this case, against his own movie-star glam image). (We’re supposed to think he deserves better.) What little scenery there is to steal is pilfered by Alec Baldwin as a Sunset Strip rock club owner and Tom Cruise as the strung-out rock idol Stacee Jaxx. Set in 1987, it features two leads of surpassing blandness, Julianne Hough’s Sherrie, newly arrived from Tulsa, Okla., to make it in Hollywood as a singer, and Diego Boneta’s Drew, an aspiring rocker who, all too fittingly, ends up in a boy band. However you play up this material – as camp, melodrama, anthem, or goof – it sags under the weight of its lightweight pretensions. The hard-rock, heavy-metal retro musical “Rock of Ages” might seem like a movie natural, but Adam Shankman (whose “ Hairspray” was a delight) never locates the right tone.
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