"Monty Cristo" here.
How to introduce this...
Well, Eric's dad sent this to Harry, who forwarded it to me, "double dog daring" me to post it. Eric apparently reads AICN almost every day, as you'll see below. I can't stress enough that this is a real guy.
Eric (as his dad puts it) is gay, 18, and as you'll see below...has apparently never seen a Gene Kelly movie and thinks the Tim Burton PLANET OF THE APES is "that old PLANET OF THE APES". Also, he has strippers as friends.
Hi, this is Eric Felderstein. Thanks for letting me write to you about this, I go to your site almost every day.
So, we went to see this movie at Lincoln Center and the director, Adam Shankman, talked. He was pretty funny. He talked about meeting Tom Cruise at some event and how Tom Cruise loved Hairspray and in his mind while TC is talking he’s going “I’m talking to Tom Cruise and he loved my movie!” Then he wanted to make Rock of Ages (I guess it was a play from what he said) and called TC, who was totally happy that someone wanted to make a musical with him. So Shankman brought him and found out the guy has opera singers in his family and has a range of four octaves, which rocked, so to speak. Then Adam proudly told us he was gay, I forget why, and showed us his wedding ring and we all cheered (so am I). Then he told us he was coming to see EVERY Gene Kelly movie when they show them here in two weeks. Hmm Gene Kelly, note to self, I’ve never seen one so maybe I’ll go.
Oh, and he took a picture of the audience from the stage and texted it to Tom Cruise!! Onstage. I have to admit that was cool. Tom Cruise has a picture of me and my Dad making devil signs on his phone tonight. Don’t you delete me Tom Cruise!!! Or I will HATE you!
So then the movie started and...well. See, this movie is for people who think lame 80s dinosaur stadium rock is cool or funny, and I’m juuuust not one of those people. So when the movie has the lead hero get trapped in a boy band -- so NOT rock and roll, and it’s supposed to be funny because, like our rock doesn’t suck and your gay-ish boy band music does, I thought, no, your music sucks just as bad. It’s just as bad as the boy band. You both seriously suck. So that didn’t work for me. When I listen to 80s music, which isn’t much, I listen either to Donna Summers or to Talking Heads, B-52s, Blondie, you know, real club music, not lame Top 100 rock. (Note, my dad loved it, college years).
That said, Miss Tom Cruise is really good as the lead singer who is ALL about the sex. His performance is good and he can sing BUT may I be just a little bitchy here and say the reason they had to have him stand next to a monkey named Hey, Man was that someone could have even less hips and be shorter than he was!! I mean the guy is like 50, isn’t he?! And he has that fifty pasty white skin and no hips. Doesn’t look like sex to me. But the people I felt sorry for were the ones who had to catch fat old Alec Baldwin when he threw his fat old self off the stage into the audiences hands. Russell Brand was the only guy there who looked (totally hot) and who had the right body type.
All the girls showed their tits and ass and did the usual girl things around rock stars, having sex with them, dancing on stripper poles, blowing, or trying to blow, the rock stars. Katherine Zeta Jones and her heavy pancake makeup looked normal when she was dressed up and like an old dyke when she was dyked out in motorcycle leather.
Funny when [SPOILER DELETED] and [SPOILER DELETED] fall in love and, as something of an expert, I totally believed it.
The girl who was playing the Rolling Stone reporter looked a real stripper playing a fake Rolling Stone reporter. Honey, glasses don’t make EVERYBODY look intelligent. Sometimes they just look like nearsighted sluts-in-waiting.
It’s not like the story was much, it was just a standard musical story so they could get all these songs together and whenever it tried to be funny, whatever, it was just so obvious.
Oh, the guy who was in that old Planet of the Apes, have to look it up, there it is, Paul Giamatti was high-larious and evil but they don’t let him sing much and you’re pretty not sorry about that.
So sorry this wasn’t more positive. Fat 50 year old guys in a movie with bad old music, a little musical plot, music I don’t like, making fun of strippers, who are some of my friends, and boy band music I don’t like just as much as I don't like bad rock.
DON'T DELETE MY PICTURE, TOM CRUISE!!!
And that was Eric, folks. Even though I don't think we have similar taste, I love him already and want him to send more reviews. Next time, Eric, give us a code name to use for you.
As an old-school musical nut, I've never been a fan of jukebox musicals like ROCK OF AGES personally, but the combination of Adam Shankman, "fat 50 year olds" I like watching, and hair music from the 80's really has me curious. It also makes me BADLY want to go sing karaoke afterward.
Are you folks looking forward to ROCK OF AGES?
UPDATE:
A few Talkbackers have asked why it's so important to point out Eric's sexual orientation, and the simple answer is that it's how he was positioned in the email forward from his dad, which I found kinda weird in the first place, and how he continued to emphasize his self-identity. More power to him. Simply mentioning it as his father had brought on a couple calls of bullying or homophobia on my part. Nothing could be further from the case. He also wasn't assigned as a novelty or anything, we just got an email forward from his dad.
Eric himself identifies his orientation in the article, and as we're all now used to in the cesspool that is the Talkbacks, sexual identification is rabidly discussed/argued/insulted on this site on a daily basis. His repeated referencing of it is something that other stripes of geeks do too. "I'm this race/gender/type of geek". As much as many of us hate to be labeled, we try to self-label to head off bullying or bigotry at the pass.
I don't endorse the negative schoolyard-style discourse that has been part of the below Talkbacks, but that's how the Talkbacks simply are at the moment. I hope that eventually changes to something a bit more civil, even though my very posting of this could easily be construed as stirring the hornet's nest.
Part of my interest in posting Eric's review was in what I assumed would be (and has proven to be) the lively Talkback response. Just because his reaction to the movie has a generous amount of ignorance and inexperience loaded into it, and that many (myself included) aren't inclined to put much weight into his assessment as a result, I thought the presence of this post on the site and the ensuing discussion would be interesting. His thoughts aren't what they are simply because he's young or gay. His feelings about the film are drawn from having no strong attachment to the source material & music, the actors involved, or really any piece of what makes the movie what it is. He says so in the review: none of these pieces are part of things he likes, and it wasn't good enough on its own (in his estimation) for him to see past that. All that said, I found it tremendously entertaining.
That said, I think there are many people out there of thissame mindset who aren't necessarily young or gay or even part of a geek sub-set that would be inclined to be for or against a jukebox musical full of hair band songs.
The thing I like most about Eric isn't the 98% of this thing that reads as willfully ignorant and clever for clever's sake, but rather, the bit where he mentions wanting to go to the Gene Kelly retrospective. Snarky, passively dismissive, and ignorant as he may very well be about ROCK OF AGES, he's got that desire to learn more and expand his horizons. That is my favorite bit of the review. I think that provided he goes, those Gene Kelly movies may just change his life. I know that some of them changed mine at different points in my life. They may not change his perspective on ROCK OF AGES, which could be no good for all I know (though I'm giving it a shot opening weekend).
We used to publish a lot more reader reviews and perspectives on things here: young and old regardless of actual age, and diverse as could be. I wish we'd get back to doing more of that. Regardless of how erudite you think you may be, if you have something you want to send in, SEND IT. Don't just post it in the Talkbacks. There are tons of those and it may get missed. Create a code name if you wish, but think to include your real name like Eric did.
END UPDATE
