Review: "Dirty Grandpa"

Well, he's certainly dirty alright.

If you were expecting the presence of acclaimed actor Robert De Niro to having a taming effect on this raunch-and-roll party, think again. De Niro plays a hard-partying gramps who has just lost his wife of 40 years, and decamps to Florida with his grandson to let his inner 21-year-old out.

On her deathbed, he insists, she told him to get out there and live the life he wants, and now he's carrying through on that pledge -- and not even waiting until her body is cold to do it.

De Niro plays Dick Kelly, a retired Army guy who, by his own acknowledgement, was an awful father. His son (Dermot Mulroney) turned into an uptight jerk, and now third generation Kelly Jason (Zac Efron) is following in his footsteps. He's already a junior associate in his dad's corporate law firm, more concerned with forming LLCs and getting married to a controlling rich witch (Julianne Hough) than pursuing his dreams.

Protesting the suspension of his driver's license due to cataracts, Dick shames Jason into driving him from Atlanta down to Boca Raton, with a few "stops" along the way. They play golf, chase some girls, head to Daytona for spring break, chase more girls, drink a lot, drug a lot, get into some fights and maybe, just maybe, learn some life lessons.

If it sounds like a goofball bender, a young-meets-old version of "The Hangover," that's because it is. Director Dan Mazer and script man John Phillips keep things loose and fast-paced. It may be 102 minutes of debauchery, but it's got just a smidgen of class.

Along the way they hook up with a threesome of hotties: Shadia (Zoey Deutch), who shared a freshman photography class with Jason and is interested in another exposure; Lenore (Aubrey Plaza), a slutty girl with a thing for oldsters; and Bradley (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman), a fabulous gay black man who can't tell if the crass grandpa is pulling his leg or not.

Both De Niro and Efron show off a considerable amount of skin in the movie, proving that the 72-year-old screen legend still has a body of iron, and that the 28-year-old Efron is a frequent patron at the hair waxing salon. There's also a bed-sharing scene that ups the ante from a similar one in "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" -- though with some stunt, uh, body parts, methinks.

One of the running jokes is how lax law enforcement is in Florida. Jason Mantzoukas plays Tan Pam, who runs a souvenir shop that's just a front for his drug operation. He fires pistols randomly -- "This entire state is licensed as a gun range!" -- and has endeared himself to the local cops so much that they pat him on the head and tell him to run along whenever he does something bad, like selling meth to 8th-graders.

It's a weird kabob of a movie, one bite tasty and the next one foul, though there's probably enough good to recommend if you're into this sort of thing. Just know what you're getting: this grandfather isn't cantankerous, he's one crude dude.

Review: "Safe Haven"

It's hard to believe that just a few years ago the phrase "based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks" would've produced only shrugs from most moviegoers. But then "The Notebook" blew up in 2004, making of stars out of Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and creating a burning desire in Hollywood to adapt other books from Sparks' Southern-fried romantic/drama oeuvre.

But here's the thing: there hasn't really been a good movie based on his material since. "Nights in Rodanthe" disappeared without a trace. "Dear John" was a dirge-like bummer, and "The Last Song" and "The Lucky One" were ill-fated coming-of-age projects for tween stars Miley Cyrus and Zac Efron.

Critics hated them, but they had respectable box office tallies for low-budget films, so along comes "Safe Haven" as the next in the Sparks line.

Like "Dear John" it was directed by Lasse Hallström, thrice an Oscar nominee and the rare European filmmaker who seems to embrace the more saccharine aspects of Hollywood moviemaking, at his own peril.

The result is a great-looking, sun-dappled story about life on the North Carolina coast that's also devoid of much dramatic or emotional heft.

It's about a woman on the run, hiding out from the law after being accused of a brutal, bloody murder. Needless to say, she falls in love with a local dreamboat, starts putting down roots and feeling secure before her haunted past shows up on her adopted doorstep.

A big part of the movie's problem is Julianne Hough in the lead role. The "Dancing with the Stars" star has mostly done song-and-dance pictures like "Footloose" and "Rock of Ages," and simply doesn't possess the sort of dramatic acting tools for a part like this.

We know from the get-go that Katie was an abused woman who went on the lam after stabbing her attacker, so the screenplay (by Leslie Bohem and Dana Stevens) requires her to go through some pretty major transformations -- from self-doubting victim to new gal in town coming out of her shell to strong, resourceful woman ready to take the next steps in life.

But Hough's placid exterior is more shy cheerleader than woman rising up.

Josh Duhamel is better as Alex, who runs Ryan's Port Market in Southport, N.C. He's a young single dad raising two moppets after cancer took his wife. He's been keeping his head down, he says, just trying to make a life for his kids, and when he falls for Katie it's like lifting his head up again for the first time.

Noah Lomax plays Josh, who's on the cusp of adolescence and testing his dad, the self-appointed protector of his mother's memory. Mimi Kirkland as Lexie reaches a level of adorableness heretofore unseen in cinematic children.

Katie gets a waitressing job at Ivan's, the local seafood shack, and begins a tenuous friendship with her neighbor Jo (Cobie Smulders). When Alex, noticing that Katie trudges daily from her remote cottage to the shoreline every day, gives her an old bicycle, it's Jo who instructs her that refusing gifts south of the Mason-Dixon line is a no-no -- particularly not from wounded widowers who somehow find the time to keep their abs sculpted.

The story keeps shifting back to Tierney (a creepily effective David Lyons), the Boston detective who treats tracking down Katie as much more than a standard domestic murder case. "Nobody is innocent," he insists. "We bring 'em in, and the other guy sorts 'em out."

Things lead to a fairly predictable place, and an outcome that is never truly in doubt. Naysayers may dismiss Sparks' books as pap for undiscriminating mass consumption, but I think there's the bones of a good story in "Safe Haven." It just needed a different cast and crew to find it.

2 stars out of four

Review: "Rock of Ages"

"Rock of Ages" is a soundtrack with a visual component tacked on. It's not so much a musical movie as music, with a movie.

Based on a Broadway show, "Rock of Ages" is virtually non-stop singing. The story is told through the lyrics and tunes of 1980s rock hits, sometimes intermixed with each other. Occasionally the characters will cease singing long enough for a few lines of dialogue -- but even then there's a beat going in the background, and you know the talkie part is just setting up the next number.

The experience of watching it is akin to listening to a runaway jukebox stuck in the 1970s and '80s, except the voices are replaced by those of actors who can't sing as well as the original artists.

Not that some of them aren't good, and occasionally really good. Among the latter is Tom Cruise as Stacee Jaxx, a wastrel rock god who's part Iggy Pop, a little bit Axl Rose and a smidge of Brett Michaels (at least the hat). Cruise's pipes are surprisingly good, doing an impressive rendition of the keening wail beloved in that era.

In fact, Cruise is the best thing in the show. It's a shrewdly comedic performance, part celebration of '80s rock excesses but with a heavily ladling of satire. One scene where he seduces a Rolling Stone reporter (Malin Akerman) is the movie's rollicking high point.

Even though it's technically a supporting part, Cruise steals every scene he's in, and whenever Jaxx disappears for too long the film deflates.

Certainly the main characters are dreary. Julianne Hough and Diego Boneta play Sherrie and Drew, youngsters who dream of making it big in the music biz, but end up working at the fictional Bourbon Room in Los Angeles. Of course, it's only a matter of time before they get to take the stage themselves.

Neither actor is a particularly adept singer, and Hough has one of those pinched little-girl voices that sounds like she's singing through a keyhole, a la Britney Spears. She even imitates Spears' colossally annoying affection of starting every stanza with a little croaky sound.

Sherrie is the prototypical small-town girl from Tulsa, living in a lonely world, and Drew is a city boy, so of course their signature song is "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey, a band that gets a heavy rotation throughout the movie. Other tunes include ones by Styx, Bon Jovi, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Poison and other acts Generation X-ers like myself grew up on.

I find it amusing that back in the actual '80s, these songs were disdainfully described by our elders and betters as representing the nadir of rock 'n' roll, a glammed-up shadow of the good ol' days. And now they're being held up as paragons of the genre.

I take note that in the time this story is set, 1987, the '50s were seen as the heyday. No doubt in 25 years today's Millennials will be middle-aged sell-outs looking back on the halcyon days of Lady Gaga and Kei$ha, God help us.

Alec Baldwin plays Dennis, the owner of the Bourbon, which has rock 'n' roll soaked into its timbers but is perpetually on the verge of going out of business. It's being helped in that regard by the new mayor (Bryan Cranston) and his wife Patricia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who's leading a Tipper Gore-esque crusade against smutty rock 'n' roll. Of course, she does so via singing and dancing, and is ultimately and unsurprisingly revealed to be a former Stacee Jaxx groupie.

Russell Brand plays Lonny, Dennis's right-hand rocker, and they share a romantic musical interlude that manages to be funny without being homophobic. Paul Giamatti is agreeably sleazy as Jaxx's mercenary agent, who robs the Bourbon of the take from Stacee's farewell concert.

Mary J. Blige, the only real singer in the mix, has a nice turn as the manager of a strip club where Sherrie ends up during her inevitable down-and-out phase. Drew's pit of despair is much funnier, as he gets recruited into a pop boy band, complete with rainbow-colored gangsta preppy outfits.

Director Adam Shankman does much the same thing with "Rock of Ages" he did several years ago with "Hairspray," which was sort of a 1960s version of this. He supplies a lot of energy and color, but the whirlwind winds up being more exhausting than invigorating.

At 123 minutes, screenwriters Allan Loeb, Justin Theroux and Chris D'Arienzo (based on the musical book by D'Arienzo) seemed to have a hard time knowing when to quit while they were ahead. Since the story is built entirely around songs, cutting it down would've meant eliminating tunes, and one gets the sense the filmmakers spent so much energy getting the rights to the songs they couldn't bring themselves to lop a couple out.

"Rock of Ages" has a few genuine thrills, most of them centering around Cruise's fun, freewheeling turn as Stacee Jaxx. Most of the time, though, it feels like an iPod stuck in shuffle mode.

2 stars out of four