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

Video review: "In Darkness"

"In Darkness" is one of the most depressing and sobering movies you'll ever see, and I mean that as a compliment.

This Polish film was nominated for a best foreign language film Oscar, and is absolutely deserving of that honor. It's the true story of a group of Jews who hid out in the sewers beneath their town to escape the Nazi regime, existing among the filth and squalor for more than a year with the help of a non-Jewish worker.

Well... "help" is a relative term. Socha is an inspector of the sewer lines, but is really a dabbler in various schemes to enrich his family's meager station. If that means stealing, or taking bribes, or extorting money, then so be it.

Robert Wieckiewicz plays Socha with conviction and a rough sort of purity. His blocky face and burly torso give the impression of a man not inclined to giving up easily.

When a group of Jews break through into the sewers from their ghetto prison, Socha is more than happy to take their money to keep them safe.

Over time, though, his selfish motives begin to soften, and he starts taking risks to keep the survivors safe -- even when the Jews' money runs out, and the endeavor begins to endanger his own family.

Some people may tire of troubling tales from World War II, but you could never exhaust all its stories of human grace and debasement. "In Darkness" has both, told with power and filthy majesty.

Video features are the same for DVD and Blu-ray editions, and are limited to just two featurettes -- but they're both eminently consequential.

The first is "An Evening with Agnieszka Holland," a 29-minute sit-down with the director, one of the greatest female filmmakers of all time, as she reflects on her long and amazing ("Europa, Europa") career.

The other is "In Light: A Conversation with Agnieszka Holland and Krystyna Chiger," in which the director talks with one of the actual Jews portrayed in the movie, who was just a child at the time. Needless to say, it's a very emotional encounter.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 3 stars

Reeling Backward: "Too Young the Hero" (1988)

I've occasionally made exceptions to the Reeling Backward column to include television movies, and I'm doing so again for a little-known drama from 1988 called "Too Young The Hero." I'm doing so not because it's particularly well done, but because the subject material is so compelling.

Rick Schroder stars as an underage seaman serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II. What makes the story of Calvin Graham so astonishing is that he had just turned 12 when he enlisted, fabricating a notarized letter from his mother stating that he was 17. Graham served honorably -- including earning two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star for heroic actions during the Battle of Guadalcanal -- before he was discovered, imprisoned and eventually discharged shortly after his 13th birthday.

He was quite possibly the youngest person to see combat in post-Civil War U.S. military history.

The TV movie shined a light on a not-too-well hidden secret of the American military during WWII: Many of the soldiers who fought and died in defense of their country were underage. We pride ourselves upon being a "civilized" nation when it comes to war -- as if there is such a thing -- but as a people we were more than happy to turn a blind eye to mere boys fighting and dying in uniform.

With a little research, I learn that estimates are that about 300 Americans age 16 or under died in the military during the war. With that, we can extrapolate approximately how many total boy soldiers there were.

Given that about 416,800 servicemen died out of nearly 16.6 million who served, the mortality rate for soldiers during the conflict was 2.5 percent. If the death rate was the same for underage soldiers, then that 300 dead indicates something like 12,000 enlisted men were secretly too young to serve.

In other words, about one out of every 1,385 soldiers who served during the war was concealing their age.

Even that excludes 17-year-old recruits, an age that still seems pretty appalling by modern standards. You can actually still enlist in some branches of the American military at age 17 with parental consent, although newer rules prohibit them from being stationed overseas. Nonetheless, approximately 60 17-year-old soldiers were believed to have served in Iraq and Afghanistan during 2003-04.

Schroder was a good choice to play Calvin, being about 17 at the time they started filming. Director Buzz Kulik shoots him in different ways so that he seems convincing as both a 12-year-old and as a 17-year-old. In uniform, he certainly looks like a pretty baby-faced seaman, but there were also probably a lot of 18-year-old recruits who looked much younger than they were. The officers and petty officers give him an extra look, but don't ask too many questions as he performs his duties well.

The story is told in flashback as Calvin sits and rots in a military brig, awaiting some sort of dispensation on his case, and he relates his tale to various fellow prisoners. The story concentrates largely on his efforts to get into the Navy, which are primarily economic in reason -- forced out of his mother's house by his abusive stepfather, Calvin lives with his brother on the streets for awhile until his sibling joins the Navy at age 14.

The teleplay by David J. Kinghorn is based on an unpublished manuscript by Graham and a ghost author, and contains a mix of factual events and Hollywood corn. The guards at the military prison are pretty brutal to Calvin, which seems suspicious as he tells everyone he meets that he's only 12. I don't know about you, but if a very young-looking prisoner claimed they were a kid, I'd probably spare the rod a bit  more than they do.

One scene is interesting, and probably authentic. Calvin sees the base dentist, who takes one look in his mouth and announces that he's only 12 -- because his adult molars haven't come in yet. "You've still got your baby teeth, kid!" The dentist orders him to take his file and report to the commander for discharge. Instead, while the guy's back is turned Calvin simply drops his file in the pile of other processed recruits. It's one of those ridiculously simplistic ploys that probably would have actually worked back then.

The battle scenes aboard the battleship U.S.S. South Dakota are about what you'd expect of a TV movie -- cheap-looking recreations paired together with grainy stock footage of actual WWII combat.

The last half-hour or so of the movie stumbles and fumbles, as Calvin grows more morose and attempts to contact his sister to help get him out, a strategy that eventually succeeds after she goes to the newspapers and blares out his story to the world. A very young Mary-Louise Parker plays the sister.

The TV movie actually played a role in Graham's real life. He rejoined the military as a Marine, but suffered serious injuries in a fall and was discharged. He spent decades fighting to have his dishonorable discharge from the Navy changed to an honorable one, something President Jimmy Carter did in 1978, restoring some of his medals in the process.

A few months after "Too Young the Hero" was televised, President Ronald Reagan restored the rest of Graham's medals and disability pay amounting to just under $5,000. That's a rather cheap price for the extraordinary story of someone who served so young.

2.5 stars out of four

Review: "Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted"

I have not been a fan of the "Madagascar" animated films, but the third one won me over. Perhaps it's a result of my becoming a parent, but I see now how the franchise's combination of kid-friendly boingy action, annoyingly catchy musical numbers and cutesy, simplistic life lessons is never dull to the kindergarten-and-down crowd.

After the packed screening I attended, literally dozens of tots were shaking their booties in the aisles as they imitated the tunes, especially a particularly egregious ditty called "Afro Circus," written and sung by Chris Rock. It consists of just those two words with a few "polka dot" throw-ins, but apparently to wee ones this is sublime comedic styling.

By all rights we should judge our entertainment by a higher standard than just keeping our offspring distracted for an hour and a half. But that's the yardstick by which "Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted" operates, and judged in those terms it's slickly effective.

As the story opens, the gang from the zoo finds themselves stuck in Africa, wanting to get back to their home in New York City. Their friends the penguins, who talk like spies out of the "Mad Men" era, have ditched them to play high rollers at the casinos in Monte Carlo, so that's where they follow.

The group dynamic remains virtually unchanged since the birth of the franchise. Alex the lion (Ben Stiller) is the ostensible leader, who puts on a brave face but has a neurotic craving for attention. His best bud Marty the zebra (Rock) is the goofy sidekick who sometimes yearns to be leader of the pack. Hypochondriac giraffe Melman (David Schwimmer) and groovy hippo Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith) have hooked up into an interspecies couple, the sheer mechanics of which beggars the imagination.

While in Monte Carlo they run afoul of Captain Chantel DuBois, head of the animal control unit. Voiced by Frances McDormand, DuBois makes for a dastardly Ahab-like villain who chases the gang all over the globe, jurisdiction be danged. With her hook-sharp nose, roomy hips and squared shoulders, DuBois is a formidable enemy.

Alex and the gang end up hiding out with the Circus Zaragoza, a motley collection of animals whose act has grown stale. Passing themselves off as fellow circus critters, the four friends resolve to add some Cirque du Soleil extravagance into the drab proceedings.

The new partners include Stefano, an exuberantly Italian sea lion (Martin Short) who dreams of being considered of average intelligence; Gia (Jessica Chastain), a feline trapeze artist who rests her hopes -- and affections -- on Alex; and Vitaly (an excellent Bryan Cranston), a Russian daredevil tiger and one-time star of the show, who got burned performing his signature act.

I should also mention Julien, the lemur king voiced by Sacha Baron Cohen, who's back to sing his "move it, move it" song again and supply some mildly suggestive humor. The computer-generated animation is a smash, particularly a couple of the big circus show numbers, which grow pleasantly psychedelic for awhile.

Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, who co-directed the first two movies, are joined by Conrad Vernon for a threesome that knows this material and its limitations, and focuses on what it can do best. Darnell also handles the screenplay, joined by indie filmmaker Noah Baumbach, best known for eclectic fare like "The Squid and the Whale" and "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou." (Someone need a paycheck?)

I'm not sure if I'd call "Madagascar 3" good bad movie-making, or bad good. Either way, I grudgingly admire the way it expertly achieves its own low expectations. This positive review is not so much a recommendation as a surrender.

3 stars out of four

Review: "Peace, Love & Misunderstanding"

"Peace, Love & Misunderstanding" is one of those movies where you genuinely enjoy hanging out with the characters, but the story unfolds with all the surprises of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. As time goes on, you find yourself liking the people you're watching less and less because you know what they're going to do long before they get around to doing it.

For a movie that professes to teach us to get past our insecurities and think more freely, it does so with astonishingly conventional storytelling tropes.

This dramedy is set in the town of Woodstock, which because of the eponymous concert holds mythic status among that portion of the Baby Boom generation that never grew up, and their fresher disciples.

Jane Fonda plays Grace, a sort of queen mother of the hippies, who eschews possessions but owns a magnificent piece of idyllic farm property outside of town. She grows (and smokes) a lot of pot, paints portraits of landscapes both geographical and anatomical, howls at the moon with fellow aging females, protests wars (any will do), bangs drums and pretty much every other stereotype of crunchy Earth Motherhood you can think of.

Her character is actually not the protagonist, but rather the flighty nexus around which other characters and their stories orbit.

Grace's daughter Diane (Catherine Keener), who supposedly was born at Woodstock, has rebelled against her mother's rebellion by becoming a conservative, uptight lawyer who hasn't seen her mother in 20 years. But Diane's own life is crumbling around her, with her husband (Kyle MacLachlan) curtly announcing one day that he wants a divorce.

She decides to trundle up her two teenage kids and head to mother's to ... well, apparently to form the basis of a screenplay. (Certainly no other logic applies. Who, in a time of extreme emotional duress, seeks to pile on more conflict?)

 Jake (Nat Wolff), still in high school, thinks life is a film, and he wants to be the director -- mainly because it allows him to shoot video of everyone instead of interacting with them. (He bristles when people call him a budding Spielberg, preferring to be associated with the more iconoclastic Werner Herzog.) Jake is painfully shy around girls, until he meets the winsome Tara (Marissa O'Donnell) at one of his grandmother's protests.

Zoe is the older child, already a student at Columbia, who has continued the rebellion streak in her family by becoming a vegetarian, peace-loving poetry lover. (In one of the movie's funnier bits, Jake complains that Zoe once had her Barbie dolls hold a war crimes tribunal for his G.I. Joes, and beheaded them.)

Zoe is more like her mother than she'd care to admit, presenting herself as open-minded but really rather dismissive of anyone who doesn't share her views. That includes Cole (Chance Crawford), the cute guy who works in a butcher shop (at least it's organic), smokes tobacco but not marijuana ("I like reality," he explains) and even hunts animals recreationally. Their relationship has a proverbial, almost slapsticky I-hate-you-until-the-moment-I-realize-I-love-you flavor.

Since both kiddies have exchanges of goo-goo eyes with a townie, Diane isn't about to be left out. Her match is Jude (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a songwriter/carpenter who takes her skinny-dipping, beckons her onstage to sing at a concert and tells her she needs to untie the balloon of her spirit from the sandbag of her inhibitions, or something.

(Somehow, I suspect this pitch would seem less dreamy if it were coming from a potbellied guy with rotten teeth instead of a handsomely grizzled Jeffrey Dean Morgan.)

Director Bruce Beresford shot his first short movie in the 1950s, and has made some gems along the way ("Tender Mercies," "Driving Miss Daisy"). He has a nice, light touch with his actors, and helps lend a sense that the characters are more fully drawn than they really are.

Screenwriters Christina Mengert and Joseph Muszynski, though, have a tendency to build their writing around individual scenes and particular lines of dialogue rather than develop a coherent whole. As a result, the “Peace, Love & Misunderstanding” registers as a collection of Important Moments rather than a fully realized story.

2.5 stars out of four

Video review: "John Carter"

I rise now in defense of "John Carter." Unfairly labeled as a disastrous flop among the worst in cinematic history, the action/fantasy was neither as much of a money-loser as the studio accountants would have you believe, or nearly as bad as naysayers claim.

Indeed, "John Carter" has made $272 million worldwide, exceeding its reported production budget of $250 million (which, granted, does not include marketing and distribution costs). Once video and TV receipts are counted up, the movie should break even or even pull in a modest profit.

As to quality, it's certainly an uneven picture with a dizzying array of characters and mythology to grasp. But it's also an ambitious package of eye candy and CGI action, the biggest spectacle this side of "Avatar."

Taylor Kitsch plays the title character, a regretful Civil War veteran who gets zapped to the surface of Mars, which in this vision based on the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is very much inhabited. In fact, a war between different factions of Martians has been raging for 1,000 years, and John Carter finds himself caught in the middle of it.

Because of the different gravities, Carter finds he has amazing powers, especially the ability to leap hundreds of feet into the air. In addition to the Martians, there is a four-armed race of nomads called Tharks, and a mysterious group, the Therns, who whisper into the ears of the Martians and give powerful weapons to those they favor.

Give "John Carter" a chance on video -- you'll find a fun flick that exceeds expectations.

Bonus features are quite good. The DVD comes with an audio commentary track by director Andrew Stanton ("Finding Nemo") and other filmmakers, and a featurette following the 100-year journey of Burroughs' pulp novels to the screen.

Upgrade to the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, and you add several other goodies. There are a number of deleted scenes with commentary; "Barsoom Bloopers;" "360 Degrees of John Carter," a look at the complicated filmmaking process of the one the movie's biggest scenes; and "Disney Second Screen," an interactive journal that extends the mythology of the movie.

Movie: 3 stars out of four
Extras: 3.5 stars

Reeling Backward: "Hondo" 1953)

"Hondo" isn't one of John Wayne's best Westerns, but it diverges in a few notable ways from the rest of his six-shooter work. In 1953 Wayne had the sort of clout that he could hand-pick his projects and directors, and this film was made through his own production company.

"Hondo" underwent a frame-by-frame restoration a few years ago, and is being released on Blu-ray tomorrow, June 5, in its first-ever widescreen presentation on video. Click the link below to find out more -- it also comes with a nice collection of extras.

Wayne & Co. found a short story by a then largely unknown Western writer, Louis L'Amour, and turned it into a screenplay stamped with Wayne's signature laconic style. James Edward Grant, a Wayne favorite, handled the script, a lean, atmospheric exercise coming in at a mere 84 minutes.

They used 3-D technology to film it, with some difficulty, and the film did relatively well at the box office. Interestingly, L'Amour penned a novelization of the movie that became a best seller, and did much to boost his career writing novels. Certainly, Hollywood took notice of him, with dozens of subsequent adaptations of his work.

But the most consequential thing about "Hondo" to me is that it's essentially a romantic drama that wears the dusty, fringed clothes of a Western. There are plenty of gunfights and chases -- using the all-too-popular 3-D technique of having stuff fly at the camera. But the heart of the story is about love and loyalty.

Geraldine Page, a bona fide Broadway star who used this movie to segue into a very successful film career, plays a prairie wife who falls in love with Honda Lane, a prototypical Wayne protagonist in many respects -- a hard, lonely man of action who lives by his own stubbornly independent credo.

Hondo's intro is pure Wayne myth-making. He stumbles in out of the desert, parched and horseless, bearing only a Winchester rifle, pistol, ammo belt and scruffy mongrel named Sam in tow. Sam is his companion but not his servant, and does what he likes, which is how  Hondo prefers it. His motto is to let other people do what they want to do, even if he knows it to be foolish or wrong, as this is the same courtesy he expects others to extend to himself.

Mrs. Lowe -- her name is credited as Angie, though I don't believe we ever hear her called that -- is a stubborn ranch wife, overseeing her rambunctious 6-year-old Johnny (Lee Aker). She repeatedly insists to Hondo that her husband is rounding up cattle and shortly to return, but they both know this to be a lie.

This have a confrontation where they make their feelings for each other plain. It includes Lowe making the extraordinary statement (for a Hollywood film in 1953) that she knows she's a homely woman. Hondo does not refuse this point, only stating that her inner qualities of steadfastness make her more appealing than any superficial traits.

Page is not of course anything in the same galaxy as homely, but director John Farrow (who won an Oscar for his screenplay of "Around the World in 80 Days") deliberately shoots her in a way to play up a dowdy sort of plainness.

Page, an early devotee of Method acting, does a yeoman's job with her part, which as written isn't terribly sophisticated. Her reactions and off-kilter line readings give her performance a showy sort of distinctiveness. It isn't a particularly authentic portrayal of  a 19th century ranch wife, but it does stand out from the drab sort womenfolk that generally populate these sorts of movies. Page received the first of eight Academy Award nominations for her turn.

(I should also note that L'Amour also received a nomination for best motion picture story, but L'Amour and the film's producers asked that it be withdrawn since it was based on a story that first appeared in a magazine, and the Academy complied. I'm not sure if there's any other occurrence like that in Oscar history.)

Frequent Wayne sidekick Ward Bond is around, playing a cantankerous ally named Buffalo Baker. James Arness, the future "Gunsmoke" star, has a small role as a Hondo antagonist who later saves his life, and is given Hondo's prize rifle as a reward. They have a brief fistfight, which is noteworthy for the fact that the looming 6-foot-7-inch Arness was one of the few actors who could make the 6'4" Wayne seem less intimidating.

"Hondo" has also been praised for a relatively progressive view of American Indians. Vittorio, the Apache chief (played by an Australian, Michael Pate, alas), is certainly fierce and bloodthirsty. But he has good cause -- Hondo himself notes that it's the whites who broke the treaty, not the Indians. Vittorio tells Mrs. Lowe that all his sons were killed by white raiders, yet he spares her and Johnny because he deems the young boy a brave little warrior for defending his mother from them.

Hondo himself is part Indian, living among the Apache for five years, took a squaw, and openly admires their ideals -- especially their hatred of lying. In the film's last moments, after the Apache have been driven off from their attack on settlers and the cavalry, Hondo notes that it's an end of a way of life, and a good one at that.

3 stars out of four