Six thoughts on "Rock of Ages"

We don't typically review movies we see on cable, but this one deserves some sort of response.  

1. We loved the candy-colored 1980s Sunset Strip vibe, especially a loving recreation of Tower Records circa 1987 (remember those walls of cassette tapes?).  But having spent many years commuting on Sunset Blvd, something felt off here.  The landmarks looked right, but the geography was all wrong.  Among other things, it looked like the movie was suggesting Sunset ran north and south instead of the proper east and west.  And stores separated by blocks looked here like they were sitting side by side.  So we did some research and found out... the filmmakers "recreated" Sunset Blvd... on a rundown intersection in Miami.  Fail.
2. This is a movie that needed to be 95 minutes, tops.  You get in, you get out.  No one gets hurt.  No way does this fluff deserve 2 hours and 10 minutes of your life. 
3. Alec Baldwin is horribly miscast.  Wow.
4. We're not sure why the whole Catherine Zeta-Jones subplot even existed.  You cut it out, what do you miss?  Maybe one nice gag at the end.
5. Why not play it more straight and dramatic?  The filmmakers layer on this goofy, half-winking campiness to everything (we think that's one reason why Paul Giamatti is so awful), probably cultivated by director Adam Shankman.  But it doesn't work.  It feels like no one had faith in the story and so decided to treat it like a lark.
6. The reason to see it is for the 1980s hair band songs, especially some clever "Glee"-style mashups.  We grew up with most of these songs, so it a lot of it was fun.  But while we might give a pass to including Quarterflash's bluesy "Harden My Heart," we have to draw the line at Starship's "We Built This City," a song that we think Blender magazine once called the worst song ever written.  It's a song about not selling out.  The irony runs thick.

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