movies

Baldwin and Crusie in Rock of Ages. (David James)

Rock of Ages is a Head (Against Wall) Banger

As rock musicals go, Rock of Ages can’t go fast enough. This sloppy freak show is two minutes shy of two solid hours of screaming swill, without a shred of freshness, insight, cleverness or coherence to be detected within a two-mile radius. It’s based on a noisy Broadway jukebox joke that was never much to write home about in the first place, but it still had a soupçon of humor and banal charm, both of which are bewilderingly missing on the screen. The fact that the show is still running testifies to the confounding disregard for taste and intelligence rampant among today’s mass-market audiences. I haven’t seen a movie this bad since Battlefield Earth and Howard the Duck. Read More