It was my thirtieth birthday last Wednesday, and I was determined to take myself and the kidlet out and do A Thing during the day instead of sitting around incessantly shaking a stuffed robot at her and singing songs about Masterchef contestants. Unfortunately, the only option was the terrible-looking Rock of Ages (I’ve already done 1987 once, and that was enough.) But after a scare where we thought the babes in arms movie option was instead Adam Sandler laugh-an-hour fest That’s My Boy, suddenly it seemed like a perfectly serviceable film, and, thanks to a lovely new mother-type friend who also jumped at the chance to go to the flicks during daytime hours, off we went to see it with our best perms and midriff-baring band t-shirts. (Haha I’m kidding, my stomach looks like I was in the last Freddy Kreuger movie.)
Peachy blonde bubble of enthusiasm Sherrie (Julianne Hough) arrives in Hollywood from the town of Dreamsquasher USA and within minutes is mugged then saved by mop of curly hair Drew (Diego Boneta), an employee of the famed Bourbon Room who also kindly nabs her a job there. Both are musicians, and the Bourbon Room is a haven for rock music lovers after giving Stacee Jaxx (Tom Cruise, channelling Axl Rose et al) his big break. But the Room is in trouble, with owner Dennis Dupree (Alec Baldwin, greying) and his cohort Lonny (Russell Brand as the only person who didn’t need a wig) running out of cash and fame. In the meantime, Mayor Whitmore’s wife Patricia (Catherine Zeta-Jones, underused) is on a mission to destroy rock music because sex, Stacee is going through a career crisis, and Drew and Sherrie’s fledging relationship is threatened by Drew’s shot at fame. And all this is conveyed through songs you probably know the words to.
While the music generally grated on me, it was a pretty entertaining film, relentless in its mashed-up tunes and enthusiastic actors. Tom Cruise is a good choice as Stacee, who is a tool, so you don’t have to force yourself to get behind him. He’s all excess, big-haired groupies and dragon-head codpieces, swanning about in a grotesque manner that will make you squirm and laugh and squirm. The singers are all passable to great, with Sherrie and Drew smiley endearing kids you want to see live happily ever after. The highlight, however, is the surprisingly touching relationship between Dennis and Lonny, two meathead looking dudes harbouring a lot of secret Feelings. The lowlight, though, is the other two hours of the movie.
Rock of Ages is terrible. They should have just done a live covers concert and be done with it, because the plot is so thin on the ground I’m not sure why they bothered. One or two lines of dialogue are in between each song and are so earnest and ridiculous that you’ll sigh and wish for the next dose of Bon Jovi. There are decade errors like the hipster-style underpants worn by Malin Ackerman’s Rolling Stone journalist Constance Sack, who also suffers from a painful dose of cliché when she turns up in glasses and a hairclip and is only attractive, apparently, after she loses both. Patricia’s plan to demolish rock is never a threat, not even for a moment, and everyone seems to know it, making Zeta-Jones a pointless addition who also has the most redundant song and dance routine in a rendition of Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” that looks like it’s been choreographed by someone who never read the screenplay to see what was going on. (Lucky them.) Sherrie, down and out after leaving the Bourbon Room, stalks angrily out of a job at a diner when someone slaps her on the ass, only to go directly into a waitressing job at a strip club and then be told by boss Justice (Mary J Blige, talented but another unnecessary part) that the only way to get respect is to become a pole dancer. (Obviously pole dancers and everyone in the sex industry deserve respect, but deserving more than a waitress is a bizarre concept and has no relation to the rest of the movie anyway. I was tuning out completely by this point.) I also dislike the way the movie mocks the late-eighties angular-primary-colours pop that was blooming on the radio—anyone who makes fun of another’s musical taste is a jerk. As Stacee Jaxx’s agent, Paul Gill (Paul Giamatti) is such a complete idiot that I assumed he deliberately wanted to be broke and despised. You know what, I actually have a lot of rage for this movie, I think I have to stop before I set my keyboard on fire.
An adequate movie that you’ll enjoy more if you’re a fan of cock rock. If you’re not, watch it with a sarcastic friend for much more fun. I give it 500 out of 1987 years.
Regular readers of this blog will have heard me frequently sigh over my secret boyfriends including, but not limited to: David Tennant, Antonio Banderas, Rupert Grint, and Robert Rodriguez. One thing I have not had until today has been a secret girlfriend. Bernadette Robinson has completely changed that and is now a contender for my heart.
Songs for Nobodies was the final play for our final Melbourne Theatre Company subscription, as the prices for subs when you’re thirty or older become far too expensive. (I hold Chris entirely to blame; I don’t turn thirty for another year, but refuse to see plays by myself because then who will I be able to whisper “they were on the telly!” to?) Fittingly, we saw our first and last plays in the same theatre—the Fairfax, in the Arts Centre—and we were also running late, as we were for our first play. Here I should mention how lovely MTC staff are when you turn up late, wracked with guilt and apologetic—they tell you how long until you can enter, set you up in a chair, and turn on a television that fuzzily broadcasts the play as it is performed. The people we had to clamber in front of were less excited, but hey guys, YOU try turning right in our car at the moment: it’s a fine and stupid art.
Songs for Nobodies follows the story of five separate women: the first, a woman who meets Judy Garland (this is the bit we arrived late for, so I am not as clear as I wish I was); an American usher glowing after her experience with Patsy Cline; an New Yawk journalist setting up an interview with Billie Holiday; an English librarian recounting how Edith Piaf saved her father’s life; a young Irish woman working on a cruise ship packed with temperamental celebrities, including Maria Callas. In each story, the most notable tunes by those singers will also be performed along with a band and—while many of the tunes are not particularly high on my list of favourites because I have heard them so much during my life—listening to them performed six feet in front of you by an artist who gets them all absolutely pitch-perfect was one of the most amazing theatrical experiences I’ve had.
Without a performer of the calibre of Bernadette Robinson, this play would be nothing. But listening to her get every accent right, all while wearing the same sharp outfit, utilising the minimalist, slightly art-deco set, and becoming five completely different people—she is incredible. As the librarian, she looks austere, walks with her head held high and speaks in a clipped accent that is nothing less than convincing. As the Irish teenager, fresh out of a relationship with an “evil bastard...no, he isn’t a bastard, but he is evil”, she is all sass and and lopes around the stage, recounting her tale with delicious drama. And when she sings—oh—you’ve never heard anything like it. Or you have, because she sounds so much like the singers she’s emulating that the hairs raised up on my arms and I leaned forward in my chair, beaming at this woman who, moments before, had been an aspiring journalist nicknamed Too Junior Jones, and then suddenly became Billie Holiday, singing the always moving Strange Fruit. It really is something.
The play isn’t all singing, though, and the little snippets of existence we get from the women are of equal interest. They are funny, and smart, and appealing. When the librarian makes a crass joke with her beautiful voice you can’t help but giggle; when the usher accidentally walks in on Patsy Cline you are excited for her, meeting her idol. Bernadette Robinson is an absolute revelation—to me, anyway, as she is a well-known performer. Joanna Murray-Smith wrote the play for Bernadette, and it is hard to imagine anyone else in these roles, able to sing as five loved stars, and to act as five anonymous women whose lives were changed by them.
I didn’t even make any jokes in this review. That’s how blown away I was by this play. It took away my propensity to be ridiculous and filled that part of my brain with awe.
In summary: Exceeds Expectations and the perfect end to our subscription. I also want to know who styled Bernadette’s hair, because it was great. If I could complain about anything, it would be that it started on time so we missed the beginning. Damn efficient MTC.
The Songs for Nobodies season runs from November 5 to January 15, already having been extended, probably due to an excess of awesome.
As we waited impatiently in the queue at Hoyts Melbourne Central today to purchase our tickets for Bran Nue Dae, Chris asked me what the last Australian movie we’d seen was. After much contemplation, we drew a blank after the laugh-a-minute cheerfest The Proposition, which was such a long time ago in movie terms that I became quite astonished. Now, I’m not going to turn this into one of those insufferable lectures about How We Should All Go See Australian Movies Even If They Look Awful, because I don’t believe that to be true. But I was shocked to realise it had been so long since I’d last seen something Australian advertised and been actually excited to see it. And I was excited about Bran Nue Dae, even though it pains my spellcheck to say so.
Originally a stage musical first performed in the early nineties, Bran Nue Dae tells the story of Willie, a young man sent from his beloved Broome to boarding school in Perth, where he is training to be a priest. But in leaving behind the beautiful Rosie, played by one of Australian Idol’s few credible alumni in Jessica Mauboy, he realises perhaps he doesn’t want to be a priest, but in fact wants to live in the glorious place he calls home and have a few 1960s-clothed smooches with Rosie in the sand dunes. His escape from school is hindered by the tracking by the school’s head, a German-toned and camp Geoffrey Rush with an expression sufficiently crazed by power and religion and the theft of Cherry Ripes.
It’s great fun, this movie, full of good rockin’ songs and great acting by Rocky McKenzie as the adorable Willie. Magda Szubanski gets high billing but is in the movie for about forty seconds in total, and really what credit there is should go to her fabulous and distracting cleavage. Other well-known stars are the eternally endearing Ernie Dingo; Deborah Mailman as an alarming character who takes Willie to a tourist attraction neither he nor you will ever forget; a red-eyed Tom Budge, who’s in pretty much every Australian movie/show of the past decade; Missy Higgins, as a fairly insufferable hippie who is happy to jump on every bandwagon that pootles by; and musical smoothie Dan Sultan as Willie’s love rival and someone who needs a slap upside the head. I loved Bran Nue Dae, no doubt; it’s one of the better modern stage-to-screen musicals I’ve seen. (I specify “modern” as I haven’t really seen that many pre-1980s musicals. Please don’t judge me too harshly.) Where the appalling redo of The Producers made no use of sets, this had lush landscapes, dusty roads and was a festival for the eyes.
There is a part of me that doesn’t want to criticise the movie at all. Perhaps I’m secretly an Australia-lover after all underneath this cynical, emo shell. But I must resist this patriotic streak. A movie doesn’t have to be flawless to be good. And Bran Nue Dae is not flawless.
I’m not sure if it’s the dubbing, or what, but some of the musical numbers feel pasted on top of the actual movie in respect to audio. With no background sounds to accompany it, you can never pretend that they’re just naturally bursting into song in the middle of a classroom or in a car; it feels like someone’s playing the CD and everyone’s miming, sometimes not that well. The obsession with head/mid shots meant that occasionally when people were dancing, you couldn’t see their feet, just their hands flailing about—the framing and editing made the dance numbers much milder than expected. Some of the characters were a little two-dimensional, like Dan Sultan’s evil Lester with his grand total of no redeeming features, and Rush’s ragey and racist Father Benedictus. The scenery, while great, could still have been expanded upon to include more outback shots. Still, for a musical, it didn’t feel too constrained in that respect.
Despite the awkward framing, I loved a scene on the back of a truck when a bunch of rawther attractive young Aboriginal men splash white paint over each other and dance to, unexpectedly, the song Zorba the Greek. Jessica Mauboy’s hopeful confusion lights up the screen, and she is beautiful. The movie doesn’t pretend there isn’t a grittier side of an otherwise idyllically portrayed Aboriginal life, with alcohol addiction playing a supporting role, but it’s supposed to be an upbeat, feelgood type movie and it achieves that. Apart from an awkward, squicky little subplot ending with a disrespectful man shacking up with someone who appears to have little respect for herself, and us supposed to cheer for it, the movie—with a big explosion of surprise reveal after surprise reveal—ends on a chirpy, singalong high on the track “There’s nothing I would rather be than to be an Aborigine”, which you’ll find yourself singing quietly along to with the rest of the audience. And by the end, you’ll probably sincerely wish you were an Aborigine too, because it clearly brings some kind of singing talent that I for one have missed.
