film babble blog: Russell Brand

Showing posts with label Russell Brand. Show all posts

Friday, June 15, 2012

ROCK OF AGES Left Me Hair Metal-ed Out

Opening today at a multiplex near you:

ROCK OF AGES (Dir. Adam Shankman, 2012)

Back when I was a teenager in the ‘80s, I hated the music this movie celebrates.

When I think of great ‘80s rock, I think of R.E.M., The Replacements, The Pixies, Hüsker Dü, Psychedelic Furs, The Cure, The Smiths, et al.

The bands whose music (sung by the cast) makes up the soundtrack of this movie - Foreigner, Bon Jovi, Journey, Poison, Guns N' Roses, Def Leopard - were the commercial sell-out arena rock enemies to me.

Over time, I started to appreciate some of the output of the latter contingent, but in an ironic way. I wouldn’t listen to this music on my own, but it sure sounded good when it blasted out of Tony Soprano’s stereo.

For a bit of the screen time of ROCK OF AGES, which is based on the 2006 Broadway musical, the gimmick of ‘80s power-ballad-anthems being sung by stars like Tom Cruise (as a very Axl Rose-ish rock star), Alec Baldwin, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Russell Brand, is comically enjoyable.

But before it even got to the half-hour mark, I was more than a little hair metal-ed out.

I can’t complain that the film is cheesy, garish, and utterly ridiculous because it’s purposely packaged to be that way. The cliché-ridden plot is by design too - small town girl (Julianne Hough) comes to LA to become a singer, and meets a city boy (Diego Boneta) - yes, just like the Journey lyrics - and they pine for fame while working at a popular club, the Bourbon Room, which is in danger of being shut down because of unpaid taxes.

Of the cast, only Cruise, who swaggers through the movie, stands out (everybody, especially Baldwin is just peddling their same old shtick), but he’s not given much of a character. In a movie like this, I know that doesn’t matter; it only matters that Cruise can sing.

But the concept’s charm is diluted by the numbing overabundance of ‘80s music video tropes, and whatever fun I was supposed to be having was gets buried under noisy annoying mash-ups like when Zeta-Jones’ Tipper Gore-esque character (whose back story is instantly guessable) and her Christian cronies sing Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” while Brand and the Bourbon Room crowd respond with Starship’s “We Built This City.”

Director Shankman, did a much better job with handling the music and choreography in HAIRSPRAY a few years back. But much like that film, ROCK OF AGES looks like a over-lit television show - it’s not cinematic looking at all. Shankman has had his hand in directing a few episodes of Glee (go figure - he did the “Rocky Horror” one), so that’s no surprise.

All of this would be easier to take if it didn’t run for over 2 hours (okay, only 3 minutes over, but still).

Maybe if they cut most of the crappy dialogue out and kept it to the length of a mix CD (80 min.), then folks not partial to this music, like me, wouldn’t get so unbearably overpowered by the excess of icky ‘80s power-ballad-anthems on glitzy display.

Actually, even then, this would be pretty hard going.

More later...

Saturday, April 09, 2011

ARTHUR: Not Completely Artless, But Still Extremely Annoying

ARTHUR (Dir. Jason Winer, 2011)

The one and only improvement that this remake of the fine but slight 1981 Dudley Moore comedy contains is that rich drunken playboy Arthur Bach doesn’t cackle obnoxiously at his own jokes throughout the entire movie.

That’s not to say that Russell Brand isn’t obnoxious in the role, don’t get me wrong. He really is.

Brand's schtick gets increasingly more annoying as the film progresses through its lazily arranged set-pieces, that stick closely to the original’s basic plot points, even recycling key dialogue, and even touches on elements of the 1988 sequel (i.e. Arthur tries to get sober and get a job).

The film does have a handful of decent one-liners mostly in the exchanges between Brand and Helen Mirren as Arthur’s nanny, but they’re not enough to justify this rancid re-imagining.

So Arthur is stuck in the pickle of having to marry a woman he’s not in love with (Jennifer Garner) or else losing his family fortune of $900 million. Indie “it” girl Greta Gerwig gets mixed up in this in the role formerly played by Liza Minnelli, but the character is now an unlicensed NYC tour-guide instead of a shoplifting waitress.

It was an inspired choice, one of the film’s few, to cast the Oscar winning Mirren, in a gender/job title change from butler to nanny, as Hobson, the role that won an Oscar for John Gielgud way back in the day. Her stern and acidic performance really helps the film through some tedious stretches.

Gerwig does good work with what she’s given, but there’s zero chemistry between her and Brand. Her aspiring children’s book author character is just a convention, and the film really isn’t very interested in her. Nor Garner, whose part is pretty insulting especially in the film’s worst bit – a sitcom-style bedroom scene that has the actress in a metal corset stuck to the bottom of Brand’s magnetic bed.

For some reason Nick Nolte appears as Garner’s grizzled father, and I don’t think I’ve seen him invested less in a part. Ditto Geraldine James as Brand’s disapproving mother, a thankless role in a movie full of them.

None of those other roles matter, of course, because it’s Brand’s show. He gets to slosh around doing wacky things like dressing up as Batman with his chauffeur (an extremely mis-used Luis Guzmán) as Robin leading the police in a high-speed chase in the Batmobile, drive the BACK TO THE FUTURE Delorean (he collects movie cars, you see), and strut down the street wearing President Lincoln’s top hat, coat, and cane he just purchased at an auction.

Unfortunately none of this is very funny, and Brand can be funny (see FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL and bits of GET HIM TO THE GREEK), but this role which I admit looked good on paper, is just too broad, too obvious, and much too irritating to elicit genuine laughter. It’s just too painfully apparent and Brand just simply doesn’t have the ginormous charm that Dudley Moore had – I mean, the original was a vehicle completely built around that charm.

ARTHUR '11 is such a predictable conventional modernized rehash, that I’m surprised there wasn’t a remix of the theme song from the original (Christopher Cross’s “Arthur’s Theme ‘Best That You Can Do’”) with a well known hip hop artist rapping over it about his billionaire boy Arthur and how he rolls.

BTW this new ARTHUR does feature the inevitable cover of “Arthur’s Theme” by Fitz and the Tantrums, which now joins the film it graces in the bulging file of unnecessary remakes.

More later...

Sunday, June 06, 2010

GET HIM TO THE GREEK: The Film Babble Blog Review

GET HIM TO THE GREEK (Dir. Nicholas Stoller, 2010)

In FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL Russell Brand, as a tawdry British pop star named Aldous Snow, stood out in a strong ensemble of heavy comedy hitters enough so that his character has been granted a very rare entity - a spin-off vehicle of his own. Joining him is Jonah Hill in a different role than the possibly gay hotel employee he embodied in the previous film.

Here Hill is an ambitious record company intern who wants to stage a concert celebrating the 10th anniversary of Brand's band Infant Sorrow's best selling live album recorded at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.

Hill's boss, played to the hilt by Sean "Diddy" Combs, at first vetoes the idea, but comes around and declares that this is Hill's moment to shine. It's a tall order - Brand has recently fallen off the wagon after 7 years because his girlfriend Jackie Q (Rose Byrne) has just left him and his last record, the oh-so-wrong "African Child", was a huge highly derided flop.

Hill has 3 days to transport the famously decadent and destructive rocker from London to L.A. with a stop in New York for an appearance on the Today Show. Of course, the premise is that none of this goes smoothly and, ahem, wackiness ensues.

To muddy the water, Hill leaves for the trip thinking he's broken up with his live-in-girlfriend (Elisabeth Moss from Mad Men) after a fight about her wanting them to move to Seattle. He arrives to an already wasted Brand who thinks the concert isn't for a couple of months. With a clock countdown alerting us to their stressful schedule we then go through a series of party set-pieces in which Brand predictably side-tracks Hill with sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll at every turn.

Because this is a Judd Apatow production we can't just have an excess of crude in-your-face comedy, we have to get to the heart of these guys in the last reel. Emotional confessions have to be made and tears have to be cried, but since the volume of laughs leading to that has been well over the limit of, say, THE HANGOVER's, I'm not going to complain.

Brand's timing and chemistry along with Hill's dependable awkward schtick is impeccable. He's "on" even, or especially, when his character is off in his own whacked out world; the king of his own little adolescent fantasy land he's built up around him, as Spinal Tap manager Ian Faith would put it.

Combs, or "Diddy" or whatever he goes by today, undoubtedly steals the movie every time he's on the screen. At first recalling Tom Cruise's turn as profane movie exec Len Grossman in TROPIC THUNDER, Combs goes further bringing a kind of gangsta gravitas to every word he speaks. His speechifying about the power of "mindfucking" to Hill is one of the funniest bits of the movie.

As comedies go this year GET HIM TO THE GREEK is a much better than average romp with only a few scenes I could do without. I think most folks will know exactly what they're getting when they go in and will be fine with that. Under Apatow's tutelage director Stoller has assembled a sturdy comic farce with all the trimmings - tons of celebrity cameos, funny freak-outs, and rapid fire one-liners.

It may not single handedly save this summer from its overriding suckiness, but it's an extremely amusing 90 minute reprieve.

More later...