ROCK STAR (2001) At least it didn't star Fred Durst WAY out of the scope of movies I regularly review, I can't let a movie like Rock Star just pass by, uncommented on. I mean, it's metal, people, the sweetest sound in the world! Okay, so it's set in a less creatively fertile time for metal than today...METAL!!! (sign of the horns) Ah, if only the makers of this film had the understanding and love for metal that I do. There's a lot that this movie gets right, but there's also so much which is misguided or just a bad idea...or even a little insulting. VERY loosely based on the story of Tim Owens, the Ohio regular-joe who got the job of singing for Judas Priest after Rob Halford's departure, Rock Star stars Mark Wahlberg as Pittsburghian Chris Cole. Set in 1985, Chris worships the band Steel Dragon, who appears to be about as popular then as was, say, Iron Maiden. (Priest itself has had so many ups and downs, it's hard to gauge, in hindsight, how popular they might have been at a given time) Chris models his clothes, hair, and singing style after their singer. He even sings in a tribute band which covers only Steel Dragon songs, and even gets in fight with a rival tribute band. One day he gets the call that changes his life forever...yeah, you figure it out. Before long, Rock Star turns into your standard Rock Casualty movie (you know what makes me want to puke? The Doors. No, I'm not just talking about the movie.) and ends up with an ending so wildly, painfully miscalculated that I was left not knowing what the hell this movie wanted to be. Sit back and think about this for a second - they got a former rapper who, by most accounts, was not a very good rapper, who we know can't act, to play a talented singer. How does this happen? Jennifer Aniston, who is such a good comic actress and I fear she's never going to get out of Rachel's shadow, has almost nothing to do here, just play the supportive-up-to-a-point girlfriend, and, ever so briefly, make out with a chick. Sort of. (man, if you've seen the movie, you know what I mean, and this has to be the most mishandled gross-out gag I've ever seen; it wasn't funny in the least, it was actually disturbing and even kind of horrifying) Timothy Olyphant plays the guitarist in Chris's tribute band, and a for a while, I thought he played the Steel Dragon guitarist as well, but he (the movie's nominal villain) is played by Dominic West. (Slaughter drummer Blas Elias, who looks more like a woman than anybody in hair-metal history, plays the tribute band's drummer) One interesting thing this movie really gets right, in a quirky way, is the original Steel Dragon music. Zakk Wylde plays one of the guitarists, and it's clear that he wrote a lot of this, with artificial harmonics popping up all over the place. (other guys in the band include Jason Bonham, who I once saw play with a broken arm, and Dokken's Jeff Pilson. Instruments are played by the guys on-screen, vocals by Jeff Scott Soto) The Steel Dragon songs are interspersed with a lot of big-hair hits from the time (the Def Leppard song wouldn't actually exist for the better part of a decade, but never mind), which serve, maybe not intentionally, to illustrate how far hard rock has come in the past sixteen years. It's certainly done in the hard-rock-marketed-as-heavy-metal style of the time, but with sixteen more years of forced-underground wisdom as to what it SHOULD have been like; man, the music of the time just sounds so, so restrained. I know, a lot of purists are gonna hate me for saying that, but think about it; the best of what hard rock and heavy metal have had to offer has rarely ever been the stuff on the radio. Put the best of today up against the most popular of then, and you'll hear what I mean. (of course, you could make the point of just how far hard rock has gone down the toilet by comparing the best of then with the most popular of today...then, fine, the best of today is better than the best of then, too...only the radio-friendly stuff has gone downhill) Now, this is a loose enough adaptation of the Tim Owens story that Judas Priest has done everything they can to distance themselves from it, and who can blame them, since this movie would only make them look like assholes. Still, it's fun for the metal fan to spot both the big and small details which either ring true or false. For example, the guy just finishing up his audition as Chris arrives for his own is named Ralph, clearly a reference to Ralf Scheepers, the guy who took his runner-up status at this audition so seriously that he formed a band which has sounded exactly like Priest's Painkiller for three albums in a row. Halford's departure from Priest did, in part, have to do with his dammit-I-don't-want-to-be-in-this-closet-anymore sexuality, but he wasn't fired, let alone for his sexual preference. But, predictably, there are a lot of things which are different, which is fine. Owens' band, Winters Bane, wasn't just a cover band and even went all the way to Germany to record an all-original album, with lyrics so bad that I can't help but think that Priest's lyrics today might be even worse if they let Owens write (and that's saying a lot). And after he joined Priest, they were hardly at the peak of their careers; when they finally put out an album with him, it had been seven years since their last and even then, they weren't exactly selling out arenas. Four years later, and their second album with Owens has just been released...and most everybody hates it. (hey, I thought it wasn't bad...awful lyrics, though) Now, that this changes so much from the true story, is not a bad thing. Movies are, after all, movies; they're not here to tell us the truth, and only a fool would go to them for that. What really goes wrong here, in regards to how the film handles metal, is that it seems clear that the people making this movie don't really respect it as a worthwhile musical avenue, and instead as just an amusing curiosity from the past. It's like dismissing the entire horror genre on the basis of the movies that make a lot of money today, like Urban Legend and Scream 2. While even Rob Halford himself has been accused of thinking of metal as merely entertainment for teenagers (less so these days), this movie takes it a step further, suggesting that not only is it merely for teenagers, but it should be "grown out of". I expected better from Stephen Herek, the director of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure...but maybe I shouldn't have. It's not like that movie had a very adult view of metal either... When Chris finally embarks on a solo career (this would be the late 80's by now, I guess, maybe around 1990), he goes to Seattle and starts making the kind of grunge balladry that would pound some nails in hard rock's coffin. The funny thing is, not only is his grunge balladry not very good even by grunge balladry standards, but this is portrayed as his big personal triumph, the music of his having "grown up", while, presumably, heavy metal stays as being dumb music for dumb teens. Ask most any metal fan how they feel about the grunge explosion; this is a tragedy, not a triumph. Yeah, maybe the forcing underground of all sorts of metal (pulled down by the big-hair stuff that MTV conned everybody into thinking defined it all) was good for it in the long run, but man, those were lean years. On a related note, when Chris brings his own contributions to Steel Dragon in a bid to have some creative power in the band, and they're rejected without consideration, he goes on to actually RAP the vocals on the song the band wrote for him. Now, maybe this is a gag regarding Wahlberg's equally talentless rapping days, I don't know...or maybe it's a sop to today's teens who demand a little rap with their hard rock. While I have to admit my understanding of rap music is scant, and I will concede that I'll bet that the rap fans who take rap as seriously as I take my metal hate the rap on the radio as much as I hate the "metal" on the radio, there's just no denying that rap is, by far, the worst influence hard music has had upon it since the hairspray days. As I've said before, hard rock used to be mostly phony, but competently done. Now it's just phony. At least, the popular stuff. As a comedy, Rock Star doesn't really work because its depiction of the standard rock-casualty story is too gloomy and depressing, even a little disturbing, like with the bathroom revelation alluded to above, the firing of the original singer, or the uncomfortable scene in the "wives' limo". The gags are often just too obvious, like Matthew Glave's presence as Chris's older brother, who has made a career on playing the obnoxious older male who gets his comeuppance (and he doesn't get it here). I liked the scene where Chris teaches his baby brother how to give the sign of the horns, though. As drama, it doesn't hold water because of its cartoony overgeneralizations. It doesn't work as either, and certainly not as a combination of both. Its attempt at a "feel-good" ending might work for a lot of people, but those aren't the people who are actually going to see this movie. But I liked Rock Star's energy, and its refreshingly straight-faced and well-done modern interpretation of the kind of hard rock popular at the time; I'll probably snag this soundtrack one of these days. And I'd watch Jennifer Aniston in just about anything. To be honest, I'm not convinced that Tim Owens has a much more interesting story to tell than the one we see here, though he did get profiled in GQ, an angle this movie chooses not to explore, unfortunately. Originally titled Metal God, but they had to change the title because Rob Halford threatened to sue, or something. It's a good bet that the studio was also afraid that an explicit reference to metal (that archaic, oft-mocked musical avenue of the past) in the title would scare people off. I guess most big metal fans (at least, the ones who stuck with Priest as far as 1997) are probably going to give this one a look eventually. No recommendation here, to see it or to avoid it; 2001 has been such an awful year for movies, this one maybe doesn't seem as bad as it might have a few years ago. Talk about damning with faint praise. Man, I'm just not going to remember 2001 very happily at all. Buildings falling down, movies are crappy everywhere, Amon Amarth cancels their tour, my train runs a guy over and kills him, two grandparents die, war is declared on an abstract concept (I fear that "we have to do it to stop terrorism!" will become the "we have to do it for the children!" for the 21st Century)...at least Nevermore's in town tonight, my favorite band of all time, and you'd better believe I'm going to that. Now THAT'S fuckin' metal. (sign of the horns) BACK TO THE R's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE