Me during the broadcast of "Much On Demand" outside in front of the Muchmusic building in Toronto, ON on September 25, 2003.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Rock Of Ages stuff

Okay, first let's get this out of the way - ROCK OF AGES IS THE GREATEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME!!! Well, actually, I'm not sure how it fares and compares with The Brady Bunch parody movies, The Blues Brothers, or the Back To The Future trilogy. As time goes on, will I think it's better than all of those, or will it just take its' own place among those films as "its' own thing," a film that, like those others, simply stands on its' own? I don't know. In fact, due to the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, I failed to see Rock Of Ages a second time in the theatre before it left the screens. But the movie's mixing of '80s hair metal power ballads and Broadway musical tugs right at my heartstrings, because for me it mixes the musical environment I grew up in as a kid with my mother's show-tune albums, the FM and vinyl record store rock environment I was introduced to as a '70s teen, and the environment that spawned, the '80s hair-band/cock-rock scene that was in full force when I did my TV show Hard Rock Heroes. And it mixes those worlds perfectly and effortlessly.

So, with that, I tweeted a great deal about this movie. But comments like the ones above aren't suitable for Tweets - too long and can't adequately be shortened. So the stuff I ended up tweeting were my fun observations of the film's historical accuracy, which was mostly bang-on. And, by coincidence, in my last blog post, I talked about possibly reprinting Twitter comments here. So without further adieu, here are those comments, all collected and reprinted here. BUT: I actually had taken those comments previously and turned them into a writeup I had sent one of the Winnipeg media music writers. So it's actually that writeup that I will now pull apart to seperate ideas into their own paragraphs below. So that's why what's below doesn't really look like Tweets.

So here we go:

"In the poster for this film, why is Alec Baldwin wearing a 1996 Kiss reunion t-shirt when Rock Of Ages is set in 1987? And that shirt would be purported to be a '70s one, too, or it better, 'cause in 1987 the last time Kiss had worn makeup and had both Ace and Peter in the band was in very early 1980." (Note: Baldwin, or anyone else, never actually wore that shirt in the film. Good.)

"In the Tower Records store, there was a Kiss Crazy Nights poster, and that album came out in September 1987, so the movie is obviously set in the fall. But why is 'More Than Words' by Extreme here, when that song came out in 1990? And funny how that's the only song that doesn't fit timewise. Is someone an Extreme fan?"

"The first time Stacee Jaxx is presented to us is a mixture of Gene's entrance and Paul's re-entrance, when the reporter finds him in his bedroom, in the home video Kiss Exposed, and Stacee's monkey is also stolen from Kiss Exposed."

"Ironically, Kiss Exposed came out in 1987. Maybe the picture is trying to be painted that monkeys were hip then."

"Oh, and Steven Tyler's monkey in that skit in the American Idol finale was stolen from Kiss Exposed, too. He should get that monkey to help him at Burger King."

"Teaching today's generation about records and used record store culture. Try the plotline about Sherrie's stolen records with a fucking IPod."