Confession time: certain members of staff, and by 'certain,' we mean 'one,' and by 'members of staff,' we mean, uh, me, are secretly quite excited about summer musical "Rock of Ages." It's either going to be a knowing guilty pleasure, or a unintentionally funny train wreck, but either way, we'll wager it''ll be a lot more fun than the po-faced likes of "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" or "Total Recall." And the appeal of A-listers donning fright wigs and putting on a power ballad karaoke show is a pretty solid one, particularly when those stars include the likes of Alec Baldwin, Paul Giamatti and Bryan Cranston.
The film's still a month away from hitting theaters, but the first extract from the soundtrack has landed, via ScreenCrush, and Warner Bros. are leading with the heavy hitters: it's megastar Tom Cruise, in character as rock legend Stacee Jaxx, covering Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me." You can have a listen to the full track below, and… well, Cruise's singing voice isn't the best thing we've ever heard, but it's not the worst either. Although it should be noted that we've listened to babies crying backwards, Steven Seagal's country album, and songs that Billy Corgan's recorded in the last fifteen years, so the bar for 'the worst thing we've ever heard' is pretty low.
But as Pierce Brosnan proved with his steamboat Chewbacca yowlings in "Mamma Mia!," sometimes hearing a movie star failing to carry a tune is worth the price of admission alone. "Rock of Ages" also stars Diego Boneta, Julianne Hough, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Russell Brand, Malin Akerman and Will Forte, and it hits theaters on June 15th.
I like this better than the original.
Oh, and for all the supposed experts there who can "tell" this is autotuned, the soundtrack producer has stated outright that no autotuning was used at all:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/earshot/tom-cruise-rock-of-ages-adam-anders-paradise-city-322622
Whenever an actor sings, there are suddenly a bunch of pseudo musical experts everywhere. It's annoying beyond belief. I'm also not a Cruise fan one way or the other but I'm so tired of this. Does Oliver Lyttelton hold some sort of musical PhD? Actors singing has always been a way more successful concept than singers suddenly acting, and why is that- because many singing actors, even many of those on Broadway, don't exactly have Pavarotti pipes but are nevertheless trained to project their point across with some conviction. And most of them succeed way better than they are ever given credit for. Robert Preston didn't have the most beautiful voice on the planet, but he absolutely could 'sing' in terms of being a commanding presence in a musical. Whether Cruise ends up good or not, you'll need a hell of a lot more than a 36 second clip loaded with backup singers to tell.
Autotune.
Sounds perfectly good to me. What were you expecting?