211 songs? "Wow, that's like 500 albums"

Rating: Null/10 (14 August 2011)

There's a scene in Peter Cattaneo's THE ROCKER in which the main character (Rainn Wilson's sort of version of "rocker Jack Black", Robert Fishman aka Fish) correctly puts the, as he call it, "drive test" as a true indicator if a song does or does not work. I mean, who doesn't love to drive with a badass tune playing in the car? Who doesn't love to drive to some great The Doors album? Or to some killer Motörhead tunes and feel, like Fish says, "on top of the world"? Here Fish is out there driving together with one of his band-mates (Teddy Geiger's character Curtis). They will test a song Curtis wrote. For them the song does work, does rock, and does make you feel like you're sitting on top of the world. But if a movie with as a title like THE ROCKER says that a song like the one Curtis wrote totally rocks, something is pretty darn wrong. Nobody who truly loves rock music will drive to that song and f****** rock! Probably in every single review of this movie we have a comparison with Richard Linklater's THE SCHOOL OF ROCK. If you still wonder why, well I just say to you that Wilson's character is a frustrated rocker who now will find a new chance with a band of kids. Hell, it actually begins in the EXACT same way (with the main character being kicked out of a band) and ends in the well enough with the spoilers. To finish my "drive test" point, here a real problem is that the kids don't rock (they are not really *kids* though, but adolescents). The music is closer to the Jonas Brothers than to The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Cream, AC/DC, or any of the other great rock bands that THE SCHOOL OF ROCK paid homage to. And certainly that homage thing was one of the reasons why that 2003 Linklater movie was a real blast. Yes, there's only one true rocker here, and Wilson as Fish really is good, darn good fun (just read again Fish's dialog I put as the summary!), but in the end he just can't help the *just plain unmemorable* rest of the movie. Also, in the end everyone sort of forgot that Fish was a real rocker, you know, he *has* to be around a so-so cast of kids, damn Jane Lynch playing the un-cool serious character (his husband was funny, though), enough said. A mixed bag, the kid of thing that makes you say, in the most convinced way, the "I will not watch this again".