Rock Star (2001) – Rewatch

I was fairly certain I had watched this before, but couldn’t remember a single detail. It was similarly bland this time around, but I did recall details from my previous view as I watched. Very loosely inspired by Tim Owens’s experience replacing Rob Halford in Judas Priest, this features Mark Wahlberg as the lead singer of a cover band who is hired to replace Jason Flemyng, the gay lead singer of the band he imitates. Unlike the actual story, this is inexplicably supposedly set in the 1980s, but looks nothing like the 1980s. In fact, Jennifer Aniston looks like she just walked off the set of Friends to film her scenes. The movie is rather dumb and entirely predictable, but the shoehorning of the Seattle grunge scene at the end is borderline offensive. I was mildly amused at the stunt casting of real life musicians such as Blas Elias, Jason Bonham, and Zakk Wylde as musicians in the various bands and former partners of musicians as the rock stars’ wives. I do somewhat like the soundtrack, even the songs credited to the fictional bands.