Why Jon Bon Jovi gave up his acting "career".
 

Aloha !

When Jon just started out as an actor (as in acting in rubbish movies 'cause he's a rubbish actor) he was all about how he looked at acting as an art form, and how some actors are wonderful artists. For a few years many of us wondered if Jon would ever abandon music as his acting got top priority (cancelling the South American leg for the 2001 Tour so he could finish Vampires Les Muertos II for example).

However, recently Jon said that he gave up acting because he refused to act in movies nobody was seeing. Is that really the same Jon Bon Jovi who said acting is an artform yidda yadda? When a movie fails at the box office it therefore must mean it's not interesting? This leads to a direct paralel to the way Jon has been approaching music ever since Crush has been released. If an album doesn't sell at least a thousand million copies it can't be interesting and is therefore irrelevant (a word Jon really hates). Yet the thousand million copies Crush sold were based upon 1 big single and the critical and fanatical reception of the album was weak compared to other album(s) that sold a lot less. Is this why Jon doesn't understand why they get bad reviews?

Creating art by using this theory doesn't really do any justice to the artform itself, which leads me to believe that Jon would rather change the music in order to sell more copies of an album rather than creating music that lies closer to what he really would be making had he not to worry about sales. I'm not saying Jon should make an indie band of Bon Jovi and start making prog rock but it's obvious to pretty much everyone apart from anyone who's in serious denial that the albums of the last decade have been aimed at a much wider audience than previous efforts.

Another thing I wonder about is how real Jon's interest in movies really is. For someone who is a pro-claimed lover of great movies and says to care about the artform itself he doesn't seem to give a **** about his videoclips. Yet those are the perfect platform for him to create his own minimovies. I'm not saying he needs to direct them himself, but if he'd honestly care about the medium itself as he claims to be doing he seriously wouldn't be making the shit videos they've been making for pretty much every single video. Jon once proudly proclaimed that Everyday was the first video with a good concept behind it yet it looked ridiculous.

The bottom line of this is the following; I know 2 music stars that claimed to care a great deal about movies. Michael Jackson and Jon Bon Jovi. Yet only one of them made great videos whenever possible, and the other just started an acting "career" in the hope to star in a major blockbuster. When this failed, he gave up on acting, thus making all his jibba jabba on how much he respected the great actors one big lie, thus one big act, which is why his acting career failed. He can't act in video's, he can't act in interviews (Really? Are my tickets that expensive?) and he can't act in movies. And that's why he gave up on it.

Salaam Aleikum,
Sebastiaan

No suprises there. He was never gonna be a big movie star with his acting.

Seb, I know you take great care etc in making these posts, however you could have summed it up in three words;

"he was shit"




There endeth the lesson

The problem Jon always had is that he's always been cheesy as hell and I for one could never take him seriously on set. He just looked outta place. Some musicians have become good actors but in Jon's case he was just barking up the wrong tree.

You're right, but how the hell did it hit you on a day like today to write almost a book about it? Hope the cure helps! But the essence of your story is right.

I'm probably in the minority here but I think Jon was a decent actor. Not claiming he was the greatest or the best musician-turned-actor in the world or anything like that. But I liked The Leading Man, Pay It Forward, Little City, and Row Your Boat and thought Jon played his part pretty well in those. Like what I've seen of No Looking Back too but I haven't seen the whole thing.

Conversely Moonlight & Valentino (great cast, wishy-washy execution), Vampires: Los Muertos (WTF), U-571 (seemed to go forever because I didn't give a shit about any of the "heroes"), Cry_Wolf (most annoying lead characters ever?), and Pucked (embarrassing) are pretty crap.

I don't know if it's a case of art imitating... well, art... but most of those movies I liked were from the 90s while all but one of the shithouse movies were from this decade.:p

Moonlight and Valentino was a good movie. He had good hair back then, not the birds nest he has now.

Sure, but I was referring to the substance over style.:p