![]() ![]() ![]() Reiner's deft grasp of the small details - the barracuda record company liaison, the tragic bad luck with drummers - anticipated Robert Altman's arch film ''The Player'' as well as all the ''Access Hollywood''-type syndicated television shows and Web sites dedicated to behind-the-scenes arcana. ''This Is Spinal Tap'' arrived in theaters just as the public fascination with the processes of the entertainment business was beginning to take the place of simple interest in stars. In the gap between the effect the band thinks it creates and the one it really does, the film's satire works its mischief. The boys in the band remain charmingly benighted, but the magic becomes tortured once we see it, it loses its spell. Even anthems like ''Big Bottom,'' the band's paean to full-bodied women (''How can I leave this behind?''), are no longer enough to rally the faithful. Stage props don't work a Stonehenge megalith, meant to tower 18 feet over the band, comes in at 18 inches, a dramaturgic whammy lost to bungled paperwork. The movie follows the American tour of an aging English heavy metal band whose fortunes are turning sour - or, as their perpetually harassed manager, played by Tony Hendra, puts it, whose ''appeal is becoming more selective.'' As gigs go bad, or don't go at all, the stage gimmicks and corporate weaselry that bands like Spinal Tap depend on to generate the effect of spontaneous hysteria at their shows start to clamber into the foreground. McKean, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and others - helped usher in the era of reflexive irony. ![]() This rockumentary - directed by Rob Reiner and improvised by Mr. Musicians like Kid Rock, and movies like the ''Scream'' series, now routinely build self-parody into their voices, having their camp and eating it too. The longer version includes, among other things, a chance to see the band's Sinatra-obsessed limo driver, played by Bruno Kirby, getting stoned and singing ''My Way'' in his underpants.īut now even the pomp of the presidency is wrapped in quotation marks, humbled as it stands straight-faced before people who know too much about the contrived conditions of its manufacture. When a video at the Democratic National Convention showed President Clinton making his endless march to the stage, USA Today observed, ''It looked more like a scene out of 'This Is Spinal Tap.' '' The film's title has become a punch line waiting to reveal any subject as a joke, the more deadly serious the better.įor cultists, MGM Home Entertainment is also releasing a digital videodisc of the film, with more than an hour of added footage, most of which has been circulating for years on bootleg videocassettes. ![]() Sixteen years later, ''This Is Spinal Tap'' returns to theaters on Friday as an established language, a universal shorthand for unintended farce. Hubbins character observes in the film, ''It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.'' The filmmakers had found this line, and their audience was on the other side of it. She disliked everything about the movie so much that no possible standards could apply to any part of it.'' ''Finally, we realized it meant Does Not Apply. ''It took us a long time to figure out what this meant,'' said Michael McKean, who played the band's singer and guitarist, David St. One answered every question about the movie with three cryptic letters, DNA. Some objected that the band was too obscure and poor others thought the filmmakers should have chosen a good band, like Led Zeppelin. Shot in deadpan documentary style, the film tells the story of a fictional heavy metal band blazing a spandex trail across America. WHEN the makers of ''This Is Spinal Tap'' first showed their movie to test audiences in 1984, the reaction was noteworthy. ![]()
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