When This is Spinal Tap opened in 1984, it had such a tongue-in-cheek feel mixed with a fly on the wall observation to it that a lot of people believed it was about a real band. Rob Reiner said he was approached by people who told him he should’ve focused on a more well-known band.
It was the first movie to be directed by Reiner. I was watching the sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues when I heard news that Reiner and his wife, Michelle Singer, had been found dead. It was later reported their son, Nick, is suspected of killing them. I’m sure Reiner didn’t anticipate Spinal Tap to be his final feature movie. But it does make a nice book end to his career as a director.
However, the movie never really offers the same punch the first movie did. Mainly it’s because the idea of a mockumentary like this was still unfamiliar in 1984. Now, it seems every other sitcom is a mockumentary. What made the first movie so wonderful was how it never exaggerated the exploits. Several real-life musicians said the problems the band encountered are very similar.
In the decade since, there’s been an ongoing “What came first?” debate as Black Sabbath (sans Ozzy) had a mix-up with a Stonehenge prop that was incorrectly built in measurements of meters instead of feet. Reiner has said the footage had already been filmed by the time of the Black Sabbath concert where Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) uses the wrong measurements, inches instead of feet, for a Stonehege scenery prop.
It just goes to show that problems arise no matter who you are or where you are. And the glamourous side of being a rock star is basically smoke and mirrors to constant headaches of managers. In Long Strange Trip, people who work for the Grateful Dead talk about how they go through the routine of setting up the famous “Wall of Sound” that takes some time from the equipment trucks and then having to immediately dismantle it after the final encore song and load the various amps and wiring into the trucks as they crash on the buses getting a few hours of sleep before having to do the same thing again the following day.
Spinal Tap II begins as the band has found themselves having to fulfill a contractual obligation for one last concert. And neither Nigel nor David St. Hubbins have been talking for years. But once a video of Garth Brooks and his wife, Trisha Yearwood, performing “Big Bottom” goes viral, more interest piques in Tap reuniting. I love the Brooks/Yearwood joke mainly because it seems like the type of thing that could happen in real life.
Yet I wish some of the other jokes had more of a bunch. Nigel working in a small English community operating a cheese shop where he barters cheese for guitars works more like a Monty Python skit. David showing that he’s made some money over composing music for true-crime podcasts as well as that music you hear on phone calls when you’re put on hold are very clever. However, there’s a joke where bassist Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) gets people upset because he started a cryptocurrency scam business and it feels a little too late.
A funnier gag is how Derek thinks he’s the sexual lothario he isn’t as he tries to hit on the new drummer Didi Crockett (Valerie Franco) in one of the most tasteless pick-up lines ever. The movie works best when it’s just showing the gullible narcissism of the band members. Remember how Nigel can’t fathom what to do since the lunchmeat is bigger than the bread?
Spinal Tap in the first movie was a band that hadn’t realized their days were getting shorter. And as the music sound was changing in the 1980s at the time of the movies released seemed perfect. Reiner, who returns as fictional filmmaker Marty DiBergi, is too busy with the cameos that destroy the fake but could be real tone of the first movie.
There are some great jokes here. And Stonehenge looms heavily. One gag works because it’s so clever but also stupid. The other seems to just exist for the relevance in the plot. And that’s the problem with this movie, things seem to exist just for a joke, such as when Marty tries to lean up against a group of folded chairs for a dramatic pose but only knocks them over.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 