This is Spinal Tap
It doesn’t happen very often that I end up watching some film without getting a recommendation and without ever having heard of anyone participating in its creation. If that happens, the film is typically one of the films in 1000 films list from TSPDT (which finally got updated!) or, much more likely, it’s a film in the Criterion Collection. I have discovered “Metropolitan” and “Branded to Kill” in this manner, and when that happens I am always glad that such films exist. One can add “This is Spinal Tap” to the list.
I love how the band came to existence after the actual film. It’s the definitely the kind of film that just screams cult film to you. When we started watching the film, nobody in our party actually knew whether Spinal Tap was a real band or not – everybody first considered the possibility that it was. I think that the content of the film makes it absolutely clear that they are not real, but the acting and the cinematography are definitely good enough to fool people. I am not surprised that the film ended up being so popular amongst a certain group. If any movie can produce the reaction “Oh wow this is totally about me” I acknowledge that it must be good somehow. (Note the difference to the likes of “Twilight” or “Harry Potter” – those are franchises which rely upon wishful thinking, not on actual identification.) In the case of “This is Spinal Tap”, this goodness comes with a great dose of black humor. In fact, it is an unusual type of black humor because some lines just make you want to laugh out loud, which I think you don’t see that much in parodies and satires.
I still remember how just a few years ago, “It might get loud” had an emotional impact on me when I saw it (though most of it can probably be attributed to the fact that I saw it in theaters) despite the fact that I was not a fan of the people involved. From an intellectual standpoint, “This is Spinal Tap” is easily the more superior movie whereas the latter is just another instance of rather pretentious people talking about music like it’s holy or something. I have no intention to ever re-watch “It might get loud” while I could see “This is Spinal Tap” over and over again, yet I would say that my enjoyment of the film is of a rather emotionally distant nature. It shows how I prefer to laugh over this whole music business, and I don’t really have the emotional attachment to it anymore which I had as a teenager. I am finally grown up?
Perhaps this is the point where you are going to tell me that you have already seen the movie, and that it’s a famous cult classic. But hey, just let me be happy about having discovered this masterpiece ‘on my own’, alright?