Name: This Is Spinal Tap -- Movie Review #JPMN
Uploaded: 2017-11-05T07:53:23.000Z
Duration: 3 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This improvised mockumentary from director Rob Reiner was released nationwide in March

of 1984, where it doubled its $2.5 million dollar budget. The quick 82-minute experience

is an excellent send-up of rock culture, portraying the fictional British heavy metal band "Spinal

Tap" during a year on tour with hilarious results. The R-rated picture perfectly satirizes

everything from their wild debauchery, musical pretentiousness, performance blunders, and

general cluelessness. Perpetually teetering on the edge of realism, it's the extremely

subtle and true-to-life humor that not only makes this movie so funny, it also tricked

a fair number of audiences into believing this band actually existed. In their first

of many such parody-documentaries, veteran comics Christopher Guest, Michael McKean,

and Harry Shearer lead the picture as the titular group of cod-piece wearing narcissists:

ad-libbing a majority of their lines in the process. In an inspired bit of casting Reiner

appears as an ambitious film director within the film, often interviewing the band on-camera.

Later, he sets up the picture's most iconic moment when he questions Guest's decision

to label all of his amps with an "11", asking, "Why don't you just make ten louder and make

ten be the top number and make that a little louder?" ... the drawn out beat before Chris

answers, "These go to eleven" is one of the most legendary examples of comedic timing.

Joined by some cameos from before-they-famous actors like Bruno Kirby, Billy Crystal, Fran

Drescher, and Ed Begley Jr. - the core group of players make their biting improvisation

and witty banter look effortless, but their heavy accents, and talking over one another

sometimes makes it hard to follow their conversations. This is one picture that definitely benefits

from having the subtitles turned on. Structurally, the movie could really be arranged in any

order... each scene works well by itself, but when assembled together, there's very

little cohesion or over-arching story here. The fly-on-the-wall visual style lends credence

to the picture's unscripted nature too, consistently cutting away to Spinal Tap's many shortcomings

and humorous issues during their on-stage performances, like when Shearer gets stuck

in a cocoon-like apparatus, forcing him to wail out his bass-solo in the cramped compartment.

Indeed, the movie is littered with dozens of little gags like this, including the group's

unexplained herpes, difficulties with their overly simplistic album cover, and overtly

misogynistic song lyrics. When Guest waxes poetic on a romantic ballad he's been arranging

influenced by Mozart and Bach, he then shares that the song's title is "Lick My Love Pump".

Despite the absurd and lewd material, their music is actually rather catchy - and should

appeal to most rock fans. U2 guitarist, The Edge famously said of the film, "I didn't

laugh, I wept. It was so close to the truth." And that is perhaps my biggest issue with

the movie: there's plenty of great concepts and jokes, but much like a great "The Onion"

article, it often induces more of a soft chuckle than true laughter. Still though, as the only

movie on IMDb to be rated out of eleven, "This Is Spinal Tap" is wonderful satire of rock

culture worth watching more than once, I thought it was COOL. Now let's check out some of your

Opinions were a bit mixed on this one, but you enjoyed the sharp writing and silly music,

scoring this an EIGHT out of... "Eleven". Not quite as strong as remember, I'll score