This is Spinal Tap

During the course of this project, I will be posting on all the movies that were nominated for the Oscar for Best Song from a motion picture. Two of them were from “Footloose” a couple of weeks ago, one is from this weeks “Against All Odds”. None of them should have even been on the list of nominated songs in the first place. All five slots that year should have been filled by:

Big Bottom

Stonehenge

Hellhole

Rock and Roll Creation

Sex Farm

The great catalog of songs from the band Spinal Tap, featured in this documentary of their career. “Big Bottom” many be the most genius musical parody ever created, including the collected works of Weird Al.

I remember reading a story in the L.A. Times in 1984, in which director Rob Reiner complained that people did not understand the movie because the band featured in the documentary was not that good. Supposedly there were a whole group of people in some of the preview audiences who did not get the joke. I don’t know if the story was true or not, but it is believable in part because everyone in this film played it straight and put in the effort to make it look like this was the real deal. The rest of us just laughed and have been doing so for the thirty years since.

The Lonely Guy

I re-watched this after ordering a DVD from Amazon. I have not seen it since the first time 30 years ago today. I now see why.  It is not a bad film, it just isn’t very good and the jokes change tone all over the place. There are times that the story means to be sadly knowing, and other times when it is absurdly over the top. Even when the jokes seem to be overdone, the actors are playing it so low key that it is hard to get into the spirit of the film.

Steve Martin broke out as a comedy presence on SNL and in the concert arenas of the late seventies.  His first starring movie was “The Jerk” which was clearly ridiculous but also incredibly funny. It was also a huge success. In fact throughout the 1980s Martin was a critical and financial success. The one film of his that did not seem to catch on was this one. It had the smallest box office of any of his movies at the time and of all the films he has appeared in, it is near the bottom when it comes to ticket sales. Of course box office does not equal quality but the inverse is not automatically true either. So this is a small film that appears to have been lost over time, and it is not really missed.