Heavy Metal Fools

Rating: 10/10 (23 March 2015)

Part of what makes comedy great is that it is truthfulness but in a comical and exaggerated tone, which makes it both relatable but also joyful at the same time to take in. This is not just one of my favorite comedies but also one of my favorite films in general. I remember when I was a kid I actually thought this was a real heavy metal rock band, though the fake band did have a few albums and do some real tours for a while if you can believe that.
This is my favorite film from Rob Reiner, it was the first film or at least one of the first films that created the comedy subgenere mockumentry which didn't entirely caught on till at lot latter with TV shows like "The Office (UK and US versions)", "Parks and Recretation", and "Reno 911". To me this was a brilliant idea the combo of both the comedy and documentary genre, the beauty of this is how in a way it's sort of a blurring the line with both reality and non reality, but also a way of simply keeping comedy along with comedic characters within reality.
The film parodies but also homages and a bit of a love letter to the music scene, from the heavy metal bands but most notably "The Bettles". The cinematography is great it's pretty much the documentary style, it really felt like we weren't watching a movie so much but an actually documentary, it really almost looked as though this band might have existed. The music is great, it's memorable, fun and actually funny when you think about the content.
But of course the three Spinal Tap band members are just fraking hilarious, all three of them are practically dorks and well fools but in a good way. They pretty much like kids or teenagers that dress up cool and try to act cool and yet they aren't. The band isn't really that good at what they do; even though their songs are fun, in the real life Heavy Metal world I wouldn't exactly call them slammin classics. My favorite song is "Hellhole" if you listen to the whole song or seen the music video on it, it is one big contradiction as if the person who wrote it might have changed his mind while he wrote part of the middle and end of the song, or someone else stepped in and wrote those parts at the last minute.
All three mainly Nigel and David can be a bit childish sometimes like in one scene that cracks me up was when Nigel complains about having finger food bread instead of full sliced bread because he simply can't fold a piece; did it ever occur to him to simply stop at a grocery store and buy a loaf.
Yet you really like all three band members and even care about them because their hearts are in the right place, if not their heads. These are people that have a dream/s but most importantly just want to do what they love play music.
Even like the manager Ian, whom is dryly hilarious. I really like how gruff he really is and just how much grief he sometimes receives from the band as he is trying to coop with what demands some of them have and making things work despite rolling his eyes a bit in the process. This is an easy attitude to emphasize with if you ever were a manager and there was an amount of chaos or uncoroporation you had to deal with. I even like the fact that he has a cricket bat which despite random I thought was a funny quark to him, he uses it as a way to remind him of his roots and also vent some frustration.
The dialog the characters have along with Ian is great, this film just so rich in verbal humor that you would have to see more than once to uncover more. Even some of the visual humor is great, my favorite was seeing the cover art of each of their albums which is deliciously bad and I feel a beautiful combo of both visual and verbal humor together.
What I also like is that there is some truth in the film, from little things like a scene where the band gets lost trying to find the main stage which is true, it would really help if those back auditoriums had a visual directory because their real big and easy to get lost in. Even that worst fear all bands and performers carry, on things going wrong we see actually do for Spinal Tap, like the Stonehenge concert which well lets just say made, rock history.
Spinal Tap rocks, well sort of.
Rating: 4 stars