The retirement of the era

Rating: 6/10 (5 August 2011)

Tonight I finally saw This is Spinal Tap for the first time, after years of knowing what I was missing and having to stave off people's incredulity that I'd have the audacity to have not gotten around to a classic. Actually, quite a lot of funny coincidences, from scratched discs to changed syllabi, got between me and experiencing this movie. Nevertheless, it is done, and all the jokes I've heard a million times I got to see in their original form.
But that's not what this review is about.
One thing that struck me about this movie is that yes, if I had been watching this on, say, VH-1 without a clue as to what I was watching in advance, I would have thought it was real. Fine, that's mockumentary. However, the reason why it works best is how it basically cuts straight through to the typical, clichéd rock drama of the VH-1 special genre, which makes this to me a little bit more than, say, Airplane style parody where the the whole thing is just set-up for sight gags, Mel Brooks' farces, or Shaun of the Dead loving parody/homages: it's almost an instructional video on how it's time to retire that story.
It's ironic then that this movie actually generated real live shows and it ends with a "Spinal Tap will live on" message, because it really seems most like it's pointing out how the rock doc has lost all its legs. A lot is laid on the age of the band members not only to emphasize their own mortality, but the feeling is almost as if the idea itself is in its forties and already ready to retire. Or maybe it just feels like that almost thirty years after this movie came out, sixty years from the point in which these documentaries started getting made.
Anyway, the only other Christopher Guest penned movie I've seen is Best in Show, which I found far funnier (I have to admit I'm full of schadenfreude), but this one was a lot sadder. Might as well been called This is The End.
This is Spinal Tap is sort of like an instructional video rock documentarists should watch to see how rock documentaries should no longer be made.
—PolarisDiB