a once weekly open mike
because I hate spelling it ‘open mic’
Let’s see what happens when your host (me) has nothing to say. Step right up, speak your mind, tell a story, sing a song, whatever.
10/11/2025
Anything Goes #49
11 responses to “Anything Goes #49”
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Managed to get a good copy of the Spinal Tap sequel. Man, that was depressing. I don’t think I even smiled once in 30 minutes of watching this before turning it off. I went into this cold (the only buzz I heard was generally positive) but I regret not even paying for it and feel like I should somehow be compensated for this.
Everything was wrong. It starts out with maybe the fakest looking CGI of a crowd entering an arena — one of those jarringly fake visuals that you suspect someone sold on the idea that they’d “clean it up in post” and didn’t.
The editing was really bad. I’d forgotten that the original was shot like a documentary (and that many musicians actually thought it was one at first) — here we had just bog standard editing, shot/reverse shot, A camera footage and B camera footage. If someone does something that is supposed to be a joke, expect them to cut to a close up in anticipation. Derek Smalls put it up his nose! It’s stuck in his nose! The thing! Ha ha.
I would guess 0% of what I saw on film was improvised. Every line feels totally rehearsed. Overly rehearsed, in fact, for what is basically endless expository dialog.
The original wasn’t like a masterpiece or something, it was a funny movie first and foremost, a giggly thing, and there was nothing even remotely funny going on here. I *thought* the sequel would be a send up of a band on the nostalgia circuit, of the sort you and I and johnthebasket were talking about, where there’s one original member and a couple of guys who kinda look like past members if you squint, playing successively low-rent gigs and suffering a million indignities along the way. I don’t know what this was about, after 30 minutes they were still idly chatting. At one point Nigel Tufnel is facetiming with his girlfriend in the UK and then David St. Hubbins shuffles past him and is heard off camera asking where the towels are. Was there a joke in here? Anywhere? This was a representative scene, and the movie was a chain of scenes just like this, and after this I turned it off. Horrible stuff, I don’t know if the Christopher Guest/mocukementary genre ever missed like this missed.
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Pretty funny review, though. Thanks for warning me. Not sure I was even aware of the existence of a sequel to This is Spinal Tap, and jeez, even the title blows. The logical (and maybe even funny!) title would’ve been That Was Spinal Tap.
Everyone involved is rich, so they can’t be doing it just for the money. So — why? Baseball is on my mind these days, so it’s like Ichiro Suzuki coming out of retirement and batting .075 for the season — why stink up the memory of work done right?
I’m also on board with your glancing recollection of the first movie: “The original wasn’t like a masterpiece or something, it was a funny movie first and foremost, a giggly thing…” I liked the original too, but just about everyone seems to think it’s an all-time masterpiece. Shrug. It was a funny, successful comedy & well-worth seeing if anyone hasn’t, but it’s a YES, not a BIG YES. And it sure sounds like the sequel is a BIG NO.
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Yes, the Mariners are IN the finals!
Good news for small markets, and
my many relatives up there.
Okay, baseball!-
Baseball was the first sport I kinda liked, and now it’s the last. Of course, it’s millionaires playing a kid’s game with corporate logos on their shirts and ticket prices only the rich can afford and ads superimposed on the pitcher’s mound if you’re watching on TV. It’s capitalism, it sucks, but … fuck it, go Mariners.
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Or even “Here Lies Spinal Tap, And Why Not”
If nothing else I guess they set up themselves to be the target of the next mockumentary: a director that hasn’t made a good movie in 25 years (Rob Reiner) reunites with the cast of his first cult film and they cut each other giant paychecks and go through the motions. (Or given how stiff and slow they all are… don’t.)
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I’d buy a ticket to that movie, long as it’s mean enough. Make it sharper than knives, written for blood as much as laughs.
Has there been another director with a track record like Rob Reiner’s? He started with a string of good and very good movies — This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men — and then poof, 30+ years of nothing interesting.
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It’s such a stark contrast, particularly that this guy made “North,” which I saw on cable or something before I ever heard of its bad reputation and simply thought it was like one of those Kirk Cameron films, those shabby Christian b-movies that look sorta like a real movie for a bit but then at the height of tension everyone takes a moment to stop and pray. It had that feel to it, you know what I mean? Like it was a simulation of a movie made for other purposes, like brainwashing or getting me to vote Republican or activating a Manchurian Candidate to assassinate based upon an encoded message in the dialog.
The funny thing is that unlike other directors whose reputation collapsed (Cimino, Bogdanovich, Coppola), Reiner was never exactly making deep, thoughtful “cinema,” and wasn’t weighed down by some spectacular failure or personal debt. People kept funding his movies and they just came out and died.
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Yeah, as you say, Reiner made very commercial movies, appealing to very mainstream audiences. They weren’t heavy think pieces, they were simply fun.
And then came North, which seemed shrewdly calculated to appeal to nobody on Earth. I remember seeing a preview for it and thinking, Who would want to see this? The answer was nobody, which seems to have remained the answer for everything he’s made since.
What the fuck happened to that guy?
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here is the paragraph taken out of my latest article by Bruce,
they always like to censor the best lines, oh well, maybe it’s good to have an editor…Country Living Back In The Day
Once I heard about this very loose woman living in a plastic house near mine, I went over and within a minute she turned me away on account of my savoir-faire deficiency: no game, mojo, or confidence. (Jeez, rejected by the “town slut,” can’t a clueless hippie catch a break? There was also no fancy lube back then, when out of rancid olive oil the lonely hermit might have to cut open an aloe vera leaf or squeeze a banana slug.)-
Bruce is a great guy & about as close to a hero as I got, but nobody’s perfect, and he has a puritanical streak. He sometimes says pornography should be banned, though I like to think saying so is mostly intended to keep his librul readers riled.
Me, I’d never consider chopping that paragraph. Doesn’t even seem particularly racy. Libido talk adds sparkle, sometimes a laugh, and it’s near-universal to all adult humans. I’ll take your sweatiest bits any time, but with a much smaller readership than the AVA.
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Okay, but stop squeezing the banana slugs…
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