Director: Rob Reiner
Cast: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Rob Reiner
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. A small note about this screening though. I stumbled upon a factory-sealed DVD at a used dealer at the Flea Market. That’s unusual enough, but the case hailed from an era when DVDs were frequently stolen commodities (kids, ask your parents) and the case had not one, not two, but three security seals on every open end. Those things were annoying to take off in the early aughts, but the glue on these suckers had two decades to seal, and I nearly had to rent a sledgehammer to get to the chewy movie at the center.
Did I Like It: By this point, the mockumentary has been played out to death. TV shows upon TV sows have used the format, and the instant one used that milieu and wasn’t any good, the magic was probably gone.
But this is something special. It didn’t invent the wheel as far as mockumentary comedies go. For that, we’d have to (but probably shouldn’t) look at least a year earlier to Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983), or maybe even as far back as his Take The Money and Run (1969).
Or maybe the better precursor to what we have here is A Hard Day’s Night (1964), because not only does this film tap into that precisely correct demented vein of absurdity that is the lifeblood of every great comedy, but the music also works. That’s directly tied to the unusual skills of Messrs. Guest, McKean, and Shearer. They are at the top of their game here comedically and they could have made an honest shot at being rock stars, had they possessed that ambition. Hell, look to A Mighty Wind (2003) and those three men could have made decent-bordering-on-great musicians of any genre.
As with most comedies, it’s never the most memorable lines that make the film truly great. You can talk about “this one goes to eleven” forever, but it’s the briefest pause the band takes before offering their reaction to “shit sandwich” that I think is both so insanely funny and so pathetically human.
Also, you can’t go wrong with a few dead drummers and a Stonehenge megalith. It’s easily the broadest comedy of which Guest is at the forefront, but anyone’s got a problem with that is the type of person who would let “shit sandwich” get printed in a magazine.