TheFearmakers
Joined Nov 2016
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The fictional heavy metal band SPINAL TAP is so legendary that it's sometimes forgotten that Rob Reiner's directorial debut THIS IS SPINAL TAP, written and performed by his old friends Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, was initially a neglected diamond in the rough...
Other than a few exceptions, like Woody Allen's 1969 crime satire TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN and the more befitting RUTLES: ALL YOU NEED IS CASH, the mockumentary device wasn't common when TAP began gaining an immense cult following during the 1980's video boom...
The original artwork didn't have images of Guest's naively spaced-out lead-guitarist Nigel Tufnel, Michael McKean's moody lead-singer/co-guitarist David St. Hubbins, or Harry Shearer's affable middle-man bassist Derk Smalls, but the colorful painting of a guitar tied in a knot...
Anyone back then knew exactly what that poster was parodying, since AIRPLANE was still a highly revered joke-every-ten-seconds classic... and both the mile-high-disaster and pseudo-rocker satire had a strong-enough central plot-line to rest all the nonstop hilarious moments on...
American actor/musicians portray a British band that's been through decades of genre-changes and a multitude of dead drummers, and it's really a character-driven comedy with two polar-opposite leads, particularly narrowed into Christopher Guest's passive pawn to McKean's straight-mannish alpha...
Who's comparably the more peevish and unlikable opposite Guest's scene-stealing deadpan guitarist... especially during the second act when his Yoko Ono-inspired girlfriend joins the fledgling tour, documented by director Rob Reiner as passively inquisitive/lowrent filmmaker Marti DiBergi, ultimately editing the comeback-tour-revival into the hatchet-job hit-piece we're experiencing...
A band breaking apart, and, like moments of The Beatles 11th hour expose LET IT BE, there's a fair share of bickering and bantering... and in that, the most effective cast member wasn't a fellow improvisational comic actor but an improvisational comedy writer and rock music journalist...
Enter Tony Hendra as steadfast/stalwart yet mercurial/explosive band manager Ian Faith, eventually struggling to get the band through even the smallest venues cancelling: as his plight of possibly losing his job is almost as important as the band losing their decade-long camaraderie/friendship...
The unlucky underdogs-in-peril moments are the most entertaining: their in-between-gig struggles coinciding perfectly with the catchy live performances... leading to McKean's/Hubbins' manipulatively punctuating girlfriend June Chadwick's Jeanine in an ongoing heated battle against Hendra/Faith's control of the band...
Making Hendra and Chadwick the epitome of a supporting cast, doing the thankless expository and sometimes dramatic heavy-lifting alongside the nonstop on-and-off-stage hilarity...
In any genre, there are only two things that even the greatest actors cannot fake: a solid golf swing and the ability to play the guitar (or seem like you're actually playing)...
And how co-guitarists McKean and Guest and barometer bassist Shearer were able to tone down their genuinely masterful skills is what makes the band itself seem more real than fictional - and at this point, THIS IS SPINAL TAP is really more documentary than mockumentary.
Other than a few exceptions, like Woody Allen's 1969 crime satire TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN and the more befitting RUTLES: ALL YOU NEED IS CASH, the mockumentary device wasn't common when TAP began gaining an immense cult following during the 1980's video boom...
The original artwork didn't have images of Guest's naively spaced-out lead-guitarist Nigel Tufnel, Michael McKean's moody lead-singer/co-guitarist David St. Hubbins, or Harry Shearer's affable middle-man bassist Derk Smalls, but the colorful painting of a guitar tied in a knot...
Anyone back then knew exactly what that poster was parodying, since AIRPLANE was still a highly revered joke-every-ten-seconds classic... and both the mile-high-disaster and pseudo-rocker satire had a strong-enough central plot-line to rest all the nonstop hilarious moments on...
American actor/musicians portray a British band that's been through decades of genre-changes and a multitude of dead drummers, and it's really a character-driven comedy with two polar-opposite leads, particularly narrowed into Christopher Guest's passive pawn to McKean's straight-mannish alpha...
Who's comparably the more peevish and unlikable opposite Guest's scene-stealing deadpan guitarist... especially during the second act when his Yoko Ono-inspired girlfriend joins the fledgling tour, documented by director Rob Reiner as passively inquisitive/lowrent filmmaker Marti DiBergi, ultimately editing the comeback-tour-revival into the hatchet-job hit-piece we're experiencing...
A band breaking apart, and, like moments of The Beatles 11th hour expose LET IT BE, there's a fair share of bickering and bantering... and in that, the most effective cast member wasn't a fellow improvisational comic actor but an improvisational comedy writer and rock music journalist...
Enter Tony Hendra as steadfast/stalwart yet mercurial/explosive band manager Ian Faith, eventually struggling to get the band through even the smallest venues cancelling: as his plight of possibly losing his job is almost as important as the band losing their decade-long camaraderie/friendship...
The unlucky underdogs-in-peril moments are the most entertaining: their in-between-gig struggles coinciding perfectly with the catchy live performances... leading to McKean's/Hubbins' manipulatively punctuating girlfriend June Chadwick's Jeanine in an ongoing heated battle against Hendra/Faith's control of the band...
Making Hendra and Chadwick the epitome of a supporting cast, doing the thankless expository and sometimes dramatic heavy-lifting alongside the nonstop on-and-off-stage hilarity...
In any genre, there are only two things that even the greatest actors cannot fake: a solid golf swing and the ability to play the guitar (or seem like you're actually playing)...
And how co-guitarists McKean and Guest and barometer bassist Shearer were able to tone down their genuinely masterful skills is what makes the band itself seem more real than fictional - and at this point, THIS IS SPINAL TAP is really more documentary than mockumentary.
Rob Reiner's completely unanticipated sequel to THIS IS SPINAL TAP wants to play it both ways: on the one hand, the fictional Heavy Metal group hasn't played together for years, their music is forgotten, and they have insanely mundane/downright bizarre jobs, like making cheese or creating background themes to cellular on-hold services...
But at the same time, while the old boys are reunited in a homey New Orleans studio, anticipating one big reunion show, they're visited by and jam with the likes of Paul McCartney and Elton John (who both consider them "legendary") with a sold-out crowd singing along to their lyrics, even somehow understanding the ironical nuances of their stage show (like the size of Stonehenge)...
Meanwhile, Rob Reiner's narrating-filmmaker Martin DiBergi isn't the aloof documentarian returning to his previous subjects, all acting out in a series of disconnected vignettes like from an attempted mainstream comedy... where Reiner awkwardly tries being more witty than the title characters...
Then there are entirely unnecessary copy/pasted fan-service bits bringing back memorable characters from the original... from Paul Schaffer to Fran Drescher to June Chadwick...
But they never connect to the new characters attempting to replace Chadwick's scheming Yoko Ono type, who desperately battled then-band-manager (now deceased) Tony Hendra as Ian Faith...
Here Faith's daughter has inherited that one final show the band's forced to participate in (yet there's neither urgency or chemistry in their initial reuniting), and she's up against obnoxious promoter Chris Addison, all primed as the token obnoxious antagonist: who never has time to capably (or humorously) antagonize anyone...
Meanwhile, the original consisted of perfectly selected moments, culled from hours of improvised footage that turned into what became a sort of accidental classic, particularly popular during the video boom...
Which had spurned Michael McKeon as moody lead-vocalist/guitarist David St. Hubbins, Christopher Guest as affably spaced-out lead-guitarist Nigel Tufnel, and Harry Shearer as cool barometer bassist Derek Smalls to put out several studio albums and genuine world tours in the interim (meanwhile Guest, who had continued the mockumentary tradition, would have been a far more logical choice to direct)...
But SPINAL TAP 2 isn't really about that band or that band's quirky members, or the real life Americans-portraying-British musicians who deliberately underplay their genuine musical abilities (not an easy task)... and are the fans within this movie (including McCartney) fans of the group itself, or DiBergi's "hatchet job" documentary about them?
Overall, THE END CONTINUES is a benign and utterly forgettable parody-of-a-parody that hardly even belongs on a bonus section of yet another remastered edition of 1984's THIS IS SPINAL TAP, the character-driven cult-classic that had an actual beginning, middle and end.
But at the same time, while the old boys are reunited in a homey New Orleans studio, anticipating one big reunion show, they're visited by and jam with the likes of Paul McCartney and Elton John (who both consider them "legendary") with a sold-out crowd singing along to their lyrics, even somehow understanding the ironical nuances of their stage show (like the size of Stonehenge)...
Meanwhile, Rob Reiner's narrating-filmmaker Martin DiBergi isn't the aloof documentarian returning to his previous subjects, all acting out in a series of disconnected vignettes like from an attempted mainstream comedy... where Reiner awkwardly tries being more witty than the title characters...
Then there are entirely unnecessary copy/pasted fan-service bits bringing back memorable characters from the original... from Paul Schaffer to Fran Drescher to June Chadwick...
But they never connect to the new characters attempting to replace Chadwick's scheming Yoko Ono type, who desperately battled then-band-manager (now deceased) Tony Hendra as Ian Faith...
Here Faith's daughter has inherited that one final show the band's forced to participate in (yet there's neither urgency or chemistry in their initial reuniting), and she's up against obnoxious promoter Chris Addison, all primed as the token obnoxious antagonist: who never has time to capably (or humorously) antagonize anyone...
Meanwhile, the original consisted of perfectly selected moments, culled from hours of improvised footage that turned into what became a sort of accidental classic, particularly popular during the video boom...
Which had spurned Michael McKeon as moody lead-vocalist/guitarist David St. Hubbins, Christopher Guest as affably spaced-out lead-guitarist Nigel Tufnel, and Harry Shearer as cool barometer bassist Derek Smalls to put out several studio albums and genuine world tours in the interim (meanwhile Guest, who had continued the mockumentary tradition, would have been a far more logical choice to direct)...
But SPINAL TAP 2 isn't really about that band or that band's quirky members, or the real life Americans-portraying-British musicians who deliberately underplay their genuine musical abilities (not an easy task)... and are the fans within this movie (including McCartney) fans of the group itself, or DiBergi's "hatchet job" documentary about them?
Overall, THE END CONTINUES is a benign and utterly forgettable parody-of-a-parody that hardly even belongs on a bonus section of yet another remastered edition of 1984's THIS IS SPINAL TAP, the character-driven cult-classic that had an actual beginning, middle and end.
It's pretty amazing that you have a man with a life-changing disease, who was fired from a dream job getting 2M dollars per situation-comedy episode, who did every drug in the book and actually made excessive drug-taking seem cool to kids on the internet...
With all that, the director of AKA CHARLIE SHEEN seems intent on capturing Sheen's smug, cat-that-ate-the-canary grin about all the things that lead to one persons' complete and utter downfall...
Has it been long enough since the famous (or infamous) 2011 "Winning" meltdown that this all all really cool now?
That's surprising given the whole MeToo Movement... backed by Netflix from the start... who made this kind of lionizing glimpse into womanizing and women-beating so... not popular... especially on Netflix...
But other than the fact the writer/director seems like an adoring fanboy not only interviewing Charlie Sheen but celebrating his actions, you have a subject that's interesting enough to merit what's actually a pretty interesting documentary...
That's sporadically effective also despite how many unnecessary filler distractions are spliced throughout almost every word Sheen speaks about his roller-coaster life...
The famous indie MY DINNER WITH ANDRE had a far less interesting subject with very few edits... So of all people, Charlie "I've Done Everything Under the Sun" Sheen didn't need every syllable spoken to be orchestrated/backed by some kind of pop culture snippet, ranging from Charlie's own films (including Super 8 footage from childhood) to various old commercials...
Also, the interviews weren't as good as they could have been, including Sheen's ex-wife Nicole Richards, who pretends she was reluctant to be interviewed, and that without her input the doc wouldn't be as interesting (her own words)...
The only truly interesting/semi-honest person here is Sheen himself, who had had the world hypnotized rambling on cheap smoky-roomed online videos during his breakdown, and yet, this sycophantic (and sometimes downright intrusive) director didn't seem to have the faith that Sheen himself could carry his vehicle...
But since Netflix only makes personal-propaganda pieces disguised as documentaries, in the end, no matter who's being covered, you can't delve any deeper than personal promotion.
With all that, the director of AKA CHARLIE SHEEN seems intent on capturing Sheen's smug, cat-that-ate-the-canary grin about all the things that lead to one persons' complete and utter downfall...
Has it been long enough since the famous (or infamous) 2011 "Winning" meltdown that this all all really cool now?
That's surprising given the whole MeToo Movement... backed by Netflix from the start... who made this kind of lionizing glimpse into womanizing and women-beating so... not popular... especially on Netflix...
But other than the fact the writer/director seems like an adoring fanboy not only interviewing Charlie Sheen but celebrating his actions, you have a subject that's interesting enough to merit what's actually a pretty interesting documentary...
That's sporadically effective also despite how many unnecessary filler distractions are spliced throughout almost every word Sheen speaks about his roller-coaster life...
The famous indie MY DINNER WITH ANDRE had a far less interesting subject with very few edits... So of all people, Charlie "I've Done Everything Under the Sun" Sheen didn't need every syllable spoken to be orchestrated/backed by some kind of pop culture snippet, ranging from Charlie's own films (including Super 8 footage from childhood) to various old commercials...
Also, the interviews weren't as good as they could have been, including Sheen's ex-wife Nicole Richards, who pretends she was reluctant to be interviewed, and that without her input the doc wouldn't be as interesting (her own words)...
The only truly interesting/semi-honest person here is Sheen himself, who had had the world hypnotized rambling on cheap smoky-roomed online videos during his breakdown, and yet, this sycophantic (and sometimes downright intrusive) director didn't seem to have the faith that Sheen himself could carry his vehicle...
But since Netflix only makes personal-propaganda pieces disguised as documentaries, in the end, no matter who's being covered, you can't delve any deeper than personal promotion.
