Spinal Tap! Now we're talking. Hey, do some Jarmusch flicks, like Ghost Dog, any of em, really. The recent one, Dead Don't Die got shit on, majorly, but I dig it, bigtime. If you're looking for dry and deadpan, can't go wrong with Jarmusch.
This film is a classic. There are quite a few more of these with a few of this cast and writers that you need to see . Best in show , Waiting for Gufman , A Mighty Wind are where you should start.
@@rostoff Yep. To be fair, reactors gotta say things while they're watching so it will happen but that one also stood out for me as it flew right by her like that fly in her room.
the marshall amplifier that goes to "11" is one of the most iconic lines from this film. pretty much an entire generation of musicians have been goofing on that scene for decades now. it's entered the popular culture to an extent where it has been referenced to in other areas as well. hence the "rating of 11" instead of 10 on imbd.. marshall actually put out a series of amplifiers that went to 11.
The Stonehenge take off was based on the '83 Black Sabbath tour. The set was so large they couldn't get it through most of the stage entrances of the venues that they played.
I’ve played in six rock bands in my life, and there was at least one Spinal Tap moment in each. I’m sure nearly every professional musician will admit to this as well. The movie still hits just as hard and is infinitely rewatchable and quotable.
Can't remember what guitar mag I read it in, but almost every big band has an embarrassing moment, and the article was titled 'What was your Spinal Tap moment?' Truly funny.
“This is Spinal Tap” isn’t just ‘any’ mockumentary, it’s the OG mockumentary. This is where it all started. Don’t know if you’d be interested, but on the DVD version, the commentary track features the leads commenting in character. Adds a whole new layer of comedy. And yes, there was an actual soundtrack album which features full versions of all the songs in the movie and a bonus track not in the movie. One last fun trivia fact: Jamie Lee Curtis saw the movie and was so enamoured with Nigel Tufnel (Guest) that she married him…😊
Actually, before Spinal Tap and the term 'mockumentary', there was 'The Rutles", done as a TV mockumentary of the history of this fake band, but kind of based on The Beatles. The film included 'early footage' of the band in promotional performances on TV. It was done by a blend of a few members of Monty Python and some members of The Bonzo Dog [Doo Dah] Band. Notable that The Bonzo Dog Band, on their album "Let's Make Up and Be Friendly" had a song titled "Fresh Wound" that over it's 4:26 duration included every Beatles song style from "Meet the Beatles" to "The White Album". And before "The Rutles" was "A Hard Day's Night" which, while centering on a real band, presented a fictional 'documentary' of the band on tour using that same raw footage of interviews and backstage/offhours filming. The director of the film was Richard Lester, best known for darkly comical satirical films. You could take scenes from both The Rutles and Hard Day's Night and intercut them with Spinal Tap and only the clothes and the graininess of the film stock would differentiate them. Spinal Tap is not where it all started, but they did an incredible job of continuing it.
A Mighty Wind and Best In Show are both excellent as well, both starring improv aces such as Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Jane Lynch, Jennifer Coolidge, Parker Posy, etc.
This movie is beyond a cult classic. Anybody who has EVER been in a band can relate to 3/4s of the scenes. One of the biggest reasons this flick didn't do well at the box office was because alot of the audience thought it was an actual documentary. Without 'This is Spinal Tap" there is no 'Office", no 'parks and Rec'...so ahead of its' time.
When I was a teenager, I thought that Spinal Tap were a real band, and that they were just crap, so I refused to watch This Is Spinal Tap for years. When I finally did watch it, I had about ten years experience of playing in bands, which I think made it all the funnier, mainly because I pretty much was Nigel Tufnell.
As a big fan of another of Christopher Guest's films, A Mighty Wind, one of my favourite stories about Spinal Tap was how, when touring as the band, McKean, Guest, and Shearer would dress up as folk singers and go onstage as their own opening act, the Folksmen, who would go on to be a major part of A Mighty Wind. Apparently some of the audiences didn't get the joke and would boo them. Oh, and the score on IMDB goes up to 11 because 11 is higher.
So happy you are doing this movie. I hope you are planning to watch all the Christopher Guest mockumentaries (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Might Wind). You will love them all.
Rob Reiner was honestly one of the best film directors of the 80s and early 90s, his track record was genuinely unbelievable. This is Spinal Tap; Stand By Me; The Princess Bride; When Harry Met Sally; Misery - he really did not miss during that time period
Mockery has to be rooted in obvious truths in order to be funny. Otherwise it just comes across as mean. That's why a movie like this works, because it's not mean, it's making fun of stuff that's real and we all know it.
A lot of performers commented that when people were laughing, they wanted to cry. Or at least hide in embarrassment because they'd had the same stuff happen to them. I'm sure, years later they could laugh at it, but when it's fresh in your memory you don't need a reminder.
Harry Shearer and Michael McKeon have also had LEGENDARY careers. Shearer voices a number of the Simpsons characters, while McKeon has co-starred in everything from Laverne and Shirley to Better Call Saul
The Rutles, a spoof of The Beatles, is also an excellent movie. In fact it the songs were so close to the real thing, they were sued by The Beatles record company, yet George Harrison was in it and the other three members of the group were on record liking it.
@@LeChaunce Both Ringo and Lennon liked it according to Idle as they sang Ouch! to him, and Yoko Ono liked it as well.This is according to an interview with ThLipTv on RU-vid.
@@rogermorris9696 It was Ringo and George who sang "Ouch!" to them (again, Idle's commentary track). Idle did say John and Yoko loved it (especially the bit about their version of Yoko's father "inventing World War II") but warned them that the song "Get Up And Go" was a little too close and they may get sued... which, as you know, they did (that's also why that song was left off the original soundtrack album)! :D During his promotion for the Cloud Nine album, George was doing radio interviews and I heard him talk about how they ended up having to co-credit Lennon/McCartney on the songs and they ended up getting owned by Michael Jackson along with the real Beatles catalog.
@@oaf-77 Nah, you can't forget Wha Happen? Its a classic too, but his add libs in Best in Show were always my favourites. I mean... the guy was brilliant whatever he did TBH.
Not only was one of the mime waiters Billy Crystal, the other mime waiter (the blonde one) was Dana Carvey (Garth). Artie Fufkin is Paul Shaffer from David Letterman. The reason they had cold sores on their lips is reference to some scenes that didn't make the cut. If you watch the extra material (the scenes that were cut, which altogether are about as long as the movie itself), they picked up some groupies (one of which was played by a young Sandra Bullock) and she had a herpes sore on her lip, so the joke is that they were both sleeping with her and caught her herpes. I highly recommend watching the extra stuff that was cut, it's awesome.
angelica huston played the woman who made the mini stonehenge prop, Boston is indeed a big college city, a lot of the side characters are played by actors often featured in rob’s other films
Fun fact: Ed Begley, Jr. was actually a drummer with a band called Every Mother's Son in the 60's. They had a semi-one hit wonder with the song "Come Down to My Boat Baby", or something like that.
Every Mother's Son wasn't a "semi-one-hit wonder", it was a *true* one-hit wonder. "Come on Down to My Boat" hit #6 on the *Billboard* chart in July 1967. It was their only single that reached the Top 40. Ed Begley, Jr. was not in the band when they had that hit. He's best known for being a series regular in the '80s TV medical drama *St. Elsewhere* . Or, if you're an old film buff, you probably recognize the name because his father, Ed Begley, won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing Boss Finley in *Sweet Bird of Youth* (1962), which starred Paul Newman. His dad was also in the original version of *12 Angry Men* (1957), *The Unsinkable Molly Brown* (1964), and he also played the leader of the hanging party in *Hang 'Em High* (1968), Clint Eastwood's first big Western shot in America after he had risen to fame in Europe doing spaghetti Westerns.
Friends and I were absolutely obsessed with the movie, when it came out. We pretty much had the script memorized and talked in “Tap” for months. Anything on the news wasn’t a disaster… it was “all mucky muck”… whenever anyone got lost, “If you’d drive without some f*cking angel hanging over your head.” We could shoehorn the dialogue into any situation. 🤘🤘🤘
Christopher Guest (with Eugene Leavy) is the master of Deep Character improve movie making. A Mighty Wind, Best in Show, Mascots, and especially for a theatre kid like yourself Waiting for Guffman are all terrific and you will love them all.
"Why did they do that?" They allowed 11 out of 10 because "these go to 11." A famous line from the movie. Christopher Guest, the one playing the guitarist, he was the six-fingered man in The Princess Bride. Billy Crystal was also in The Princess Bride as Miracle Max, the one that made the pill to bring Wesley back to life. He was the chatty mime in this, the one you thought you recognized the voice.
As has been mentioned, the dialogue was almost all ad libbed. They had an outline of the characters and a backstory so they could have a common past, so to speak, but then let the actors go wild. Brilliant.
The funny thing is that the wealthiest actor among this group is Harry Shearer. He has been one of the main voice actors for The Simpsons since the very beginning.
So many subtle lines: “People envy us… I envy us!!!” always gets me. And the “He wrote this!!!” at the Puppet Show gig is so dead on. Every bar band that tries an original song seems to point out whose fault it is in exactly that way. You are the PERFECT audience for this.
Now you'll probably have to watch every movie these guys made together, 'Waiting For Guffman,' 'Best In Show,' 'A Mighty Wind,' and yes they are all improv.
Waiting for Guffman is really good, but my favorite Christoper Guest movie is A Mighty Wind. It's a folk revival mockumentary. Jennifer Cooledge makes an appearance I believe. Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hare star but it also features Christopher Guest, Mike McKean, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey, I think maybe Jane Lynch and just a whole lot of amazing character actors and improvisers.
Talk about demonstrating wild range in just a pair of roles: three years after playing Nigel Tufnel in this movie, Christopher Guest played Count Rugen, the Six-Fingered Man in The Princess Bride. He's also been happily married to Jamie Lee Curtis for decades! Amazing dude.
This is one of those movies that keeps getting better upon multiple viewings. Every time you watch it again you pick up new jokes and details. And "turn it up to 11" has seeped into the culture.
I know this movie for decades, but I just recently learned that the singer David is played by Michael McKean, who played Saul Goodmans brother Chuck in Better Call Soul. I would never ever had recognized that by myself.
@@kjmorley Oh, I love “The Avengers” (and not only for Emma Peel 🥰), but never noticed Patrick MacNee in this. Have to take a closer look on the next rewatch.
I was lucky enough to see them perform live when they toured for their Break Like The Wind album. They went the other direction for their Stonehenge set piece.
Glad you mentioned The Princess Bride. The music for that movie was written by Mark Knopfler of the band Dire Straits, who was a huge Spinal Tap fan. He agreed to do it under the joke condition that Marty Di Bergi’s hat had to appear somewhere in the film. Rob Reiner took it seriously, it is hanging on Fred Savage’s bed throughout the movie.
In the days before the internet you could find Spinal Tap across a bunch of different media. I had the soundtrack (of course) but also their follow-up album, Break Like The Wind. They would appear in character on a variety of talk shows and would even write articles for music magazines as their characters. I remember a Guitar Magazine article where Nigel introduced the Amp Capo, a device that would squeeze your amp into a different key. Then there's a Christmas Television Ad included on the DVD - and an anniversary version has a commentary track from the band that is so good it's like watching a whole new movie. You'll be surprised to learn that Keyboardist Viv Savage was the next in the band to spontaneously combust. The other members were shocked to realize that he had been a drummer all along.
Shanelle, I just found your channel and I really appreciate your content. Your love of movies and the work that goes into making them is refreshing. I was born in 1970 and love watching your reactions to the 70’s and 80’s films. As I was watching your Spinal Tap reaction, I wanted so badly to just be able to answer all your questions as they popped up in your head. I was constantly wanting to point out actors that I know you know (because of your love and and respect of the industry and art) and to clue you into upcoming call backs on jokes and situations.
Oh my gosh Shanelle! “These go to 11”. Not even a chuckle. Anyone over 40 who has ever been in a garage band laughs at that line, even after hearing it 10,000 times. I now realize you were never in a rock band, and I am old.
Saw it when it came out and yes, it was an instant classic. Every rock musician knows this movie backwards and forwards and every time you watch it, you catch something else. YOU pointed out something I NEVER noticed, even though I've seen it countless times. (The cast of the Wiz on the sign.) The fact you were familiar with the different periods of music was a huge plus for this reaction; you got what they parodying. Wasn't Fran Drescher amazing in this? It's my favorite of all her performances! THANKS SHANELLE! So happy you did this one. 1984 was a good year for brilliant, one-of-a-kind comedies: "Broadway Danny Rose" and "Repo Man" came out that year, you'd love both of those.
I suggest "Anvil: The Story of Anvil". Its basically Spinal Tap in real life. If time periods were switched, you'd think Spinal Tap was based off of Anvil.
Saw it in the theater when it came out and just LOVED it. Christopher Guest took this improv filmmaking technique to make his own kind of mockumentary subgenre. He's made several such movies with recurring players over the decades. My personal favorite is Waiting for Guffman. Music is a constant in Guest's movies and the songs are consistently brilliant. Michael McKean and Annette O'Toole do a lot of the songwriting. Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy also do a lot of songwriting and performing for these movies. I won't tall you anything more but, just check out Waiting for Guffman. It's magical.
When Spinal Tap guested on the Simpsons, they even finished that joke! One of them has a hand written Springfield sign taped to the back of his guitar so he wouldn't forget.
Spinal Tap actually toured to help film the movie, and they've toured multiple time since then -- they released a second album in the early '90s. There's an in-character/in-universe commentary track with David, Nigel and Derek where they trash the documentary and Marty Di Bergi for making them look like like idiots and it's as hysterical as the movie.
My neighbors father played bass for his church. I was talking to him one day about guitars (I was in a few bands in middle/high school) and he told me about This is Spinal Tap. He kept laughing about the pod not opening and with the drummers all dying in weird ways. So, I had to see this, and I did.
Also, Michael McKean (David the singer) you have seen in Clue as Mr. Green and Harry Shearer (Derek the bass player) is known for voicing Mr. Burns, Waylon Smithers and Principal Seymour Skinner in The Simpsons. Speaking of The Simpsons, the actors actually voiced their Spinal Tap characters in an episode of the show and this is from an early season when The Simpsons where still funny.
You may like to know that Harry Shearer (Derek Smalls) was the voice of at least 21 characters in The Simpsons. Also, hear’s another nudge for mockumentary “Best In Show.”
I’m so impressed with how much you caught of this movie on first viewing! Especially given the time this was made! Nice job! You’re so great to watch! 💛xo
I've been going through Christopher Guest's (Nigel Tufnel) directorial filmography. All are mockumentaries with the same cast but different characters/stories. Highly recommend Waiting for Guffman, Best In Show, and A Mighty Wind. I haven't seen Mascots yet but I'm sure it's worth a watch too.
The accents. Speaking as a Brit, the first time I saw this it took a while to realise these guys weren't actually English! When you rewatch it you'll pick up on stuff you missed first time I guarantee it. Genius.
One of the best parts is that Derek(Harry Shearer), Nigel(Christopher Guest) and David(Michael McKean) do the DVD commentary in character. During the airport security scene, Derek said the reason the cucumber was wrapped in tinfoil is he didn't want it grafting onto his leg. Wondering if you've ever seen any of the other movies they've done: Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind or my favorite Best in Show
This movie has been such a huge part of my life I forget that people watching it for the first time will miss a ton. I kept waiting for you to react to my favorite lines and you let a lot of them slip by. Watch this over again and you'll keep getting more and more of the jokes. Also, I can't believe you didn't get that the "these go to 11" scene inspired the rating 11 out of 10.
It’s so cool Shan that you love music of the 60s!! I thought I was alone when I was a teen in the late 80s early 90s and loved the oldies and still love it today! So very cool that someone young like you still like this great music! 🎶 ❤️
I was watching a reaction to this by a pair of girls who'd never heard of Spinal Tap & suddenly the one girl recognized Sex Farm & proved it by singing along to it. turns out she used to do some exotic dancing & this was one of the songs!
When Rob Reiner approached Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits to do the score for The Princess Bride, he told him, “only if you put your baseball cap from Spinal Tap in the movie”. The cap is hanging in the grandson’s room. Michael McKeon is the only surviving (main) actor from Laverne & Shirley. He played Lenny. He was also the FBI agent in Clue. Besides Billy Crystal, Dana Carvey from SNL was the other mime, Bruno Kirby was the limo driver, Paul Shaffer from Letterman’s band played Artie. Fred Willard, Howard Hessman and Ed Begley, Jr. were also in it. None of the actors in the band are British.
I knew a girl who watched this on the understanding that it was real. She apparently started to wonder about it after a few scenes but it was the “You can’t dust for vomit” line that made her realise that it was a joke movie. One of the best things about this movie is not how much it spoofed actual bands and artists that went before it (listen to Jeff Beck talking to hear Christopher Guest’s inspiration for Nigel’s accent) but how later bands knew of it’s existence and actually almost confirmed how uncomfortably real it was. Metallica’s black album cover is one example but even better is their own documentary Some Kind Of Monster which I watch every year or so for a brilliant comedy that’s not intended as a comedy. To see a bunch of successful grown men barely able to function as human beings is hilarious.
Shanelle, since you enjoyed the humor in this one, you really have to watch "A Mighty Wind" (another musical one with a great soundtrack), "Waiting For Guffman", "Best In Show" & "For Your Consideration", all great Christopher Guest movies with the same kind of dry humor found in "This Is Spinal Tap".
By complete coincidence the Stonehenge gag is something that happened to Black Sabbath. That gag was first presented to the public on March 2, 1984, when the movie was released. A year earlier, in August 1983, Black Sabbath (one of the primary sources for Spinal Tap) released Born Again (October 1983 in the U.S.), one of their most poorly reviewed efforts. The second track on the album is a brief instrumental called “Stonehenge”-and on their 1983 Born Again tour, Black Sabbath hilariously had to shelve a Stonehenge stage concept because the scenery was much too big to use-someone had misinterpreted the requested foot measurements as meters, making all of the pieces roughly nine times too large (remember your volume calculations in high school geometry?). It’s tempting to conclude that Spinal Tap nicked the gag off of this real-life precursor. But there are problems with this theory. For one thing, Black Sabbath’s North American tour didn’t start until mid-October 1983, and the incident with the Stonehenge set didn’t occur until around October 21, when they hit Montreal. It seems unlikely that they hadn’t finished principal photography on This is Spinal Tap by then (the project had already been kicking around for a while), and nothing about the Stonehenge gag suggests a rush job-a full song was composed, a live rendition was recorded, and so forth. Also, there’s footage from Nine Inch Nails sound check during the 1991 Lollopalooza tour & their crew made a replica of the tiny Stonehenge…..which was then lowered on to the stage 😂😂
Stage failures in rock are legendary. During a show David Bowie rose above the audience in a cherry picker. One night it broke and they had to stop the show and figure out whether to find ladders to get up to him, or rig a system from the ceiling and get him from above. Most bands have a WTF were we thinking/it looked good on paper moments.
@@christopherconard2831 I’ve never heard that story, so thank you for that but of information!! As someone who does theatre & film design; & as someone who’s into rock / metal, I’ve always liked it when bands go all out with their stage sets. That said, the more moving parts massively increases the chances of something going wrong. Notable stand outs of stage design for me are anything Iron Maiden have ever done; especially the Somewhere In Time Tour, Marilyn Manson’s collapsed cathedral for the Dead to The World tour & of course the controversy causing 12’ inflatable penises & cages with dancing girls in the Beastie Boys had for a few shows in the early 80s. Other than Iron Maiden, the only other acts who are continuing to use big stage sets are Alice Cooper & Rammstein. I saw Rammstein on their last European tour in Cardiff & their stage was vast. It weighed somewhere in the region of 130’000 tonnes & the pyrotechnics caused local residents to think the stadium was on fire 😂 I’ve linked the time lapse of the building of it below ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-JgGuRKgvWQ4.html
I was going to see that show but Geezer's bronchitis caused them to cancel it in Vancouver, Seattle and a few others so I missed out. I did see Quiet Riot (the Born Again opening band) their next time through with Kickaxe and Whitesnake.
Michael McKean (David St Hubbins) was in Better Call Saul, playing Saul's brother, Chuck. He graduated from Long Island's North Shore HS as did Kate McKinnon and myself!
They have three albums released as Spinal Tap: This is Spinal Tap (which has all the throwback songs like Flower People on it as well), Break Like the Wind and Back From the Dead. They even play live from time to time (since they actually wrote and performed all the songs).
When Spinal Tap toured in 1992, (Bart and Milhouse went to the show when they came to Springfield) they released a new album, (there are a couple of semi-serious music videos for Majesty of Rock & Bitch School) and they did an actual studio recording of All The Way Home. Everything in this comment is on RU-vid.
This movie is so good. I've shown it to so many people just to watch them react to it. They play this so damn straight the whole time and I have no idea how. So many quotable moments. So many iconic takes on rock. And their songs are absolute bangers. Every one of them. Big Bottoms is awesome. Cups and Cakes is another classic. I honestly want a single release of Nigel's Lick My Love Pump. The bit with the sandwich breads... lol. "But I'm a professional. I'll rise above."
I actually saw Spinal Tap perform live in Philadelphia! They were touring for the Break like the Wind Album. It was so amazing as they were in character the whole time! Derrick Smalls threw tin foil wrapped cucumbers in to the crown and Cher made an appearance on screen to sing a duet with David St. Hubbins on the song " Just Begin Again"! Classic...
This movie literally created the genre of the mockumentary. It came out when I was in high school, and I vividly remember everyone, including movie critics, being slightly confused at first whether Spinal Tap was a real band and this was a serious documentary. To add to the meta theme, the actors actually went on a music tour as the band Spinal Tap and played concerts in real venues, staying in character during the shows, and even did interviews on Johnny Carson and David Letterman totally in character. It was a stroke of marketing genius that seems cliched today only because it has been copied many times over the years by others in lesser attempts.
One of my most favorite movies all time. My parents brought us kids to see this movie when it came out (it was $1 movie night), not knowing that it was a mockumentary. My mom was completely duped. I had to explain to her that the whole thing was a farce. I love the music and the very fact that they did all of their own stuff.
Van Halen and the brown M&Ms was actually a brilliant move. It served two purposes. 1) After previous tours the band would get charged for different things that they felt they were not responsible for. So every show without the proper M&Ms was noted. If they were charged they'd show the clause and could claim the contract was voided by the promoter and he was responsible for any changes. 2) They were one of the first bands to use a heavy amp system hanging above the stage. Many venues couldn't handle it and the band's equipment was damaged. If the promoter didn't read the M&M bit, they probably didn't read the specs for the equipment. So the band could bill promoters for the damage. David Lee Roth has an excellent interview on RU-vid explaining it. Despite coming across as a California party boy, he's a very good businessman. I've seen something similar to the scene from the Air Force base. Triumph had to stop a show in Jacksonville because they were using wireless mics and guitars (Uncommon at the time) that were too close in frequency to the local NBC station. They rewired everything the traditional way and continued the show. The cold sore scene reminded me of Billy Idol. He had to stop a tour because every member of the band (And I presume most of the crew) had to go back to England to be treated for various types of VD and crabs.
