Dakota Beacon

On or about 7:10 pm, Wednesday, September 17^th, a Minnesota mother and two of her children entered an otherwise empty theater and were ambushed by former comedians and assaulted for approximately ninety minutes.

Movies are generally a waste of time and money and the choice between spending twenty or thirty bucks and up to three hours on a movie or staying home and doing literally anything else is not one I have to ponder very long. But once in a while I act against my better judgment and bet on a turkey to fly.

In the case of the latest such bird, Spinal Tap II – The End Continues, I had reason to expect something of value. The first (the real) Spinal Tap, which came out in 1984 or so, directed by Rob Reiner, was, to my knowledge, the first time Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer appeared together. They became the nucleus of what, about a decade later, would emerge as a comedy troupe, essentially, which gave us some of the best humor of the last several decades.

I was not up, last Friday, for a movie, so I stopped into my local cineplex to ascertain whether their website was reliable and that the film in question would be shown throughout the week, and somehow ended up in a really enjoyable conversation with a couple from California and we just talked about comedians and movies and Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and … Christopher Guest. I have little reason to believe our political sympathies would align, but our tastes in humor did and I thought, naively, that comedy was something that can unite, or let’s be more precise, transcend differences in politics or other parameters like race, class, religion. I thought, to paraphrase Voltaire, “I may disagree with you, but I’ll die laughing at the same jokes as you.”

Anon I will get to what political faction may or may not have to do with this movie review, but first I have to get on with the actual review.

This movie was not funny. Not remotely. Something happens when you realize what you are stuck watching that is not engaging. You start wondering: Why did they make this? What was their ulterior motive?

One thing I thought is: there is a point, in a supposed comedy, beyond which, if nothing funny has happened, nothing funny can happen. If you go to a movie, thinking it’s going to be a musical, and after a certain duration of time, no feet start tapping nor vocal cords pipe, whatever you’re watching ain’t a musical and if the male and female leads start dancing thirty minutes in, it’s too late. The audience has expectations. Okay, let’s say you go to a fireworks show on the Fourth of July. It’s ten o’clock and not one firework is seen in the sky. Finally, around ten twenty-five, the wannest of colors sprays, like the mist from a can of disinfectant on its last gasp, into the sky and you’re supposed to be satisfied that that’s your fireworks.

That’s as good an analogy as I can think of for what this movie was like.

It’s the “Think System” approach to comedy that Christopher Guest & co. put on the table. The laughs aren’t there. You have to imagine them. All eight people who will ever read this article already know that, at the end of The Music Man, Professor Harold Hill extracts a miracle out of the place he’d hitherto used exclusively to sound his unique brand of wind instruments. (I’m sure Ayn Rand wrote a diatribe about how The Music Man was subversive but who cares?) MY point here is that, at least, in the case of The Music Man, seventy-six trombones did lead the big parade (with a hundred and ten cornets close at hand). At least in Meredith Willson’s universe, the think system works. In Christopher Guest’s, Michael McKean’s, Harry Shearer’s and Rob Reiner’s universe, it doesn’t.

I think a lot of movie reviews go astray by even condescending to plot description and such and I don’t want to tip my hat at all by doing so, but I suppose it is necessary, in a movie review, to grudgingly concede some reference to what are ultimately irrelevant disjecta membra.

The rationale for the reunion is a contract, one signer of which died without fulfilling. Legally questionable, but let’s not quibble. Reiner hunts down the Christopher Guest character (Nigel Tufnel) and he’s running a cheese and guitar shop. This is the make or break moment of the movie. We’ve been diddling around now for about ten minutes (or real-feel fifteen) and the six sides in the theater I was in showed no evidence of splittage. What’s our heure d’ouvre? A guitar and cheese shop. If it sounds like I already told you the punch line, it’s because I did. Get it? Cause guitar and cheese don’t go together.

This movie relied on ghosts of jokes from earlier movies. It’s undignified to even describe the attempts at humor. In the real Spinal Tap, a gum-chewing Christopher Guest is asked “Why not just have ten be eleven?” and Guest answers, after deliberation, “This one goes to eleven.” In the new Spinal Tap movie, he still has the gum, but instead of “This one goes to eleven”, he opens up a battery box (that I have never seen in an electric guitar) with a tiny cheese grater and a bit of cheese. And in case you weren’t howling at the guitar and cheese shop, wait till you see Harry Shearer’s glue museum. Rob Reiner is interviewing him and Harry Shearer invites Reiner to sniff the oldest glue of such-and-such a variety and gets glue up his nose. Sorry, did your brain stop working? Are you not impressed by the scaled-up prop buttocks in their revival of “Big Bottom” that accidentally emit gas during a rehearsal?

This is comedy substitute. If someone were to tell Bill Gates what comedy is, he would jump to buy up stock in this pig’s breakfast of a movie for the sheer reason that this ain’t even funny’s neckin’ cousin. His chitin burgers are probably closer to real burgers than this is to a funny movie.

And here’s the thing. When you watch something suck you are left to question why this suckage was made. When entertainment of any conceivable kind is violently thrown off the table, you have to wonder what the entertainers had in mind. The entertainers, in this case, were masters of comedy. Christopher Guest being the ring-leader and giving us characters who were both foolish and likable. He was Corky Saint Clair in Waiting For Guffman. Corky was a gay director of a local theater company in a Missouri podunk who would be recognizable to leftists and right-wingers alike as a both laughable and likable type. That whole movie represented something real about small-town mid-western America and we knew not just Corky, we knew everybody else in that movie. We have all met (maybe not all, but I bet a lot) someone like Corky and people exactly like the other characters in that movie. Contrast Guest and company’s treatment of mid-western life to the ineptitude of the Cohen brothers’ misfire, Fargo, which displayed about as much understanding of the real mid-west as you might expect a goat-herder from the Altai mountains to display of a Broadway musical. With songs by Cole Porter.

All those movies have this quality about them. A combination of the kind of people one might really encounter in a situation that might be alien but is fruitful for comedy.

It was funny seeing Fred Willard turning to the camera, like Oliver Hardy, saying “Now I know what it looks like to stare down into the Grand Canyon.” That was a scene where Catherine O’Hara got drunk after not getting nominated for an Oscar (in the movie For Your Consideration). There’s so many scenes from these movies that form in-jokes in my family. That dork that moved to North Dakota. We laugh at that guy because we recognize him.

Because I never saw any of these movies in theaters, I get mixed up on what scenes were “out-takes” and what scenes were shown on screen, but I think some of the funnier ones were out-takes. Harlan Pepper, Guest’s character of a southerner entering his bloodhound in a dog show, in Best In Show, was jaw-dropping. It’s not just him, it’s all of them. Parker Posie. She could morph from that psychotic fiend in Best In Show, engaged in endless warfare with her equally neurotic husband, to an ain’t-I-cute working at a DQ in Missouri (again, Guffman) and it was a pleasure to watch her because she was good. And Michael McKean was good, too. He had this sardonic edge to him that all those of us who’ve seen these movies will have noticed and appreciated. Even now, I take pleasure in how really irritable he could come across in The Mighty Wind, for example. Caustic. He’s caustic.  

The specific examples of humor that these guys came up with are nigh innumerable. These are people who made us laugh. And they now give us this.

What is this? What is this disgusting thing that they have offered up for us? It is not a comedy. Is it a melodrama? To say “This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen” is akin to saying, “This is the worst sh#t sandwich I’ve ever eaten”. A bold but claim but meaningless if true. This probably is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but that is the least of its problems.

I have been offended by movies (Black Swan), I have been non-plussed by movies (that thing about Whitney Houston), I have been confused by movies (or rather, why they were made – like that cowboy epic Kevin Costner made a couple years back) but this movie is something new to me. This is the first time I felt like a movie was telling me to f#ck myself under the Christmas Tree and tell the kids Santa wasn’t bringing any presents this year.

Spinal Tap II – The End Continues is an angry film. A few ineffectual attempts at humor aside, this movie is more like what I imagine a soap opera to be like. There’s a snotty little impressario who’s always got his wares tied up and an empathic female side-kick who wants to let the aged rock stars sit about in chairs when he snarls that they need to stand up.

It’s almost as if they let Englishmen take over the writing of this “comedy”. And I don’t mean Rowan Atkinson Englishmen. I mean Keir Starmer Englishmen.

I recommend to anyone considering going to see this movie to sit in a bus stop in Barrow, Alaska instead because it’s certainly more fun. But let’s go back to this question. Why did they go through with this? At any point, surely someone could have pulled the plug.

Well, maybe the film-makers were subject to such a scurrilous contract as the benighted band and the film itself. Maybe they just had to. They didn’t want to. They just had to. So they torched their legacy as revenge for having to make such a sh#tty movie. Or maybe they were angry because of MAGA. Things like this happen. Now, Will Farrell was never a funny man, but he was a comedian and he did something similar about two years ago where he disavowed comedy (formally) and made a movie where he went on a road trip with his best friend who decided to turn into a woman. I didn’t see that movie and neither did you, but we can imagine what sort of a joyride it was.

We are left to wonder if some similar psychology is at play here. Was this their revenge against the conservative revival of the last few years? The left is at odds with reality, whether it be with regard to feminism, multiculturalism, mostly-peaceful protests (systemic racism) or transgenderism. One of their rules of engagement in this warfare is to inundate all available channels of influence with their falsehoods and dumbfound potential non-believers by repetition and ubiquity.

Will Ferrell can be seen as a sort of pilgrim who, having wandered lost in the wilds of his own mediocrity years on end, finally found the true religion and renounced all his previous ways – making fun of people, etc… Is this what happened with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and the rest of them? Did they discover the holy tablet that decreed “Thou shalt not be funny?”

I don’t know, but if such a religious conversion took place, it is far more whole-hearted in true comedic geniuses such as the afore-mentioned than it was in a comedian whose whole shtick was a false-posture to begin with. That aside, the religion to which they may or may not have converted is a false religion inasmuch as any religion can possibly be true, because a religion presupposes a creator, and one thing we can be certain of is that we humans, whether created or not, possess a faculty not only for laughter but of discerning that which is funny and that which isn’t. If the claim of the left is that laughter is a sin – and that’s definitely the claim of Will Ferrell and, seemingly Guest and company, why package salvation in the cloak of sin?

This movie was made not to be enjoyed, but to negate enjoyment altogether, and in that respect, it is a tour-de-force. If you want to know, like Fred Willard, what it looks like to stare down into the Grand Canyon, watch Spinal Tap – The End Continues.