This is Spinal Tap (1984)

Film: This is Spinal Tap (1984)
Stars: Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, Rob Reiner, Fran Drescher
Director: Rob Reiner
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I have not had the best luck when it comes to revisiting classic comedies of the 1980's in the past decade.  Movies like Animal House or Airplane!, movies that are considered the gold standard for the genre, are totally lost on me.  This is a little bit because comedies generally rely upon being of-the-moment.  Few films can function as well in every decade like, say, Some Like It Hot or Young Frankenstein, forever timeless.  However, that's also a sign of a movie that didn't age well, which a movie should-film is something that should resonate across generations even if it was made for only one, which is something I'm going to hold against This is Spinal Tap, a movie that has developed an absolute cult following that I found, well, dull.

(Spoilers Ahead) For those unfamiliar, the movie is a rock mockumentary, meant to parody films like  The Last Waltz (about The Band) or Don't Look Back (about Bob Dylan), which had been popular in the 1960's & 70's, but in this case it's about a mediocre singing group who enjoyed a couple of minor hits in other genres, but whose transition to heavy metal has not been greeted with a grand fanfare.  Their shows are increasingly in limited venues, and the crowds are getting smaller.  The band (McKean, Guest, & Shearer make up Spinal Tap) has quite a bit of infighting, including McKean's David falling for a Yoko Ono-type figure, and there's a recurring gag about how the drummers in the band all die in mysterious circumstances.  However, in the end the band reunites after one of their songs becomes a major hit in Japan (which is an inside joke in the rock industry about how certain bands enjoy pockets of success in select regions of the world).

Spinal Tap is thankfully brief, but I left unimpressed.  Its reputation might be because the film would end up inspiring a whole host of filmmakers in the years that followed, including lead actor Christopher Guest, who would make his own series of mockumentary films that would enjoy a devoted fanbase.  In many ways this is the modern template for such films-movies that take the documentary form and fictionalize it, which would at the very least make this style of movie groundbreaking.

But it's not very good.  The jokes and motifs in the movie are dated & not that funny.  Like most 1980's films, there's a strong dose of sexism intermingled with the humor, to the point where you kind of want to check in on the marginalized women in the film to see if any of them would like to be portrayed as something other than a "harpy" or someone-to-have-sex-with.  If it's satire, it's hard to find a way to connect with it as someone who was born after it came out (and therefore didn't grow up with it at all), and if I'm going to try & disregard my generation, I can't disregard the misogyny.  The film is intriguing, and it's impossible not to see the pop culture it inspired, but I found it a bore.