Apparently not everybody treasures Spinal Tap the way I do. "Spinal Tap 2:The End Continues” should have had a nice moderate run at the box office and been beloved by fans of the band. Instead it's a neglected pebble on the beach, kicked out of the way by people who should be embracing it and ignored by the people who created it except for the four main stars, who are doing their best to try and sell the film in the face of public indifference.
Spinal Tap is a fictional band, but the music is real and the performances are live. Famously the structure of these movies is the framework that existed before the movie started but most of the material that fills it in is improvised by the stars themselves. Harry Shearer, Michael McKean and Christopher Guest are joined by Rob Reiner returning as his fictional director Marty de Bergey. They all improvise and kibitz their way through a reunion concert that is filled with intrigue, and the usual antics of narcissistic rock artists.
The 41 years that have passed since the original film, have seen changes in the music industry, and the way films are made and marketed. Those changes must have been significant enough to render this film impotent in the face of the new World Order. I say that because I completely enjoyed this movie, and I laughed a lot. The only thing that I thought was missing were new original songs that might match up to the brilliance of the original soundtrack album. To compensate we get Cameo appearances by some big rock stars who sing some of the Spinal Tap Originals. Paul McCartney comes in during rehearsals and with his quiet respectful comments, he manages to antagonize David St, Hubbins. A perfect example of Rockstar megalomania gone to the extreme.
A much longer insertion into the story is Elton John, who not only appears in the rehearsal stages but shows up for the performance of the climactic song of Spinal Taps reunion concert, “Stonehenge”. Fans of the original will be anticipating disaster and they won't be disappointed, although it's an exact reversal of what happened in the first film. In between these appearances we had a series of drummers who rejected the idea of joining Tap for a one-off performance, which is understandable given the history of Spinal Tap drummers.
I talked about this movie a couple of weeks ago with some of the other Lambs on the LAMBcast, one of whom enjoyed it almost as much as I did, and the other found a few things to be entertained by but he was not as nostalgic as we were for the return of Tap. I guess his attitude reflects the modern world more than my own. It's a complete shame to me that this movie managed to have such a minuscule box office weekend, and some other crap is going to pull in more simply because it fits into a genre that is popular in September. Oh well it's a fine line between clever and stupid, the stars and director of this film fall on the clever side of the line, the audience falls on the other.
