Waiting for Guffman is the funniest movie ever made, after Spinal Tap.Best in Show is flawed, but pretty dang good.
A Mighty Wind had some great moments, but I gotta give it C+, tops.
No real guffaws, and it takes you somewhere interesting then drops the ball and leaves you nowhere. I was might impressed when, despite Eugene Levy’s heavyhanded, clumsy performance, his (and Catherine O’Hara’s) storyline took us in a roundabout way to a truly touching moment, which threatened to surprise us all with the sentiment that, overearnestness and dorkiness notwithstanding, there’s a real heart at the center of American folk music. But then it wobbled, and anticlimaxed from that great and surprising moment into a schticky ending.
The music was great! But, since I was a folkie once, that might have made less of an impresson on you.
A friend (TV and movie director/producer) saw AMW, then saw WfG and said: “It’s the same movie!” So maybe it depends on what you see first. Spinal Tap is, of course, by far the best–the different director may be a factor…
I agree. B- or thereabouts. Very funny stuff, but didn’t work as a whole. I think the Guest team is falling into a formula, which seems to me the antithesis of their approach.
The big reason the movie doesn’t hold together overall, I think, is the nature of the event. Previously, there’s a unifying climax toward which all the stories are driving, and an open question that provides suspense and narrative drive. In Waiting for Guffman, it’s whether or not the producer guy shows up. In Best in Show, it’s the outcome of the canine competition. (Spinal Tap is an exception, and works for different reasons.)
In Mighty Wind, they try to set this up, with the “will they get back together or not” question, but it’s central only to a few characters, which means it isn’t central to the movie. There’s never any suspense about whether or not the concert will happen, so it turns into a list of events where everybody’s hanging around and being eccentric. Some extremely funny schtick (the theater manager whacking the whining Bob Balaban on the head is one of the twenty funniest moments in any of Guest’s movies in this style), but the movie has no center and therefore doesn’t hold together.
I give it a solid B. I liked it better than Best in Show, but not as much as Guffman.
Part of the reason it may not have hit the mark for you is because it’s a generational thing. If you weren’t really exposed to the folkie craze, the music doesn’t really mean anything. Imagine if you had never heard a heavy metal song or been to a heavy metal concert (or didn’t know anything about the Beatles/John/Yoko traingle) how much of Spinal Tap would have fallen flat.
I also disagree that there “never any suspense about whether or not the concert will happen” – in fact, a good portion of the audience I saw it with was holding their breath to see what disaster would happen to destroy the concert.
Where the movie fell down was in the editing. Either before or after shooting, I’m sure there were some sizable chunks cut out of the backstory of the New Main Street Singers. Even though Mary Gross has full credit in the movie, her character is seen only briefly in a TV clip and on a poster, and Paul Dooley’s part is little more than a cameo. Parker Posey seems to have had a lot of material cut, as well as some other discontinuities that suggested heavy cutting.
On the other hand, Laurie Bohner got big laughs every time she was on screen.
I thought the story with Levy and O’Hara’s characters was utterly wonderful, the moment was truly touching, and the ending was…was really one of the most painful things to watch. It was brutally sad. I liked it.
I thought the story with Levy and O’Hara’s characters was utterly wonderful, the moment was truly touching, and the ending was…was really one of the most painful things to watch. It was brutally sad. I liked it.
I was dissapointed by AMW. I continue to think that Waiting for Guffman is the funniest film ever made. Best In Show was not quite up to standard, but still one of the best movies of its year. I would give AMW a C-. I really didn’t care for it and didn’t manage more than a weak chuckle.
Most of the problem was in the performances. I didn’t feel the actors knew what was supposed to be funny. The story lurched from funny to poignant without succeeding at either.
Strangely the music was too good for the movie. There was no parody of folk music, because the songs were no better and no worse than the standard folk songs of the era. I will still see their next effort, but I can’t imagine I will rent AMW again.
I remember one of my initial reactions to AMW: “Geez, it’s painful to see all these scatological and sexual innuendo jokes. . . especially “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show” managed so well without them.”
I found it to be much better than Best in Show, to me a total disappointment.
AMV was intended to have a somewhat different tone, which may have confounded expectations. The humor was buried in the performances and characterizations rather than the situations.
And the music was so dead on that it’s hard to believe that it didn’t come from the 50s. Very unlike their performance of “Start Me Up” on Conan.
Ya know how we’re always amazed the Jackie Chan does all his own stunts, and that’s the only value to some of his movies?
same with A mighty Wind for me.
Certainly there were some good gags, the spectacle of them making the music was really cool but I feel like I’m already in on most of the jokes because of having seen “guffman” and “best in show”
It seemed to be structured in too similar a way to the others. Interview, candid shot, interview, candid shot, song. Not enough surprises; nothing new.
It would have been alot funnier if I hadn’t seen “guffman” and “show”
hey, does anyone remember this:
I swear I saw Michael mckean, christopher guest and Harry shearer years ago on SNL performing “Joes Place” complete with the “ea” “a” “oes” gag.