a mighty wind c/d

Argh, I keep saying this since I saw the movie on Saturday. I am probably driving poor Dan to madness.

We went to see A MIGHTY WIND this weekend, and Mickie's character is disgustingly close to my ex-boyfriend's mom, who is a creepy Minnesotan earth-mother type who was always hinting at how she wanted to be my creepy Minneston earth-mother-in-law. She looks eerily like Mickie, sounds the same, and even plays the autoharp. It was too much!

Other than that, the film was hilarious. ME & my friend were the only ones in the theatre, which is The Ultimate Way to see a movie. He kept shouting "Spinal Tap!"

I've had this happen a few times -- it is a joy.

I like Spinal Tap a lot; to me, this movie played with the documentary aesthetic and kept it up throughout the movie. Mighty Wind has stuff (like the shot of Eugene Levy wandering around New York) that couldn't have possibly been captured by a documentary camera. To me, this is annoying.

i think fred willard is hilarious, but he's so over the top that guest was wise to only put a little bit of him in the film. too much would be too much. and we'll always have the dvd outtakes for that stuff.

we really oughta move this to I Love Film! there's not enough traffic there.

*raises hand*

(x-post)

http://www.snoopygift.com/books/1532.gif

Other stuff I really really loved: the little "short-films" wink, Harry Shearer going into the Spanish Civil War history, the scene where the guy asked to take off his sweater and he got lectured about how he "wasn't ready yet", the smack-on-top-of-the-head, and Parker Posey being too corny to not be funny.

And I swear, at the rate Fred Willard keeps getting funnier in each Guest film he's in, I'm seriously gonna explode a testicle in whatever comes next. His suggestion to The New Main Street SIngers on what they should do on the show cracked my shit up!

I may just dig out that New Christy Minstrels album I have in my closet...let's see...sweet jesus, does a band really need six guitars and three banjos?! It's like acoustic Branca. And they all are holding them up at greater-than-45-degree angles.

http://www.thenewchristyminstrels.com/Discography/6302%20-%20In%20Person.jpg

Okay, I'm putting it on the stereo RIGHT NOW.

I should watch this again. Mascots popped up on Netflix and had us in stitches.

I didn’t dig this much apart from Fred Willard, should watch again

Ends with an antediluvian joke where the joke is just that Chris Guest’s character is a trans woman but still sings bass, iirc

it was actually Harry Shearer but yea

All of the music was sung/played live which is pretty impressive.

There is a thread on here somewhere about the treatment of LGBTQ characters in Guest's films and the above bit was not beyond reproach.

Where’s the real mayor? Someone shot the mayor, but they did not shoot the deputy.
Incidentally, the D.A.’s office called. They can’t find any witness, so he’s in the clear, Your Honor.

Speaking of Your Honor, I was at a swinger’s party the other night and a fellow says
to me “I’d like to meet your wife,” and I said “Your Honor!”

Watched Mascots for the first time last night and it was surprisingly delightful.

Huh thought Mascots was very very bad. Eugene Levy has a lot to do with the artistic and comedic success of the earlier films.

the transgender "joke" definitely was uncomfortable, since it was fairly obvious Shearer's character is the butt of the joke. Can agree it was antediluvian but I will admit around the time that film came out, my reaction probably would have been different than it would today, as back in 2003 I didn't know anybody that was transgender or know much about gender dysphoria or the trans community at all.

kind of a bummer note to end the movie on, yeah.

I had low expectations, and it's better than most of what's on Netflix. Mostly it was nice to see the regular players again, especially since we've been rewatching Party Down and some other shows where they pop up a lot.

Finally saw this recently. It might not have been quite as laugh-out-loud funny as Guffman or Best in Show, but it had a warmth to it that I really enjoyed, and there are some great bits -- Bob Balaban completely misunderstanding basic stagecraft and concert setup, warning the audience about the plants in the lobby, Jennifer Coolidge's line about model trains, Ed Begley Jr as a philosemitic Swede public tv producer who can't stop dropping yiddish into conversations, the spanish civil war song, "wha happened" etc. The rehearsal scenes especially felt very much like a real band reuniting for a concert. My grandparents were very much in the Chicago folk scene and I grew up hearing the music and stories, so it felt very close to home for me. I thought they captured a very specific slice of that scene very well -- not so much the Dylans and Dave Van Ronks, but the Kingston Trio type bands (I loved that the Folksmen sneered at the commercialism of the New Main Street Singers while only being a notch or so less commercial). "Eat at Joes" felt very real. These seemed very much like the bands that would do a hastily thrown together multi-act reunion concert for public tv, whereas the more *serious* acts probably wouldn't.

Mixed feelings about the Eugene Levy performance - I got the sense that he was supposed to be either acid burnout or nervous breakdown, but it was a little hard to tell if it was that or if he had had that same weird stilted speech when he was young. A bit one-note and underdeveloped.

The titles and cover shots of Mitch’s solo albums are hysterical