This Is Spinal Tap Will Get a Sequel 40 Years Later, Reuniting Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest & Harry Shearer

-

Fans of James Cameron’s Avatar are expressing astonishment that its long-expected sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, will have taken thirteen years to get to theaters. That delay, of course, is nothing next to the 35 years that separated Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, or the 36 between Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick, which comes out next month. But the recently announced sequel to This Is Spinal Tap tops them all: “Spinal Tap II will see Rob Reiner return as both film-maker on and off the screen along with Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Christopher Guest,” writes the Guardian‘s Benjamin Lee. “The film will be released in 2024 on the 1984 original’s 40th anniversary.”

Critics praised This Is Spinal Tap back in 1984, but it took time to become a revered classic of the improvised-mockumentary genre. In fact that genre hadn’t exist at all, which resulted in some viewers not quite getting the joke. “When the film first came out, we showed it in Dallas and people came up to me and said, why would you make a movie about a band nobody’s ever heard of?” says director Rob Reiner. “And one that’s so bad?”


Or as Christopher Guest remembers a couple girls at the concession counter observing: “These guys are so stupid.” The befuddlement extended even to collaborators in the filmmaking process: “I don’t understand this,” said cinematographer Peter Smokler, who’d worked on the Altamont documentary Gimme Shelter. “This isn’t funny. This is exactly what they do.”

Such reactions pay indirect but great tribute to the painstaking craft and observatory wit of Spinal Tap’s creators. Those creators — Reiner, Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer — tell these stories in the Today interview above, conducted in 2019 to mark This Is Spinal Tap‘s 35th anniversary. In that time they’d occasionally reunited as Spinal Tap for live performances and real albums, the last of which came out in 2009. Perhaps that’s kept them ready to get back into character, pitch-perfect English accents and all, and put on — as they’ll be forced to in a plot shaped by realistic-sounding music-industry vagaries — one last concert. But like any belated sequel, it brings proportionally inflated fan expectations: specifically, about whether they’ll be able to go up to twelve.

Related content:

The Origins of Spinal Tap: Watch the 20 Minute Short Film Created to Pitch the Classic Mockumentary

The Spinal Tap Stonehenge Debacle

Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel Promotes World’s Largest Online Guitar Lesson

Ian Rubbish (aka Fred Armisen) Interviews the Clash in Spinal Tap-Inspired Mockumentary

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.



from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/NiRhJ61
via IFTTT

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How a Fake Cartoon Band Made “Sugar Sugar” the Biggest Selling Hit Single of 1969

-
Image
Rock critic Lester Bangs described bubblegum pop as “the basic sound of rock ‘n’ roll – minus the rage, fear, violence and anomie.” The short-lived genre had its roots in the Please Please Me era of the Beatles’ minus the sex and the sarcasm. But from the Beatles we can trace a pretty solid path to the Archies. Not that we deserved this band as an inevitability, but the cartoon concoction is one of a thousand variants from that infectious strain of post-war pop. The Archie’s lasting legacy is one single: the bonafide earworm, “Sugar Sugar.” Written by Jeff Barry and Andy Kim, it was a real number one single (it knocked the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman” off the throne in 1969) sung by a completely fake band, namely the cast of Archie Comics, the five or six perpetual teenagers that have been around since 1941. How we got there, we must go back to the Beatles. Once the Fab Four had started to quickly outgrow their innocent image, King Features turned the four into a Saturday M
Read more

How to Charge What You Are Worth as a Creative Professional.

-
Image
If you are having difficulty knowing what to charge, then check out your competition and find out what theyíre doing. Find out if they post prices or fees on their website or if they have "packages"  deals.  Do they have payment options? While you are researching, keep in mind just because your competition is charging one way it is not necessarily how you should be charging. One of my clients is a business and life coach.  Most coaches charge for a set number of scheduled phone meetings, which seems to be a standard for "the coaching industry," but that doesnít mean itís the best way. I encourage my clients to charge fees that match who their clients are and what they are trying to accomplish. Itís very refreshing to do what works for you and not necessarily follow the "industry standard."  If you donít feel comfortable with the way your industry charges, by all means, change it.  Just because the industryís doing it doesnít mean that itís right.
Read more