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Take away the exploding drummers and foil-wrapped cucumbers, and This Is Spinal Tap is a movie about people who take themselves seriously. Which is why it's a comedy classic. Christopher Guest used that same seriousness in three more improvised comedies: Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and a new folk-music film, A Mighty Wind. Guest, who writes his movies with Eugene Levy, reunited with Tap alumni Harry Shearer and Michael McKean as the Folksmen in this film. All four sat with TIME's Richard Corliss and Josh Tyrangiel for a folksy conversation...
...causes disease when it reaches a place where it doesn’t belong,” he said. “It travels from the upper respiratory tract to other places,” like the lungs, spinal cord, blood...
Anyone who sits through A Mighty Wind, writer/director Christopher Guest’s latest entry in the mockumentary subgenre, will be tempted to make comparisons to Guest’s earlier work, This Is Spinal Tap. The classic parody of perpetually witless hard rockers finds its complement in both music and volume with Wind, which focuses not on the disaster-prone tour of a brainless metal band, but a disaster-prone tribute concert in memory of a late, legendary folk music producer. The premise is just the sort of odd episode that Guest has mined so skillfully in the past...
...three is Mitch and Mickey, a hopelessly maudlin duo played by Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, who sports one of the more grating speech impediments in recent memory. Another band, the Folksmen, is comprised of the same actors playing the same instruments they butchered in Spinal Tap, but reinvented as balding, anachronistic folk singers. The script makes a serious mistake in under-using the Folksmen, replacing the genuine tension of their metal alter egos with some inane squabbling over set lists. Rounding out the collection are the New Main Street Singers, whose leaders practice some sort...
Enter Ali G, a tracksuit-wearing "hip-hop journalist" and the alter ego of British comic Sacha Baron Cohen. Da Ali G Show (HBO, Friday nights, 12:30 a.m. E.T.) is a little like This Is Spinal Tap, if the doltish rockers were asking the questions. In one of a series of artfully staged (but real) newsmaker interviews, Ali asks former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros BoutrosGhali: "Which is the funniest language? It's French, innit?" When he asks a panel of religious leaders, "Isn't God just an overhyped David Blaine?" you swear one of the panelists, a Dick Cheney...