Posted by Jim at April 10th, 2004

I’ve really enjoyed the various movies in which Christopher Guest and others do a mock documentary. Examples: A Mighty Wind, Waiting for Guffman, and Best in Show. Before any of these came This is Spinal Tap which included many of the same people as the above mentioned films doing more or less the same sort of thing. The same sort of thing being almost entirely improvised, character-based humor.

I was looking through Amazon recently and ran across a review for “This is Spinal Tap” that simply floored me. Either the writer is rather unaware and thinks that Spinal Tap was actually a real band or he’s getting into the act himself and pretending that they’re real. If the latter, I don’t find his review funny enough to justify him going to the bother. If the former…

Wow.

Read it for yourself (you’ll have to scroll down a bit). The idea that he really doesn’t know that it’s a fake documentary is strengthened when you notice his comments on other movies. For example, he gives On the Waterfront two stars because it’s not colorized. In his view, all black and white movies should be colorized. Mac and Me by contrast, gets five stars.