Sunday April 20, 2003

A MIGHTY WIND. Saw the new Christopher Guest movie last night. It delivered the expected laughs, thank God, as at this stage the price of a movie ticket is a serious investment for me, and if my breathing and/or thinking muscles don't get a good workout I consider myself royally rooked. The movie's goals are modest in the big-picture sense, and all the attention is lavished on versimilitude and comic engineering. The album jackets, archival footage, tunes, and physical and emotional characterizations (from Christopher Guest's quavering Peter Yarrow schtick to the annoyingly hearty New Main Street Singers) are even better-observed than in This is Spinal Tap.

It wasn't as hilarious to me as Spinal Tap for a couple of reasons .Foremost, rock and roll is just funnier than folk -- more bombastic, and more overtly enabling of lunatics at every level. Now there are some freaked-out folkies in the world, true, but you just don't get the kind of dirt on Pete Seeger and Mary Travers you get on their rock equivalents. And folk music just doesn't have Stonehenge (or cucumbers down the pants).

Also, Guest gambled a bit on his Mitch and Mickey characters. When Eugene Levy came out in his zombie mode, I thought we were in for many cheap burn-out jokes (and there were some, and they were all great). But Mitch and Mickey have kind of a sweet, sad story, and its payoff was really touching (though the coda was properly cynical). Roger Ebert thinks Guest went soft on his characters here and that vitiated the humor. Well, maybe -- Albert Brooks' earlier movies have more yuks than his later, gentler ones (like The Muse and Defending Your Life), and the corrosive Real Life is still my favorite. But in a world full of harshness I can't fault anyone for giving us a little more of the human dimension.

I also have to confess that I have a soft spot for 60s folk music of the cleaned-up and canned variety parodied here. My mother had a live Limelighters album, and a few years ago I got my own copy of it. To hear these well-scrubbed boys wailing their arch rendition of "There's a Meetin' Here Tonight," and imagining a bunch of equally well-scrubbed college students getting their groove on to it in some candle-in-the-Chinati-bottle joint, for some reason gives me great pleasure. It's just so square, but energetic at the same time -- full of hope and promise, and maybe embarrassing precisely for that reason. Rock gives you an out by being cynical. With folk at its worst-best (excluding, that is, the Loudon Wainwrights and John Prines, who have their own, different charm, and of course the antifolkies), you have some guy beating strings on a wooden box and trying to get the crowd to howl along about peace and freedom or some immigrant past he read about in a sociology class. It's silly, but it's also sweet -- not "sweet" in the IBM-ad way (I just made a million off some idiot followers of a shitty band! Sweet!), but in its traditional sense.

So Guest cut 'em some slack. And so do I.