a very funny film

The Leningrad Cowboys have competition. We finally got round to watching A mighty wind last night, Christopher Guest’s take on folk music, and it took about ten minutes longer than the running time, simply because we kept laughing so hard that we had to rewind to catch the drowned dialogue.

Oddly, all the funniest lines belonged to women: the PR woman talking about her partner — “You could say that we share a brain”; Jane Lynch’s monologue as a nice girl from Idaho who became a porn actress, and then a folk musician; the closing sequence of a woman singing about incontinence to an autoharp accompaniment at a trade show where her husband is selling “SteadyFlo” catheters. they are named after his grandmother, Florence. In a less funny film, they’d have been named after his mother.

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3 Responses to a very funny film

  1. Rupert says:

    Perhaps it’s because the film brought back too many filk memories. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have enough sympathy for the genre being satirised. Perhaps it’s because I saw the film in a bubble of emulsified time zones, 35,000 feet above Greenland. Perhaps I was expecting another Spinal Tap.

    Whatever, I just didn’t get much from it – although it was beautifully made. The faux-clumsy edit during the porn actress reminiscing was very funny… but, um, that was that.

    Bad Santa, on the other hand, should be broadcast on all channels on Christmas Day, just before the Queen’s Speech. Billy Bob was perfect. Nicholson, who was in the frame, might have been even better: Bill Murray – the original choice – would have been worse. About the only false note was the ending, but on reflection I think it’s even more subversive and mischevious than the rest of the movie.

    But a little bit of me would have liked to have seen Robin Williams turn the full force of his schmaltz ray onto the script, and lose. Bit like a matter/anti-matter annihiliation event.

    The irretrievably crude R

  2. quinn says:

    the only thing missing from a mighty wind, and i really wanted it, were the political folkies. ok, and the recent anti-folkies as well. that seemed like such an oversight, given how they scream to be made fun of, specifically by guest.

    btw, the soundtrack is great and has a bunch of songs not in the movie. like one about a train wrecking into a coal mine.

  3. acb says:

    I didn’t think it was a genre being satirised. I thought it was the whole business of trying to make an honest living at a traditional, outmoded craft – like writing. Playing the autoharp to sell catheters at a trade fair is just a slightly less comfortable and more obviously humiliating picture of how most journalists with aspirations make their livings.

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