THE PLOT:

The story is a spoof on the 1960's folk music scene. Irving Steinbloom, a well-known folk-music promoter, has died. His son, Johnathan plans to organize a tribute to him by bringing together three of the main groups he promoted during his career and putting on a concert in NYC. This is the story's vehicle for presenting caricature-type portrayals of the groups.

THE HUMOR:

I've seen (and own) A Mighty Wind. I've seen Best in Show. I've seen Waiting for Guffman. I've seen Spinal Tap. I've seen For Your Consideration. I have listed them above in order of my enjoyment, A Mighty Wind being my very most favorite! I own it and I know it by heart. I think it's very funny and entertaining.

One thing I have to admit to you is that I am not cerebral in my approach to a movie that I expect to make me laugh. I don't really try to figure out whether the humor has an underlying agenda, unless it dawns on me automatically. I just listen and watch and I laugh when I feel the urge, without trying to reason with myself about it--laughter is visceral and more of a reflex for me.

My very most favorite thing about this group of funny people is the way they can exaggerate and make obvious the human tendencies of being self-important, self-centered, neurotic, boring, misinformed, etc., etc. None of us are objective about ourselves, and I think this movie shows that clearly. It takes our idiosyncrasies, turns the volume up on them and then shines a spotlight on them so we can laugh at them.

THE MUSIC:

I am a baby boomer, but in the small town in Texas where I grew up, the focus of my young adult peers was mostly on Elvis, The Beatles, The Dixie Cups, Major Lance, and the like. I wasn't exposed to folk music much. I kind of knew who Peter, Paul, and Mary and The New Christy Minstrels were but I wasn't an informed listener. I wasn't sophisticated enough to ask myself what type of music I was listening to. I didn't know who wrote the lyrics or who arranged the music or who produced it, etc. I just listened. It either grabbed me or it didn't. With my lack of first-hand knowledge of the folk music era, I can't really evaluate how A Mighty Wind mimicked folk music or how well it parodied the groups.

When I saw the movie, I simply opened my ears and listened and I enjoyed! The music was pretty to me. I loved the harmony of the voices and the upbeat mood that was created. The tunes stuck in my mind and I still love them enough to hum and sing them to myself. I did realize that the lyrics were silly and got a chuckle here and there like when The New Main Street Singers sang a tale about a young woman who was born in the cellar and who had a face like a par-boiled yam!

A lot of the music was written by Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, Eugene Levy, and Christopher Guest wrote a good deal of the music for the movie. That made me appreciate the music even more.

THE CHARACTERS:

This group of performers wows me! They can play take-offs on such a wide variety of characters.

Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael McKean play Alan Barrows, Mark Shubb, and Jerry Palter, respectively. These three make up the trio called The Folksmen. All three of these guys are fun and good for laughs. They particularly show their intellectual depth when they are interviewed and recount for the audience how they started out great but were ultimately moved down to a lesser label without any distribution and when someone bought one of their records, the purchase came with a built-in problem. The problem was that, "It would teeter crazily" on the spindle of the record player because the records were not manufactured with a hole in the middle. They told the audience with perfectly deadpan earnestness that if you could find a way to punch a hole in the middle, you'd have a darned good product. We also learn toward the end of the movie that, in his opinion, Mark Shubbs is a blonde woman living in the body of a bald male folk singer. He dons a shoulder-length blonde wig and proceeds as the base fiddle playing member of the trio without skipping a beat. After that, the group's appearance went from a little funny looking, before Mark came out of the closet, to pretty ridiculous afterward.

Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara play Mitch and Mickey, the "sweethearts" of the folk music scene. The story begins long after Mitch had finally "snapped" and he and Mickey had parted ways. We learn of their careers and their past love affair through the memories of various people who were part of the folk music business and from hearing Mickey's own stories about those early days. Mitch must've failed to get the message of the public service announcements such as the one I used to see on TV that warned: "Here's your brain (they showed an egg) and here's your brain on drugs (they showed the egg fried to a frazzle). Any Questions?" He certainly seemed to have cooked his brain on high heat! He was totally spaced out and couldn't utter a complete sentence without stumbles and muttering, eyes as wide open as he could force them. To hear Mickey tell it, during their heyday, Mitch was "so smart and he knew exactly what he wanted" and everyone was trying to get close to him, but she was close to him. At the time of the reunion, she was an aging housewife living a middle-class life married to a man with his own company in the bladder-management industry, Sure-Flo Medical Appliances, named after his mother, Florence. As he told Mitch during lunch, "Every 13.5 seconds a new incontinent is born." Mickey seemed to feel a little uneasy having her husband discuss the details of impacted fecal material, and its affect on the bladder, at the dining table. For reasons I can't explain, she moved away from the dining table and said, "This might be good dessert talk."

John Michael Higgins plays Terry Bohner (yes, it is pronounced boner!) who heads up The New Main Street Singers, one of the three highlighted folk groups in this movie. He, and his wife, belong to a cult-like group that sort of worships color, WINC (Witches in Nature’s Colors). My favorite of his delivered lines from A Mighty Wind is when he is describing WINC. "This is not an occult science. This is not one of those crazy systems of divination and astrology. That stuff's hooey, and you've got to have a screw loose to go in for that sort of thing. Our beliefs are fairly commonplace and simple to understand. Humankind is simply materialized color operating on the 49th vibration. You would make that conclusion walking down the street or going to the store." He delivers that bunch of "hooey" with total conviction and thoughtfulness and he, like most people, thoroughly believed that his understanding of reality was right and he seemed to pity the unenlightened who didn't have his insight. I loved his character.

Jane Lynch plays Laurie (Mrs. Bohner) in the movie. She is also a member of The New Main Street singers. She matter-of-factly and unashamedly shares that she began her show business career in the porno industry. She proudly relates that she got her breaks in that industry because, "I was known for doing a certain something that many of the other girls wouldn't do." She tells her self-described "beautiful story" of how her being in "short films for more mature audiences" ultimately caused her to be invited to join The New Main Street Singers and that's where she met her man and became "the new Mrs. Bohner." I wasn't particularly moved by her performance but it was adequate and cute. I enjoyed her a little more when she played a gay, and totally self-absorbed, professional dog handler in Best in Show.

Parker Posey plays Sissy Knox, also one of The New Main Street Singers. She pretty much keeps my attention no matter what the role. She's just as competent as the others in this comedy troupe at playing diverse personalities. In this movie she played a girl who lived her early teen years as a homeless waif but who was rescued from "that darkness" when she got a chance to join the singing group--thereafter becoming a perky little gal, complete with a dog-ears hairdo and ear-to-ear grin, who finds someone in the audience to sing to so that she can "give back a little" of what was given to her. Her character in this movie is enjoyable but her part isn't that big.

I think The New Main Street Singers was a sextet, but the other members were not really important to the story.

Bob Balaban, whom I thoroughly enjoy in any comedic role (I first saw him in Amos and Andrew), plays a hyper-organized, self-important, over-controlling, nervous-ninny, Johnathan Steinbloom, who organizes this folk music reunion as a tribute to his Dad and later emcees it when it is aired. He drives the manager of Town Hall, where the show is to be held, nuts with his nit-picky worries over the handling of the show. Just hours from air time, he is still going on about the set (which looks beautiful) because there is a prop, or "furniture" as he calls it, that is painted to represent a banjo right next to a real street lamp and wonders, "Can you have an actual three-dimensional object that represents the thing that it actually is...can that be next to something that it's pretending to be?" At this point, the manager just loses it and whacks him on the top of the head in an effort to make him snap out of it and shut up.

Lawrence Turpin, or King Larry, as he says he sometimes is called, is played by Michael Hitchcock. He plays a small part as the manager at Town Hall but I get a good laugh when he shows off the hall's acoustics, after explaining that he is a singer too, as he launches into an ear-splitting, teeth-hurting rendition of Ave Maria.

Jennifer Coolidge, also one I'm pretty much willing to watch no matter what she does, plays Amber Cole, a publicist of some sort. She plays a total airhead. Mickey's husband tries to strike up a conversation with her at a party and tells her that he's a model train enthusiast. She shows what a dim-wit she is by replying, "Oh! Thank goodness for model trains! You know? If they didn't have the model trains, they wouldn't have gotten the idea for the big trains."

Ed Begley Junior is also a good addition to the cast as a Jewish Swede named Lars Olfen. He has his own memories of Mr. Steinbloom and the folk music scene, having had his own group as a kid. His group actually had one hit that was named in Swedish with a translation that was something like, "How's it Hanging Grandma?" Huh? Oh well, good for a laugh.

Fred Willard played an abrasive idea man, Mike LaFontaine, who thinks he's funny but is just silly. His characters usually irritate me a bit, at least in this movie and in Best in Show. (I liked his character in Waiting for Guffman best).

OVERALL:
This movie makes me laugh and the music makes me tap my toes and hum along. It's a feel-good movie! I'll go see anything this group comes out with and I can't wait until the next one. Even though I couldn't fully "get" the parody of folk music, I got the parody of human nature. I've never been a dog handler either, but I loved Best in Show because of the way it makes transparent some easy-to-find-in-your-world human frailties.











Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older