My A Mighty Wind review…”

Solid. Funniest movie I’ve seen in the theater since, well, since Best in Show. The folk music was spot-on, and terrifically funny. Fred Willard is spectacular as sleazy band manager Mike LaFontaine, Harry Shearer is wonderful as stand-up bassist Alan Barrows, and Eugene Levy is, well, probably my favorite comedic actor, period. Parker Posey is sexy as ever.

Now, the bad news. I think A Mighty Wind ranks a distant fourth in the Christopher Guest mockumentary series. That it’s a distant fourth and still the funniest new release in several years I guess says quite a bit about how talented this cast is. There are some great lines, and some great scenes, but the humor is much less subtle than in the other movies, and too often I thought the script grasped for easy sex jokes instead of the nuanced humor the other movies employed so well. Not that I’m averse to sex jokes, but I tend to cringe when they’re used as a crutch.

Likewise, the characters here are more cartoonish than at least the last two releases. One of the great things about Guffman and Best in Show was that you knew almost every character in both movies. I’ve met virtually every dog-owner stereotype in Show. The gags in Wind seemed too contrived, the premises too planned. The humor is more gag-oriented, less cunning. And though I loved Catherine O’Hara as Cookie in Show, every time she appeared on-screen in Wind, I couldn’t wait for the scene to end.

That’s a lot of criticism. All that said, I did like the movie very much. And I’ll probably see it again, which I very rarely do in the theater. So go see it.

On a related note….

Has anyone ever seen Eugene Levy and Gregg Easterbrook in the same room at the same time?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2003 at 9:31 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.