Reuben and the Jets (8/11/99)
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The Song Remains The Same. [Peter Clifton and Joe Massot, 1976.]
The world owes an eternal debt of gratitude to Christopher Guest and Rob Reiner for having [with
Spinal Tap] killed this genre for all time; else there might have been an endless succession of pretentious two-hour concert movies filled with enigmatic cloaked figures out of Arthurian legend moving through mistfilled Scottish landscapes intercut with backstage documentary footage of screaming road-managers, drugaddled groupies, security thugs bouncing gatecrashers, and lowangled shots of backlit guitar players blowing all the licks they managed to hit in the studio. True, we have instead an endless succession of two-minute videos on MTV; but it could have been exactly sixty times as bad. An Academy award can’t possibly do justice to an accomplishment of this magnitude; is it too late to nominate the authors for the Nobel prize?
____________Blame it on the Casanova (8/6/99)
