The wholly fake documentary about the rise and fall - and the bumpy ride in between - of the wholly fictitious heavy-metal band Spinal Tap is what you might call the perfect spoof: at the time, it convinced innocent (and perhaps a tad too trusting) filmgoers that they were watching a genuine documentary about a genuine rock band of pathetically pretentious, spoiled, capricious (and accident-prone) rock stars. You could say that it struck a chord among real-life rock stars though. Apparently, it made Tom Waits cry while watching it. Sting, on the other hand, didn't know whether to laugh or to cry, even though he's said to have watched it at least 50 times.
Rob Reiner, who had a real cinematic meta-moment directing himself as Marty DiBergi, the fictitious director of the Spinal Tap documentary, captured so accurately the glorification of the monumental silliness that inflates the images of rock stars to preposterous proportions that in the case of the recent Anvil! The Story of Anvil documentary it appeared that life imitated art (which imitated life to start with): viewers were convinced that the film, which recounts the sorry story of a failing Canadian heavy-metal band, was yet another cinematic prank on a Spinal-Tappesque scale. 'The music lasts forever. Maybe the debt does too' (see the closing credits) epitomises it all.
The name of Anvil! director Sacha Gervasi certainly compares well with Rob Reiner's alias 'Marty DiBergi'. But to top it all, uncannily enough, Anvil's drummer (one of the Spinal Tap's running jokes concerned the bizarre fates of that band's drummers) is named Robb Reiner. You really couldn't make it up.
'Does for rock and roll what "The Sound of Music" did for hills'
The Anvil! The Story of Anvil trailer
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