This Is Spinal Tap - Rob Reiner (1984)

There is a wonderful message and an important conclusion hidden in the last verse of the song "Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die" (Jethro Tull): No, you're never too old to Rock'n'Roll if you're too young to die. Indeed, you're never too old for rock...

We keep lamenting in corners (like old ladies of our youth) that the PC-Net generation is an apocalyptic one, completely detached from the ascending trajectory of human civilization; that the gap between age groups has widened and deepened beyond any precedent, estimate, or anticipation; that today's young people are more introverted, more violent, more self-destructive, and more ignorant than ever... that they don't read, don't go to the theater, and have forgotten about exhibition halls, symphonic concerts, and opera/operetta.

However, they haven't done much to defend their rights; they haven't taken the protest to its payable limit in terms of life sacrifices; they haven't invented anything like LSD, or ecstasy, they haven't made the apologia of cocaine, cannabis, morphine, mescaline, or heroin; they haven't refused or rejected en masse the values of humanity, institutionalized education, or traditional culture; they have never experimented with returning to nature, essence, and spirit, testing their functioning as the hippie movement did, for example...

We were much worse to our predecessors than the current generation could ever be to us. But as my generation firmly slammed and loudly shut all kinds of doors, small doors opened by themselves everywhere, and they were the only escape routes... Anyone who followed the path had to go through them... Just like a mature tree whose branches are cut off before spring to force it to renew itself, through a more vigorous and stronger rebirth, I grew up denying and fighting, so that I could end up accepting and understanding.

It all started with a joke by director Rob Reiner on a TV show, in which he tried to mock the extreme tendencies of the rock phenomenon by inventing a successful band that he put on the small screen to parody the star symbols of the moment. As the public response was unexpected, and Reiner had just graduated from UCLA's film school, the idea of ​​translating it into a film came naturally and did not surprise anyone.

What surprised everyone, especially Rob Reiner, was that the script refused to be written as it was intended... All the planned sketches rebelled in front of the camera, turning into serious themes, and the personalities caricatured gained an even more idolatrous contour than they already had. The team of actors itself crystallized into a self-awareness that soon gave birth to the imaginary band, as the soundtrack of the production became the first album of the newly-formed heavy metal band Spinal Tap.

Even more astonishing is the way in which this band quickly gained a large following... over time. Fans in flesh and blood created a fictional previous discography in the name of the band, an inexistent past, and a cycle of tours (between 2000-2007) that never actually took place.

Many of the imagined events are full of spicy details, and others are celebrated periodically...the Spinal Tap community responds in the same manner as the project, but without neglecting the subtexts of the film that launched them.

This is because, as a secondary element, this film is a hymn dedicated to the spirit of rock and roll. What appears on the screen as one of the hundreds of documentaries that aim to reconstruct the life of a group of musicians is, in fact, an immense fresco of the entire phenomenon, which probably required many hours of study and a mountain of ingenuity to encrypt the material into a single story.

In 82 minutes, the references flow in every second of the projection; we come across Twisted Sister, Alice Cooper, Sepultura, Capability Brown (in a scene where three bass guitars are in the foreground), Anthem, Motley Crue, Rush... you name it.