Customer Reviews

This Is Spinal Tap (Cultographies)

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Nobody can destroy the joy of movies quite like a film professor. For a short book, Ethan de Seife's analysis of This is Spinal Tap feels mind-numbingly long, mostly because it repeats itself. A handful of points (Tap owes a lot to cinema verite; Tap simultaneously uses and breaks the rules of both conventional and documentary filmmaking) get overexplained with new and fancier words, like a grade-school book report stretching to meet its minimum word count with the use of a very large thesaurus (A sample: "The formlessness of alleged actuality is rendered more cinematically palatable by the use of mechanisms of narrative"). There are some interesting insights -- the film's parallel with traditional Hollywood musicals was well presented, and the author does a good job of looking at the rock culture the film lampoons -- but many of the insights from the filmmakers are lifted straight from the DVD commentaries, and better told by them than regurgitated by a stuffy academic. Rarely engaging to the reader, it's simply too overwritten and self-important to be enjoyable.

I couldn't disagree more with the previous review, this book proves that people still really think about things. It's obvious that the author understands and appreciates art and the evolution of entertainment. Most books of this type can be very dry, but this isn't, de Seife doesn't substitute humor for intelligence. His writing style is very academic but not unreadable. He provides interesting ideas and a valid analysis. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.