The groundbreaking movie Jack Black calls “the greatest motion picture” of all time
We all have our personal picks for what constitutes the peak of cinema. The first shark attack in Jaws, the terrorising sequence of Apocalypse Now, or any of Tommy Wiseau’s dialogue in The Room are all pieces of cinematic brilliance that will go on to influence artists for generations to come. While there will always be classics that are put on a pedestal for a damn good reason, Jack Black considered one of the true peaks of the motion picture to come from Christopher Guest’s This is Spinal Tap.
Then again, anyone who has ever played music in their lives has had more than their fair share of run-ins with this movie. Although the film is clearly meant as a parody of what the greatest bands in the world would have to deal with, the idea of a bunch of meatheads coming together to pretend they’re doing something important is much closer to reality than many people realise.
When first putting together the movie, Guest seemed to model his scenes after the largest figures in hard rock and heavy metal. Outside of the recurring jokes about always losing drummers and never getting respect from critics, there are more than a few rock stars who watched the movie and weren’t just laughing…they were mortified.
Even though it’s a joke, many artists have claimed to have the exact same thing happen to them whenever they go out on tour, from getting lost underneath the stage to screaming the wrong city to thousands of people in an arena. For a guy like Black who lives and breathes all things rock and roll, this wasn’t just any old movie…this was describing the fantasyland he dreamed of.
When talking about his favourite movies of all time, This Is Spinal Tap took up prime real estate in Black’s collection, saying, “[It’s] the greatest motion picture of all time. In 100 years, they will talk about Citizen Kane, they will talk about Casablanca, and they will talk about This is Spinal Tap. The greatest performances of all time…the greatest directing of all time…breaking ground left and right at the beginning of the mockumentary”.
While Monty Python may have gotten to the mockumentary first, there would always be limits on where to take a parody of just one band like The Beatles with The Rutles. There was no set template for This is Spinal Tap, so this felt like the kind of band that you would have loved when you were 12 years old and honestly believed that their drummer died by spontaneously combusting.
Although Black would try his hand at music and acting when forming Tenacious D, it’s hard not to see his entire career as an extension of what he loved when watching This is Spinal Tap for the first time. He still has some dramatic chops and does explore them from time to time, but when looking at his own magnum opus, School of Rock, it’s like Black was playing the character version of his 12-year-old self, always looking to pay tribute to his heroes like Led Zeppelin.
And while it’s nowhere near the level of Guest’s masterpiece, The Pick of Destiny is practically a love letter to that kind of mockumentary style, only this time Black and Kyle ‘Rage Kage’ Gass have been schooled in the ways of rock and roll by Satan. It might have the same dramatic undercurrents as The Godfather and Citizen Kane, but in the halls of cinematic Valhalla, This is Spinal Tap deserves a spot at the table for just how much it brought to the mockumentary genre.