Just thought I'd add my own nod to the well-deserved kudos for Sacha Gervasi's doc on the hardscrabble life of the Canadian metal band Anvil; it really is the feel-good movie of the year so far. Quite a few reviewers have deemed the picture a "real-life This Is Spinal Tap" (which is a bit of a conundrum, given the number of rockers out there who will tell you that This Is Spinal Tap was their real life). But I (not unlike Armond White, as it happens, not that his review isn't the usual mess) found the film more moving than hilarious. Yes, band co-founders and lifelong buds Steve "Lips" Kudlow and Robb Reiner are a little rough around the edges and have their goofy moments, but they sure aren't dumb, and they've got tremendous integrity. They're genuinely heroic, albeit on a level that most moviegoers don't get to see a lot.
Yes, on the one hand, it's kind of funny to watch Kudlow shoveling snow and scraping ice off the sidewalk in front of his house, or playing a very humble game of badminton with his young son in their small backyard, and then singing lyrics such as "Cast a spell from the wave of the wand/the depths of hell, there's a voice from beyond." But I think anyone with an even rudimentary familiarity with metal understands that it's the most formalist of rock genres—you're just not gonna cut it with singer/songwriter-esque observations of daily life, or, say, wryly ironic takes on urban romance a la Luna. (I bring up the alt-rock band Luna because the doc Tell Me Do You Miss Me, a chronicle of its last tour, touches on a lot of the same notes as this picture does, albeit in a different key—the road life is always in a sense the same, no matter what kind of music you play, or if you've got a college degree, or what.) Yeats once said that the only two subject worthy of serious artistic consideration are sex and death; for metal music, with its often relentless and some would say anti-social aggression, it's sex and Satan(!!!). (And for all that, what you don't hear in the doc are the songs in which Kudlow does address his actual situation in life, a balancing act between putting bread on his family's table and keeping his rock dreams alive: "From the morning until the night/Anticipation, on my nails I bite" he sings in a tune called "Should'a Would'a Could'a.")
Another difference between Anvil! and This Is Spinal Tap is that Anvil's story is actually that of a pretty good band. Reiner in particular is an impressively powerful drummer, and Kudlow's got a real way with the licks. Snob that I am, I generally take my metal on the more fringe-y, avant garde side—yup, I do love me some Sunn O))) and Boris—but these guys have definitely got something. Not as frenetic as Slayer, and not quite as pop as mid-period Judas Priest, they absolutely do rock out the fuck out. I like the music well enough to state that my shelling out of 25 bucks Canadian to score a copy of This Is Thirteen, the album the band is shown recording in the film, was maybe about 1/4th an act of good will.
Robb Reiner? Seriously? Do they have a guitarist named Chrisstopher Guest?
Posted by: Matt | April 19, 2009 at 03:49 PM