Hacker Cinema
This Is Spinal Tap
1984 · Film · 82 min
Directed by Rob Reiner
"This Is Spinal Tap" shines a light on the self-contained universe of a metal band struggling to get back on the charts, including everything from its complicated history of ups and downs, gold albums, name changes and undersold concert dates, along with the full host of requisite groupies, promoters, hangers-on and historians, sessions, release events and those special behind-the-scenes moments that keep it all real.
5 positive14 neutralfrom 19 commenters
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19 comments on Hacker News
Oh dang. Last night before falling asleep my wife told me "some guy from Spinal Tap died" while scrolling on her phone. Didn't think much of it.
Wake up and first thing I do is read this...
Rob Reiner? Really? What a terrible shame. What a loss. His films and even his time on All in the Family really helped shape the cultural landscape.
Nothing had as large an impact on my sense of humor growing up as This is Spinal Tap. Just thinking about the movie now I chuckle to myself. Most of his other films are certified classics.
He will be greatly missed.
Can you believe that This is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men were all directed by the same man? What an eclectic set of masterpieces.
Three great movies that he directed that everyone around my age would be relatively intimately familiar with: This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally
> Police are treating the deaths as apparent homicides. According to the L.A. Times, authorities have questioned a member of Reiner’s family in connection with the death. As of Sunday night, the LAPD have not officially identified a suspect, but Rolling Stone has confirmed that Reiner’s son, Nick, was involved in the homicide. A source confirmed to Rolling Stone that the couple’s daughter, Romy, found her parents’ bodies.
Alternative source:
> Senior law enforcement officials report that both had stab wounds
Tragic.
Does anyone know how what kind of local hack had to IMDb implement to allow this special rating scale for "This Is Spinal Tap"?
While the current movie rating shows 7.9/11, you can only rate it on the 1-10 scale.
For those unfamiliar with the reference to 11: https://www.imdb.com/video/vi149275673/?ref_=tt_vi_t_2
https://www.livescience.com/stonehenge-acoustics-amplification.html
>Their research is based on detailed examinations of a geometrically-accurate scale model one-twelfth the size of Stonehenge, as it probably looked and sounded during its prime, about 4,200 years ago.
>By a curious coincidence, the model is exactly the same size as the miniature Stonehenge arch that appeared on stage in the 1984 movie "This Is Spinal Tap." Film buffs may recall that it came about after a confused member of the eponymous rock band specified the stones should be 18 inches (45 centimeters) tall, instead of 18 feet (5.5 meters), which is about the height of one of the real Stonehenge arches.
original from 1984:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg5Ovdu6bOE
corrected live in 1992 at Royal Albert Hall:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA4nhoblyMI
> Is this just a US thing? I thought this was common knowledge.
Have you seen the movie This Is Spinal Tap? Good scene on this "common knowledge":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg5Ovdu6bOE
To be fair, Hollywood has always been a bit of a hit-driven industry, and people have been complaining about this for as long as I can remember.
I wouldn't put too much stock in those box office figures; I never heard of Footloose, ranked #6, and the imdb (6.6) and rotten tomatoes (52%/71%) rating are not especially great. The same applies to a number of other films in the top list. Scarface is ranked #32 and is much better known, and has 8.3 on imdb and 81%/94% on rotten tomatoes. This is Spinal Tap is ranked #129 and is iconic enough that the imdb people programmed a special exception so you can rate it from 1 to 11.
I kind of chuck it up to fashion; all these Marvel things are in fashion today; back in the 90s romcoms were pretty fashionable, in the 80s you had the "action hero" era, etc. Hollywood produces hundreds of films every year and there are hundreds of films every year outside of Hollywood. There's still plenty of stuff to watch.
Reminds me of how Ozzy Osbourne didn't find Spinal Tap funny, and said that everything in the movie had happened to him including getting lost backstage: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/ozzy-osbourne-didnt-laugh-this-is-spinal-tap/
Except for the fact that connotations inescapably persist through a long chain influences tracing all the way back to the relevant archaic tuning systems, treatises, church rituals, secular dances, and oral histories.
"D minor: Melancholy womanliness, the spleen and humours brood."
-Christian Schubart, 1778
"It's part of a trilogy, really-- a musical trilogy that I'm doing in d minor, which I find is the saddest of all keys. I don't know why, but it makes people weep instantly."
-Nigel Tufnel playing "Lick My Love Pump" in This is Spinal Tap[1], 1984
Also...
"C major: Completely pure. Its character is: innocence, simplicity, naïvety, children’s talk."
... will persist as long as C major consists of a) the white keys on the instrument of the piano and b) the key in modern notation that doesn't require any sharps or flats in its key signature.
1: FYI-- Christopher Guest appears to actually be playing in d minor for that moment in the movie.
I was curious, since I have been watching the "100 Films To See before You Die" and so many older films seem to clock in under 90 minutes (to be sure there are plenty of exceptions).
Just a handful of films under 90 minutes:
"Toy Story", "High Noon", "Rashomon", "This is Spinal Tap", "Frankenstein" (and "Bride of"), "Umberto D", "My Neighbor Totoro", "Run Lola Run", "Duel", "Rope"...
Office Space is interesting, it’s one of these movies to which I see references all the times while I have never run into someone in real life who actually saw it or even heard of it. The other one being This is Spinal Tap.
Completely off-topic, but having heard a "youngster" (relatively speaking) use the phrase "nuke the site from orbit" and then turn right around and ask, "BTW, where is that from?" [0], I wonder if this title hasn't suffered the same fate? Considering that the reference was released about 35 years ago, I imagine many folks saying "it goes to 11!" weren't even born when This is Spinal Tap came out.
[0] Aliens, the sequel to the first one: Alien. I'm old enough to have gone to the cinema to see all movies mentioned.
I think it's just marketing bullshit.
More "G's" have to be better. so 5 "G's" are clearly better than 4. It's kinda like that great scene in the movie This is Spinal Tap. The amp "numbers all go to eleven". When pressed, the obvious advantage is "These go to eleven".
The average person couldn't explain what either LTE or 5G are.
I just ran a Speedtest on my phone and with a relatively weak signal I'm getting 10 Mbps download via LTE. Isn't that good enough for the latest cat GIF?
I think the industry wants 5G to deal with improved cell service in densely occupied places such as football stadiums. Well, that obviously won't be a priority for the next few years!
My girlfriend and l I wrote a completely fictitious wiki article about a non existent musician after watching this is spinal tap when we were bored and stoned one day years and years ago because we thought it would be funny and the movie inspired. We wrote a whole life story and everything. I'm pretty sure it's long gone.
> > As a wise man once said, it’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.
> That man was not terribly wise, actually: he was the David St. Hubbins character in the 1984 rock and roll satire film This Is Spinal Tap.
I think that the idiom "as a wise man once said" is not meant to be read so literally. I've always taken it more to mean essentially "here's a quote with which I agree."
> As a wise man once said, it’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.
That man was not terribly wise, actually: he was the David St. Hubbins character in the 1984 rock and roll satire film This Is Spinal Tap.
The quip is intended by the screenwriters to be comically idiotic, and not to portray St. Hubbins as a wise man, because in fact there is a big difference between stupid and clever that is not subtle at all.
It also satirizes such a belief, which permeates popular culture: the belief that something that is, on the whole, banal or stupid can be propelled to excellence on account of some rescuing subtlety. Basically the bulk of the content doesn't matter: whether you're clever or stupid rests in some tiny, subjective detail. Layers of pretense are heaped upon garbage based on this principle.
You might also enjoy similar documentaries Cloverfield, The Blair Witch Project, and This is Spinal Tap ;-)
The last election cycle gave me the idea:
A reality TV show about making a reality TV show.
With The Garry Shandling Show, Entourage, political campaigns (and their documentaries), social influencers, paid placement, Spinal Tap...
Everything's so meta now, I can barely discern fact from fiction.
"All the world's a stage." -- Shakespeare
Trademarks might be expected to get a few seconds of attention at a given moment, much of it subconscious visual processing. In the 5-10 minutes it takes to read an Onion article, almost all people will observe something not right and be motivated to decide whether it's a fake story or not. In the 1 second it takes to observe a trademark on a piece of clothing, most people will not have the motivation to decide whether it's a fake or not.
And even then, the trademarks are still very similar. Even a person looking at them side-by-side can reasonably suggest that the South Butt logo is a humorous sub-brand that comes from The North Face. Often, with Onion articles, you can point to some fact that contradicts fundamental scientific laws and therefore cannot possibly be a true story. Spinal Tap is technically a real band, and while the story told in the movie is fake it is still plausible. I would not be surprised at all if someone saw out-of-context clips of This Is Spinal Tap without knowing what it was, and assumed it was a real documentary.