A Mighty Wind

A Mighty Windⁱ goes with Best in Show an' the rest of Christopher Guest's stuff : a very well made pretend-documentary about stereotypes, deconstructed attentively, reconstructed craftily, with very cold hands.

Christopher Guest proceeds exactly opposite of contemporary screenwritingⁱⁱ : instead of tryin to tell us who should we feel what for, he simply constructs characters that can stand on their own ; instead of hamming it up in the middle he hams up the superficial minutia. The pretty singer that had an ambiguous relationship with her co-lead vocal for while the flower lasted, then settled down with a more burgeois guy for a fruiting requires no straining of our suspension of disbelief. The co-lead vocal in question, while apparently very, very strange is in fact quite banal, and for this reason works well.ⁱⁱⁱ On it goes, but why insist on the recipe.

What's important is the result, and the result is quite delicious : a pointed, disinterested but for this reason loving, immoderate but for that reason fair, story of a generation of idiots. Who, while they were indisputably idiots, are nevertheless much less harmful, much smaller idiots than the people gazing upon their now-gray hair.

You should probably see this thing. It's the good sort of vanitas. And did I mention it's hysterical ?

1. 2003, by Christopher Guest, with Christopher Guest (written by Christopher Guest, too). [↩]
2. Which subsists entirely on a diet of "creating" adverts. This is very unfortunate for the actual craft for the reason you'd expect : the iron law of shoddy cheapness will push things that certain way.

   For instance, the same law has pushed all viewports into the same proportions, irrespective of intended use or the needes of the buyer, because whatever, it's cheaper to cut all the floated glass the same way than two different ways. Just so it's cheaper to make averts and then tag them as "music videos" or "films" or "campaign messages" or "state of the union address" than to make that many actually different things, or to try and fit them to their purpose or anything. It's 80% after all, time for a wrap.

   This mirrors the sad fate of newswriting, relegated to the status of copywriting by the current hordes of retarded, acultural children pushing the sad mud of their pretense to a life up the sand dune that's left of the gardens of Semiramis. It similarly mirrors the sad fate of everything, pretty much, from Debian to nuclear missiles.

   Who could have ever imagined that encouraging the naturally excessive selfesteem of teenagers is a bad policy! [↩]

3. This is a common mistake the inept noobs trying their hand at writing ("I tried and therefore no one should criticize me!!1") regularly make : they attempt to construct strange, weird, odd characters by packing a strange core inside chunks of smoothly machined outside. This works about as well as you'd expect, they keep trying to push the solid outer shards into their desired shape, pressuring the strange in the middle which thus keeps seeping out until they give up in frustration, dubious foamy froth spilling all over themselves and everything around. The correct approach, of course, is to machine a smooth core, and then pile on it as much whipped cream and nonpareils as it'll hold. [↩]