Words from Tyler: Parker Posey's so cute, I want to give a big old hug..
I (Brandon) first watched this film ohh about 3 years ago with my dad, a lover of folk music and Christopher Guest films. With this viewing my feelings were mixed about the film, I really had forgotten about it until we watched "Waiting for Guffman" and Tyler mentioned that he had never seen "A Mighty Wind." In the end my memories of the film were much better than the film itself, and I was left after an hour-and-a-half feeling unfulfilled like that time I ran up to a parked ice cream truck only to discover the owner was out of ice cream. I still laughed in a few places but overall the moment was very different from that first or second viewing of the movie and I will probably delete it instantly from my hard drive.
hey this is tyler. i hate fucking folk music. it's stupid. i made a LIST of adjectives about how I feel about Folk Music. Here it is. a distraction, hokey, insipid, irrelevant, unimportant, mind-boggling, silly, wasted.
with those kinds of words in mind, I feel like I connected with the film on the basis that it was practically making fun of folk music all the time. Thinking this way allowed me to finish the film without feeling some sort of lonely emptiness. Second, the casting was, as can be expected from a Christopher Guest movie, really good and the same as always. Even though he uses the same damn people all the damn time, it somehow seems different each movie. It's like they're good actors. Parker Posey is soooooooo damn cute. I think she'd play a good redneck, and I hope to see a movie starring her as the main cute redneck. She sort of redeems her accent category for me. Additionally, Jane Lynch (who I vaguely recognize as being from some... popular television series, not sure what it is though) was really really cool as the sexually charismatic former porn star colour magick woman who was married to some weird OCD weakling man. I feel like that's true. Third, folk music is nostalgia about nostalgia about nostalgia. That is why it is stupid. The reason it has not maintained continuity and required reviving is that people eventually realized that American folk music is (see my list of adjectives). Fourth, the movie's eponymous song "A Mighty Wind" was really about US imperialism. It concerns the spreading of "democracy" to other countries via military action. The song is also stupid because it says that a "star" makes the "wind." I don't know if the writer knew that stars in fact do not have anything to do with wind, except solar wind, which isn't real wind anyway. I don't feel like the writer (maybe Christopher Guest) took meteorology seriously enough in the film (unlike in Twister). Speaking of which, this is rather ironic, Brandon and I watched the film starting at 6:50 AM (that's really early for me). The reason we started so early was that there was an actual "might wind" to our south. My sister called and woke me up to protect me from the tornado, but it never actually came and destroyed anything or threatened our lives. However, this movie was rather like a tornado for me. I feel like I will be recovering for a couple of days. Also, Aram left a couple of days ago, so I didn't really feel like watching a good movie, because I'm in a "bad mood." This was sort of an ideal situation, because I'm pretty sure I'm satisfied with hating this movie, so it's not a big loss for me. The transwoman at the end of the movie was really nice. I hate folk music, but liked that this movie also sort of hated folk music. Bye.
