Too Bad

Waiting For Guffman is my favorite Christopher Guest-directed mockumentary. (Guest's next two films, Best In Show and A Mighty Wind, grossed far more, but Guffman established the style and stock company of this series (unless you insist on including Rob Reiner's Spinal Tap, created more than a decade earlier).)

While watching it recently, something hit me. There's always comic exaggeration in these movies, and almost everything about the fake local musical production is dumber and cheaper than it would be in real life. (And actors always love to make fun of bad acting.) But the tunes themselves created for the musical within the movie are far superior to what you'd expect from such a show. This is for two reasons. Guest, with the rest of Spinal Tap, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, are imaginative songwriters and parodists. Second, if they wrote the kind of music you'd likely see in such a show, you wouldn't be entertained--even at how bad it is--you'd just be bored.