Double Tap

No, I did not just revisit the sequel to Zombieland.

Yes, I did just confront my first Rob Reiner film since the director was killed last month. 

Two of them, actually.

As I mentioned in this post, in 2026 I am going to rewatch six of my favorite Reiner films and watch six previously unseen Reiner films for the first time, all part of intertwining bi-monthly series with the same name: Remembering Rob Reiner.

I also mentioned that I had a seventh of each type of movie that wouldn't directly fit into the series, so I'd watch them first as a double feature, before formally starting the first bi-monthly series later this month.

Those are, of course, This is Spinal Tap and its sequel, the 2025 new release Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. 

It's not every day you get a sequel to one of your top ten movies of all time, and that's what This is Spinal Tap is, currently my #9 on Flickchart. So why, you ask, didn't I rush out to see this when it was in theaters? Long before Reiner's sad demise? 

Well its September 12th release was smack dab in the middle of my trip to Europe. And though I did see two movies in the theater when I was in Europe, it wasn't playing at the Barcelona cinema within walking distance of my Air BnB when I saw The Conjuring: Last Rites on that exact day. As it turns out I didn't see another movie on the trip, but if I had, I was trying to catch One Battle After Another in Greece. 

I might have watched it earlier on video, but then came the sudden shocking news of Reiner's passing. I needed a few weeks to get over that. In fact, I might have taken longer, but now my ranking deadline is the end of next week, and I wanted to include The End Continues with my 2025 rankings.

Well, it was tremendous to watch this as a double feature, and each movie is so short that I think I watched them both in the time it took for the last battle to play out in Avatar: Fire and Ash. Not only are these movies short, but they have such delicious comedic pacing that they feel even shorter than they actually are. 

Now clearly, that is more of an attribute of the 1984 original, which benefits from the actors being young and spry, and from shooting in a number of different locations around the U.S. (Or at least setting scenes in a number of locations, whether they were actually shot there or not.) There was never any question as to which of these movies was going to be better in that regard. To even suggests that there could have been a question is silly. 

However, I did really appreciate how well these actors remembered how to play their roles. The best in that regard is Christopher Guest, even though we'd ordinarily give more credit for their ongoing abilities to Michael McKean (recently in Better Call Saul) and Harry Shearer (in The Simpsons for nearly 40 years now). Perhaps without the distractions of other significant work, Guest was better able to home in on what made Nigel Tufnel Nigel Tufnel. Though they all provide credible incarnations of their earlier selves as those characters. 

If there was one I was disappointed with, it may have been Shearer, possibly because he just doesn't have enough to do. Derek Smalls is a low-key MVP of the original film, the "lukewarm water," as he describes himself, that allows him to function as glue for the group -- which has a fairly literal interpretation now, as we see Derek as the proprietor of a glue museum. I just didn't feel like the character got so many opportunities to shine in this low-key way -- never stealing the scenes, but sometimes being the funniest aspect of them anyway -- in the new movie.

Still, I liked The End Continues even a bit more than I expected to, which is why I'm giving it four stars on Letterboxd. Yeah, some of that may be nostalgia and my out-sized love for the original. If you were to try to argue with me that this is really more of a 3.5-star movie, I'd cede the point to you pretty quickly. 

But the minor miracle this movie pulls off is how similar it feels to the original. And part of that is Reiner's central role, both as a director and as a character. He's playing the same Marty DiBergi here as well, the same earnest filmmaker who allowed Spinal Tap to be who they were on camera, never for a moment doing anything less than being perfectly generous to them. 

That was something I appreciated about Reiner's performance this time when watching the original. He certainly questions the things the musicians say -- the most famous example, of course, being when he wonders why they couldn't just make 10 the highest volume setting on the amplifier when the volume units are arbitrary units of measure anyway. But he never questions them with the intention of embarrassing them, and it's this kind of kindness that make us love both him and them. They are able to show their foibles, their imperfect understandings of the way things work, and he just continues to encourage them, though not, you sense, because he thinks it's dynamite footage that is going to make his movie better. 

In fact I think the only thing that didn't totally work for me about Spinal Tap II was its very last image, which I think I can spoil, but if you don't want to know what it is, you can skip the next paragraph after this SPOILER ALERT. 

Interviews play over the closing credits here just as they do in the original, another strong choice to remind us of that original. The final interview is with the band's current drummer, an enthusiastic young woman who happens to be gay, though that's not important right now. She's played by Valerie Franco, a real musician. The subject of this interview is of course her ability to survive her experience with the band without dying in a gardening accident, choking on vomit (hers or anyone else's) or spontaneously combusting. I could see the joke coming from a mile away, that she was then going to start choking on the piece of fruit she was eating, at which point DiBergi jumps in and starts to give her the Heimlich Maneuver. The movie ends on a mid-Heimlich freeze frame. I think it would have been stronger to end with one of the band members, preferably Nigel as in the original, and not on a freeze frame, which is a cinematic device that's beneath someone like Reiner. 

I could probably go on and on about both films, but I've seen This is Spinal Tap so many times that I'm not sure if I'm actually getting new things from it each time I see it. I did, however, want to delve into one thing that has always puzzled me but that I've never actually looked up before, so I just fed Google this prompt to see what AI would say:

"Why is Bruno Kirby listed prominently in the end credits of This Is Spinal Tap?"

You would reasonably say that Kirby has no bigger role in that movie than any other actor who has a cameo of a minute or less. Yet he gets the "And Bruno Kirby" credit at the end of the movie. Why?

Here's what AI says:

"Bruno Kirby is listed prominently in the end credits of This Is Spinal Tap (1984) because, despite having a relatively short on-screen role, his performance as Tommy Pischedda, the limo driver obsessed with Frank Sinatra, was a significant improvised contribution to the film's success."

Well that's dumb because they had to create the credits before they knew whether the movie would be a success. Wrong again, AI. 

I guess that one will remain a mystery. Maybe he was better known at the time than the others who made cameos. AI goes on to speculate that it has to do with his close relationship with Reiner, appearing in several of Reiner's movies, but that's another retroactive analysis, considering that this was Reiner's first film. 

As for the sequel, I did enjoy the bits that I thought some others may have had issue with, like the cameos by Paul McCartney and Elton John. But in terms of "Can they still do it," I was indeed impressed by the vocal and musical fortitude of these three actors in their late 70s and early 80s (Shearer is 82). Any staging they did of any song we knew was a pretty darn good version of that song, as far as I was concerned, especially the little studio bit they did of, I believe, "Give Me Some Money," which ends with them fading out into just quieter and quieter repititions of the chorus. Some great harmonica, which I assume was real, by McKean there, too. I also love their reaction to realizing they've just been in total harmony and knocked out of the park.

The great thing about both movies is that this kind of earnestness is embedded within a world defined by partying and showboating. They allow us to see the humans beneath the rock stars. And that's Reiner all over, earnest to a fault, earnest to the end. 

I don't know what the form will be of Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale. For what it's worth, Reiner is not listed on IMDB as an actor in this movie, so it could just be a concert film, without a lot of jokes or great moments from characters we know and love. Maybe it was conceived just as a way to show us how much these men could really do as musicians.

I'll take any last little bit I can get, because it will, indeed, be the last. 

Mourning my favorite director

I debated about whether to hem and haw in the subject of this post about calling Rob Reiner my favorite director.

If you were measuring Reiner in terms of the yardsticks a cinephile would use to praise a director, you might not think of him as an obvious candidate for this honor. He wasn't always pioneering new camera tricks. He didn't have a signature style. His movies didn't make the Sight & Sound list. He wasn't a big mis-en-scene guy. 

But if measuring Reiner only on the pleasure his films brought me, it's no contest. 

I wouldn't maybe know I held Reiner in such high esteem except for Flickchart, which has revealed to me that I have three Rob Reiner movies in my top 30 of all time, and six in my top 200. Yes that's right, Reiner is responsible for 3% of my top 200 movies of all time. 

And today I learned he was stabbed to death, along with his wife, most likely by their son.

WTF?

I haven't even watched Spinal Tap II: The End Continues yet. That is going to be one sorry viewing when it actually happens. 

There are lots of terrible things going on in the world. Two men fuelled by hatred just shot up a Hanukkah ceremony at Bondi Beach. Another guy killed some Brown University students. And as it happens, I've got some pretty concerning health developments in my family right now. (Nothing in my immediate family of my wife and two sons. That's all I'll say.)

But because I'm a movie guy, the one I can't get out of my head is the image of Rob Reiner begging and pleading for his life when an assailant, most likely his son, was coming at him with a knife.

And losing that argument. 

Any death is bad. But when Rob Reiner's father, the great Carl Reiner, keeled over at age 98, you couldn't even really be sad. You knew it was his time. 

Rob Reiner was 78. He lived a good life. But it had such a terrible ending, and when I think of him, I will now always think of him in the same company as others who lost their lives in such devastating ways, like Phil Hartman. 

So while I want to give Reiner more of the typical, wistful send-off that I like to give our cinematic luminaries when they pass on to the great beyond, now I'm in such painful misery that I can't even type straight. 

But because I don't think I can write a series of pieces remembering Reiner, I'm going to give it a go now.

Rob Reiner became a target on shows like South Park for a sort of liberal piousness that Trey Parker and Matt Stone found grating. But for a liberal like me, that was part of why I liked Reiner. He believed in the causes I believed in. But that was just a happy bit of fortuitousness. I would have loved him even if he played on the other team. 

That's the thing about Reiner -- you could like the films he directed, but he also had a personality as a result of being an actor first and foremost. I can't say that I watched All in the Family -- in fact, it's possible I've never seen a single episode -- but Reiner's Meathead made millions into fans of his personality, a personality that earned him two Emmys. 

I'm not going to spend a lot of time describing Reiner's persona. It was expansive. It was hilarious. In his comedy, it could be a bit naughty. On this weekend where we've lost some good and innocent Jewish Sydneysiders, Reiner embodied the lineage of great Jewish comedy, his kvetching always generous, his observations always shrewd. Simply put, he was funny as hell, and I also got a great sense of warmth from him. 

And the film that introduced him to the world as a director used that personality to good effect. My highest ranked Reiner film on Flickchart is his first, This Is Spinal Tap, my #9 film of all time. I said earlier that Reiner wasn't always pioneering new camera tricks, but how about new film genres? He and Tap star Christopher Guest might be the two men most responsible for the mockumentary, and we couldn't have gotten a better initial tour guide than Reiner's Marty DiBergi, who interviews David St. Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls. I can't believe I don't know what the first scene of this movie is, but if you told me it was DiBergi introducing himself to us, I'd say that's most likely right. Little did we know, Reiner was introducing us to his incorporable career, which gave him the best "imperial period" -- to borrow the music term -- of any director. What's more, it was his personality as the straight man playing off the Tap men that made it all work. Who else could have asked Nigel the innocent questions necessary for "This one goes to 11," and had it work so smashingly?

Reiner followed that up the very next year with The Sure Thing, which at #396 on my Flickchart is only my seventh favorite Reiner movie. I have friends for whom this might be top three. And it would be top three for me for many directors, but I have so many other films to talk about that I can't even linger on one of the films that really introduced us to John Cusack.

Stand by Me in 1986, #131 on my Flickchart, proved that we didn't know Reiner's only mode after two films. He could also make a Stephen King adaptation and a truly seminal coming-of-age story for Gen Xers -- though about their parents, so it worked for that generation too. Which also managed to be funny in spots. It had a huge impact on me. Heck, I was 12 when it came out. 

But then the very next year, again -- that's four movies in four years, if you're keeping track -- Reiner made my #11 favorite film of all time, The Princess Bride. Epic. Iconic. Also hilarious. You can quote 30 lines from this movie and there would still be 30 more honorable mentions. I didn't even know how much I loved this until I rewatched it with my kids in the last decade, which is when it shot up from somewhere in my 20s or 30s on Flickchart all the way up to #11. If it weren't blocked by The Iron Giant, that would be two Reiner films in my top ten.

Rob Reiner didn't make a film in 1988. Everyone has to recharge sometimes.

But in 1989 he made what I consider to be the greatest romantic comedy of all time, and yes I know I am pissing off classic movie fans who'd rather Cary Grant star in their great romcoms than Billy Crystal. But what can I say, I was born in 1973, and When Harry Met Sally slayed me. It's funny, it's heartbreaking, and it makes me feel fonder about New York City than almost any film out there. For a long time this was ahead of The Princess Bride, fully in my top 20, but at the moment it's my #26 on Flickchart. 

And yet again Reiner made a movie in 1990, his second Stephen King adaptation, Misery. Which is also a stone-cold classic. Two-handers don't get more tense and exciting than this. He coaxed an Oscar-winning performance out of Kathy Bates that no one will soon forget, and brought James Caan back to relevance. Which is good enough for #150 on my Flickchart. 

Rob Reiner kept things going throughout the 1990s, with the exception of legendary flop North in 1994. (And even in a mode of excess generosity toward the man, no, I am not going to defend North.) I may not be as big a fan of A Few Good Men as some people (wow, I didn't realize it was all the way down at #3292), but I do respect it. The American President at #691 is more my style. Ghosts of Mississippi (#2125) is even pretty good.

But while many people are ready to write off Reiner's career at this point -- even with zeitgeisty movies like The Bucket List on his resume -- I am always left in a puddle of fresh tears over 1999's The Story of Us, which is all the way up to #167 on my Flickchart. This is possibly the only movie I can remember watching twice consecutively on the same day, just before my first son was born in 2010, for reasons I won't get into right now. I'm sure it's happened, but I don't remember when or why. Then I went another 15 years without seeing it again, when I saw it this past February, my fourth time overall, and it inspired me to write this post. And then five days later, this post. 

I'm going to finish talking about this movie not because I don't think Reiner has made a good movie in the 21st century, but because it makes a good bookend with This is Spinal Tap. Why, you ask? What could these two movies possibly have in common? 

Answer: Rob Reiner the actor. Rob Reiner the personality.

In the film, Reiner plays the best friend of Bruce Willis' character, who is possibly separating from his wife, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. Reiner is married to Rita Wilson. Just likeable actors all around. 

Reiner doesn't have a huge number of scenes, but he has just enough to give us the flavor we like from his personality. And the part I love most is Reiner's disquisition about how the ass does not really exist. The ass is just the fatty tops of the legs. In reality, there is no ass. Believe me, it works in context, especially when it gets called back to later on.

Reiner was great in front of the camera, Reiner was great behind the camera, and Reiner was great in the sphere of progressive politics, even if Matt and Trey sometimes didn't like it. I can't believe I won't see him in front of or behind the camera again.

Is he my favorite director? God, now I have to use the past tense. Was he my favorite director?

It's something I've told people about before, this high success rate on my Flickchart, which corresponds to my real affection for the man and his movies. But I always feel a bit hesitant about it. If you go around telling everyone how much you love Rob Reiner, maybe they just focus on the fact that he didn't have a lot of hits in the last 25 years of his career, or maybe they think of Matt and Trey making fun of him. Maybe it's an embarrassment to say, especially in circles of serious cinephiles, how much you love the output of one of our great populist directors.

But if I can't proudly shout my love for Rob Reiner now, in the hours after his death, I don't know when I can. 

I might just shout until I cry. 

Did Derek Smalls plant the cucumber?

I watched This is Spinal Tap for probably the eighth or ninth time this past weekend, having just watched it for the seventh or eighth time a little over a year ago.

You'd think by this point I wouldn't be discovering lots of new things about it, or maybe I should say, that I wouldn't be finding new interpretations of certain scenes. (This is Spinal Tap not being known as a movie where you interpret the meaning of scenes, per se.)

But I did have a new discovery of sorts this weekend, or a realization that maybe I hadn't read something correctly on all previous times I watched the movie.

When Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) has to go through the metal detector three times at the airport, I always thought having the cucumber in his pants was a prank meant to embarrass airport security and thumb his nose at airport security conventions. A punk rock act of defiance.

Now I've decided that the most obvious interpretation of the scene had escaped me for over a half-dozen viewings: It's a prop designed to enhance the sense of sexual prowess he emanates, and he's gotten so used to it that he simply walks around with it all the time. Meaning that even though the two female security agents are embarrassed, it's Derek who is more embarrassed.

I guess I still don't know which it is, so I'd like to ask you.

It's not that on some level, I didn't think the cucumber was also a prop meant to enhance the impression of his sexual prowess. I knew that joke was also being made. But something about the way Derek reacts to the incident made me think he knew it would set off the metal detector.

For starters, he doesn't show much surprise when the wand reveals the location of the metal source. Then he unwraps the aluminum foil from the cucumber and drops it on the table with the same cool dismissivness as a rock singer who drops his microphone and walks away. Then there's the laughter of his bandmates, which I always thought was with him, targeted at the security guards, rather than at him.

But my erstwhile interpretation would require us to reimagine the character entirely. Every other time we see Derek in this movie, he's polite, humble and kind -- he doesn't seem like he has a bone in his body that would try to make another person feel bad. He doesn't take the piss out of people; he gets the piss taken out of him. If we decide he's going to turn on a dime and (mildly) sexually humiliate the airport security guard, that's not the Derek we know.

But if he does walk around all the time with a cucumber (not an armadillo) in his pants, what are the logistics of that? How does he sit comfortably? How does he keep it from falling out? How often does he have to change the cucumber so it doesn't start to go bad? And why would he chance such a thing, when the movie seems to indicate he's getting tail left and right? If you live a rock star lifestyle that might involve unpremeditated sex at any moment, why would you risk blowing it by having your girl find a cucumber in your pants?

However, in that picture above, he does look a might bit embarrassed, doesn't he? It's hard to say if he's embarrassed or just playing the joke very straight. How the joke plays out could be either. By pretending to remove every metal he has on each pass through, he could be just intentionally wasting everyone's time and drawing more attention to the ridiculousness he perceives in the process. Or, he could have literally forgotten that he had a metal source next to his junk. 

What ultimately convinces me that it was, indeed, a prank, is that the cucumber is encased in foil. If you were just augmenting your crotch area to affect the bulge that appears in your pants, why would you wrap that augmentation in foil? It wouldn't change the shape of the bulge.

It would help keep the cucumber fresh, however.

Projecting again, posting about it again

So is this impressive collection of films a shelf at the local video store? With that many films lined up so impressively and so neatly, it could only be, right?

Nope. That's just what I brought with me to the hotel on Friday night.

Yep, I made another trip to a dumpy hotel near my work, armed with clothes, snacks, a laptop and a projector. Oh, and lots of movies. Twenty-one physical DVD cases, one of which contained three separate DVDs. So that's 23 movies total.

You may recall that I first did this last fall, the day after my birthday. It was designed as a birthday present, to get a night off from parenting at a hotel. My wife had done such things previously, and I followed suit. Projecting movies on the wall was my own personal innovation, my idea how to get the most out of time that I could spend exactly as I wanted.

Well, since my wife went out of town for three nights for her own birthday a couple weeks back, she insisted that I take another one of these nights for myself. Initially I was not all that pumped for it, because this would be my third time borrowing the projector from work, and I was already feeling sheepish about the prospect of asking my boss. In fact, I even devised various plans to steal it (he probably wouldn't notice), or rent or even buy my own (some people were selling them really cheaply on craigslist). Ultimately I just asked him again, and again he had no problem loaning it out to me.

That's when I started getting excited.

My goal this time was to watch six movies, which would be a one-movie improvement on my previous total. Having done this once already, I figured to lose less time to the logistics of making it work. For example, this time I didn't have to go to the store to buy a box of pushpins, so I could put a sheet up on the wall to cover the patterned wallpaper. But I did forget to bring the power strip I brought last time, so I watched my first movie with the laptop running on batteries. After that finished, I headed back to the office just after the last person left for the day, and corrected that situation. Time lost: 13 minutes.

And yep, I did get in those six movies - just barely.

I didn't want to write a massive post about my experiences watching these movies, but then as I was watching them, ideas of things to write about came up for each movie. So it will in fact be a sort of massive post, but it'll be broken up by subheadings, so you can pick through it that way if it makes it easier for you.

Laurie Holden's twin sister

My first movie up was Ron Underwood's Tremors, which made its way to the top of my Netflix queue without a specific plan for me to watch it. This seemed as good a time as any. When the sunlight is still coming in the hotel window (I checked in just before 3 p.m.), it's nice to have a movie that has lots of exterior shots. Otherwise it's difficult to see anything.

One of the first things I noticed was that Laurie Holden, of X-Files and Walking Dead fame, was in it. But this struck me as very strange. The movie is 22 years old, which would mean that Holden is now in her mid-40s -- at the very youngest. And the woman in this movie didn't seem to be only in her early 20s, in part because she is playing a seismologist doing research on plate tectonics.

So I took a break from the movie to satisfy my curiosity on the internet, and in fact, the woman in the movie is Finn Carter, who I saw last fall in How I Got Into College. I didn't mistake her for Holden then. But here, look at them side by side and tell me what you think:



Uncanny, right?

Well, maybe it would seem more so if I'd been able to find better pictures to use as my examples ...

(For the record, Holden is 39 and Carter is 51.)

That strange subplot with the Japanese guy

When I got back with the power strip, I excitedly put on Fargo. The movie is one of my top ten films of all time, but I have not seen it in at least five years. This needed to be remedied.

As I was watching it, I was marveling over the perfection of the script. It's such a tight script. Except ...

... there's an otherwise totally unnecessary subplot about a former classmate of Marge Gunderson's who is trying to romantically woo her, despite the fact that she's married and seven months pregnant.

I got to wondering what the purpose of this subplot is. It never dovetails into the main plot. I was talking about it with my wife later on, and we determined that the primary function of the subplot is to show that even in a contented marriage on the verge of motherhood, Marge has doubts about her place in the world. After all, she dresses up nicely to meet her former classmate while out of town in the big city, and even chooses a fancy restaurant for their meeting -- before eventually seeing how weird the guy has become and realizing how good she has it back at home with Norm. I guess the doubting of contented marriage is a theme in this movie, as Jerry Lundegaard is also shaking up a seemingly stable family life through the choices he makes.

Still, Fargo could easily exist without the Mike Yanagita subplot. Especially if you go by the basic screenwriting guideline that every scene in a movie should move the story forward in some identifiable way.

So why did the Coens include it? Especially when the movie otherwise exists as a master class in screenwriting?

My ultimate conclusion: It was a deliberate imperfection introduced to showcase how brilliant the rest of the script was. I admit that this is something of a stretch, and basically accuses the Coens of patting themselves on the back. (But let's be honest, it wouldn't be the first or last time they had patted themselves on the back.) But it got me thinking about how Muslims are supposedly known for leaving deliberate imperfections in their work, because only Allah is capable of perfection. Not that the Coens are Muslims, but that there's something about an imperfection that tends to accentuate how great everything else is.

And since Fargo is perfect as it is, I would definitely miss Mike Yanagita if he weren't there.

The unintended benefits of Heath Ledger's death

At around 8 o'clock I started what I guess you would call the main course. Anyway, I'll call it the main course because my pizza arrived about 20 minutes in.

The most famous thing about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is, of course, the fact that Heath Ledger was working on it when he died. Since he had not completed all his scenes, Terry Gilliam pulled the unorthodox trick of recruiting three other actors -- Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell -- to complete the parts Ledger had not completed.

To me, this sounded like a doomed decision that would just add confusion to what was probably already a very confusing movie, it being from the mind of Gilliam.

Then I saw the movie.

It was amazing to me how cleanly Gilliam incorporated these other actors. If Ledger had to die while making this movie, it seems he chose an opportune time to do it. He seems to have filmed all of his real-world scenes before dying, leaving those within the fantasy word of the imaginarium unfilmed. It's in this fantasy world where those other actors take over, and it makes perfect sense in terms of the logic of that fantasy world. And it's not at all confusing.

In fact, I think I liked the movie better with these other three taking on the roles they did than if Ledger had done those roles himself.

You can't make an assessment like that in a vacuum, of course. We'll never see the movie as it would have been if Ledger hadn't died. But the work Ledger did contribute to this film is not some of his best. Which may have something to do with his physical condition in the weeks before he died -- I mean, he was taking all those medications that resulted in the cocktail that killed him for a reason. It's just like when I was watching Brad Renfro's last movie, The Informers, last weekend, and he seemed to be physically struggling to complete his scenes.

And so it was that Depp, Law and Farrell injected a much-needed playfulness into both this film and the character.

Anyway, the film does not entirely work on all levels, but it does enough right to have been well worth the watch.

Cybill Shepherd as [some character you don't know]

My second viewing of Taxi Driver, which began at about 10:45, was long overdue. I saw the movie for the first time probably in the mid 1990s, and not again since. It was also the one movie of the 23 that I knew I would watch, because my boss loaned it to me. In fact, as if I'd needed to lubricate my request to borrow the projector, I told my boss about my plan to watch Taxi Driver so as to snare him in a wave of enthusiasm. (It's one of his favorite films.) I'd actually been intending to pick it up at the library, but he brought in his copy on Friday to loan to me. That meant I was committed to watching it, even if I felt like passing on it at the 11th hour. (And it literally was almost the 11th hour when I started the nearly two hour movie.)

My main and only comment on Taxi Driver, beyond the fact that I really like but don't love the movie, has little to do with Taxi Driver itself, but a phenomenon that occurred to me while watching its opening credits.

Namely, that movies used to -- and some still do -- give the name of the character such-and-such actor is playing in the opening credits.

Taxi Driver did this twice. It says "Peter Boyle as Wizard" and "Cybill Shepherd as Betsy."

While I have a certain affection for this convention because it has a long history in cinema, I did wonder what it really gains you to know the name of the character an actor is playing. You don't know the names of any of the characters at this point, so knowing which actor plays which character is of limited value. These credits are basically asking you to store that name as information in your short-term memory, and then when the character appears on screen, you can say "Oh, that character is played by Cybill Shepherd."

But in a way, isn't that kind of "breaking the spell"? Don't you just want to concentrate on the character as a character, not as an actress playing that character? That's what the closing credits are for.

I think it's slightly different if it's a character that you might know before the movie even starts. Like, if Santa Claus were a character in Taxi Driver (which would be a pretty weird version of the movie), you might say "And Harvey Keitel as Santa Claus." But who is this "Betsy," anyway? Why is she singled out from the other characters?

The beauty of Derek Smalls

This is Spinal Tap is another of my all-time favorites, and another film I hadn't seen in at least five years. In fact, I can't even remember when I bought the DVD, and the packaging was still on it. (It was one of those DVDs that's taped shut along three edges, and the tape rips off in chunks. It took about five minutes for me to free the disc.) Anyway, since I know it so well, it made a perfect accompaniment to my morning coffee. The light streaming past the closed curtains wouldn't matter, because I didn't technically need to see everything that was happening.

This post is getting long, so I don't need to go on at length about This is Spinal Tap. You probably already know everything a person could say about it. But a couple quick comments nonetheless:

- I consciously noticed for the first time that Anjelica Huston is in this movie. She plays the woman who designed the 18-inch Stonehenge model. But what I found really interesting about her appearance is that her name appears twice in the closing credits, spelled two different ways. The first time they spell her first name wrong (Angelica), and the second time they spell it with the J. Funny.

- I love the "lukewarm water" that is Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer). I love how even-keeled this guy is. He's always using logic to interpret every situation in the most optimistic possible way, and nothing can really throw him. On this viewing, I especially appreciated the fact that he smokes a pipe. That seems to make him all the more wise. It also makes the scene where he goes through airport security with an aluminum foil-wrapped cucumber in his pants all the more funny, because you get the prankster side of the character there as well.

Watching Raising Arizona as a father

My personal favorite among the classics I rewatched is Raising Arizona, the final movie of the visit, which I finished just 15 minutes before checking out. I have it ranked as my third favorite movie of all time on Flickchart, yet I hadn't watched it since June of 2007.

I know this movie like the back of my hand, which made for a good movie to watch as I was cleaning up the room and dealing with a stronger quality of light coming through the window. What I'd never done previously, though, was watch it as a father.

And I found myself getting emotional several times.

Some of that was just the emotion I've owned up to feeling when I love a movie so much that it touches me on a deeper level. Like, when the opening credits finally kick in at something like the 11-minute mark, with the movie's classic theme song, I think I had a bit more than just the chills I'm getting even know as I write about it.

But the ending, always sentimental and poignant, really got me this time. HI and Ed having to return the baby. Nathan Arizona realizing that it was them who took Nathan Jr. Ed explaining that they can't have one of their own. Nathan describing how lost he would be if Florence left him -- "I do love her so." And finally, HI's dream where you see him from behind, an old man at a future family reunion, and a grown woman comes to touch him on his cheek, speaking to him a single, loving word:

"Dad."

Yep. Waterworks.

A realization about Rob Reiner

My friend Don, who was visiting for the weekend from Chicago, and I were leaving Amoeba Music in Hollywood on Sunday night when the conversation turned to Rob Reiner. It had actually started on Ron Howard, because I had just picked up a nice-looking (albeit used) collector's edition DVD of Apollo 13 for $5.99. (It was a space-themed evening -- I also finally bought Dean Parisot's Galaxy Quest.) For his part, Don bought Bram Stoker's Dracula on BluRay and some music.

The apparent similarities between Howard and Reiner -- both former TV stars who had gone on to careers as highly respected directors -- was what caused us to wander into Reiner territory. Our initial thesis was that Howard might be the greater director. After all, he'd won an Oscar, and he continues to release prestige films. Whereas Reiner's last decade has been kind of the opposite, composed of moderate misfires (Rumor Has It ...), major misfires (Alex & Emma) and popular schlock (The Bucket List).

But it was when we started to review Reiner's older work that it hit us like a smack in the forehead:

Rob Reiner may have had the greatest decade for any director of any era. And he did most of it in five years.

If you start with his directorial debut in 1984 -- This Is Spinal Tap, which could be one of the best first movies ever -- and go forward, Reiner was absolutely on fire for the next five to ten years. Not only that, but every movie he made could be described as one of the best versions of that movie ever made -- even still today.

Shall we take a look?

This Is Spinal Tap (1984) might be the best mockumentary ever made.

Argument: Hardcore film lovers may cite a dozen examples to the contrary, but you could even say that Rob Reiner invented the mockumentary. What's certainly true is that Christopher Guest's participation in this film inspired him to reshape his whole career as a series of increasingly less brilliant mockumentaries. Nothing is less than 100% brilliant in This Is Spinal Tap. In fact, it's so great that I don't need to go into an in-depth description of why it's so great, because you already know. But I will mention Don's interesting perspective on its greatness, which is that you can see the characters thinking. When Nigel Tufnel (Guest) makes one of his inane comments, he's not just reading his lines (in part because a bunch of this stuff was improvised). You can actually see the wheels turning in his head as he answers each question, and that's part of what makes it such a fully realized, spot-on satire.

The Sure Thing (1985) might be the best road movie ever made.

Argument: Or it might not. In fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't. But the rest of the movies after this fit the format, so go with me on this. The Sure Thing is definitely a really good road movie, and as a result of the age I was when I saw it (about 13 or 14), it sticks out to me as one of the first films I think of when you talk about road movies. It's full of classic scenes involving the various modes of transport John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga use to cross the country, like Cusack freaking out the pervert who picks up Zuniga hitchhiking, and Cusack clashing with the pair of show-tune singers (one of whom is Tim Robbins). It's especially nice as it had the function of serving as Cusack's breakout role.

Stand by Me (1986) might be the best coming-of-age movie ever made.

Argument: Who in my generation doesn't think of Stand by Me when they think of coming-of-age movies? I'd like to think that this extends outward to other generations, but I'd probably be wrong about that. After all, today's teens probably see Twilight as a coming-of-age movie. But in terms of purity of form, Stand by Me takes the cake. Few films deal so intensely with the transition between childhood and adulthood, as Gordie, Chris, Teddy and Vern are caught between the innocence of childhood play and the seriousness of death, which confronts them in the form of a corpse, older bullies who fight with knives, and a train that may flatten them like pancakes. It might also be one of the best period pieces ever made, with its great 50s soundtrack.

The Princess Bride (1987) might be the best storybook romance ever made.

Argument: Or should it be called a romantic fantasy? A fantasy comedy? A romantic storybook comedy? However you choose to categorize it, The Princess Bride hits every note perfectly. It introduced a slew of iconic characters, a boatload of quotable lines, and one of the most delightful forms of "damsel in distress" escapism you are likely to find on film. Do you remember how you felt after you first saw The Princess Bride? There you go. I'll leave it at that because there just isn't much more to say.

When Harry Met Sally ... (1989) might be the best romantic comedy ever made.

Argument: And here is the really big one. All the other genres I've discussed have relatively few entries compared to the number of movies that could be described as romantic comedies. And yet this movie could still be considered the best romantic comedy of all time -- I'm not even sure what the other top contenders would be, since there are few romantic comedies that everyone can agree are as perfect as this. Granted, this is again showing the bias of the era in which I came of age, which may be inescapable -- there are certainly classic romantic comedies by the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy that older viewers would probably consider their favorites. But When Harry Met Sally is almost certainly the king of modern romantic comedies, and you might even say its stamp is evident on many if not most of the romantic comedies that followed. Again, I don't need to tell you why.

Misery (1990) might be the best Stephen King adaptation ever made.

Argument: Okay, now I know I'm wrong -- especially since Reiner himself has made a better Stephen King adaptation (Stand by Me). However, the best film adaptations of King's novels tend to be either non-horrors (both Stand by Me and one of my favorite films of all time, The Shawshank Redemption) or horror adaptations in which the writer or director took liberties with King's work (The Shining). But could Misery be the best faithful adaptation of a horror by Stephen King? Perhaps.

A Few Good Men (1992) might be the best movie in which Jack Nicholson shouts "You can't handle the truth!" ever made.

Argument: Okay, now I'm kidding.

But this is a good place to leave off, because Reiner's next film was the infamous bomb North. He did follow that with the excellent The American President (best movie ever about the president? Nah) and the pretty-good Ghosts of Mississippi, but that's the last time Reiner has met with pretty much universal critical acclaim. (I absolutely love The Story of Us, but I know I'm in the minority.)

What's amazing about this period of 1984 to 1990 is not only how prolific he was during it, and not only how successful each film was, but how comfortably he shifted between genres. As is evident in the way I've structured this piece, talking about genres, Reiner never repeated himself during this period -- in fact, I don't know that you could say any two of the films are even somewhat similar to each other.

It's an interesting realization especially when compared and contrasted to yesterday's discussion of Danny Boyle, who is also constantly reinventing himself. If you lined up 20 film bloggers and asked them which one is the better director, Boyle or Reiner, you'd probably get 18 for Boyle and two for Reiner.

But I might be one of the two. I mean, just look at those titles. Granted, Reiner's films from the 1980s have had more of a chance to endure in the zeitgeist and stake their claims as classics, and his films are all accessible in a way that Boyle's films aren't even trying to be. But it's being uncharitable and just plain wrong to dismiss Reiner as simply a populist director. Making films for the masses that are also as smart as Reiner's films is a true challenge indeed. In a way, you could say that "anyone" can make an arsty film with a potentially narrow target audience -- and Boyle may be among the best at that, considering that his artistically credible films have also managed to find a pretty big audience. But making films that please both the studios and almost any film fans you ask, from the least discriminating to the most? That's a special talent. Because most of the time you are going to piss off serious fans by pandering to the masses. However, I don't think there are many serious film fans who would find fault with This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally or Misery. And This Is Spinal Tap, in its own way, might be more subversive than anything even Boyle has ever made.

I just think it's important not to let a "what have you done for me lately?" mentality cause us to forget or discount the kind of greatness that Rob Reiner demonstrated during those incredible 6+ years. Any director would be proud to have six titles as good as those on his CV. I'm not even sure if the best six films of Steven Spielberg of Martin Scorsese are as universally well-liked as those six films. Of course, I could also be getting carried away.

However, I think Reiner deserves a little excess enthusiasm. In recent years, the man has turned into something of a figure of ridicule, and not just because he's been on a losing streak in the director's chair. His most prominent recent appearance in pop culture may have been on South Park, where Trey Parker and Matt Stone eviscerated him, making him out to be a self-righteous liberal ideologue stuffing his face with food in every shot.

Well, that self-righteous liberal ideologue stuffing his face with food may just be one of the most influential directors of all time.

Or at the very least, a guy with an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time.