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.
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