Summary
Which brings me to Anvil! The Story of Anvil, the remarkably good documentary about a promising 1980s metal band that didn't find real success. Anvil! is strongly reminiscent of Spinal Tap, between the absurd stage theatrics, the heavy-metal hair, the bickering. Anvil! even has Stonehenge - the real Stonehenge, though, not Spinal Tap's scale model. Anvil! also is intermittently funny, though it's more mournful than comic. You've never seen so many tears in a metal documentary.
The Canadian band Anvil joined the pop- metal surge of a generation ago, when acts like Whitesnake, Metallica and Bon Jovi attained superstardom. Anvil was respect- ed among metal musicians, a fact that's established right away. In interviews, nota- bles like Motorhead's Lemmy and Metalli- ca's Lars Ulrich talk admiringly about Anvil in its heyday, when the band joined the Scor- pions and others on a 1984 tour of Japan. The famous musicians are at a loss to explain why Anvil never made it big.Anvil! is skillfully crafted, especially in the way it conveys [Steve "Lips" Kudlow] and Reiner's delight at the fact that, all these years and difficulties later, they're still having fun playing music and traveling the world. Even so, Anvil faces an entertainment business that is, by its nature, brutal. It's hard to watch Kudlow pound the pavement in Hollywood with his newly recorded CD, and it's even harder to watch him meet with a record executive at EMI Canada. The executive listens to a few seconds of a track and says he'll be in touch, but he notes euphemistically that for old-time metal acts like Anvil, "the landscape has changed." (It's worth noting that the film has given Anvil's career a big boost.)See the full content of this document
Extract
Heavy-Metal Poignancy
Heavy-metal poignancy
Anvil! is a touching documentary about a flailing bandThe standard for rock documentaries was set by This Is Spinal Tap, and it isn't even a real documentary. The 1984 spoof is uproariously funny but also uncomfortable, especially for...See the full content of this document
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