I first saw this over at Metalsucks, where Corey Mitchell called it his sight unseen nominee for best metal DVD for 2009. I’m inclined to agree with him, but I guess we’ll both find out for sure whenever it gets released (Amazon has a book of the same name slated to come on out March 12, 2009. Let’s hope the DVD will follow shortly after.)  Apparently, the movie has been screening at festivals, been nominated for a couple of awards and generated some positive press, but like I said, I only heard about it a few days ago.

Watching the trailer, I honestly thought that this was another Spinal Tap-esque mockumentary at first (I mean, one of the guys is named Robb Reiner, and Anvil is already such a great fake band name), but a quick wikipedia search revealed that no, Anvil is a real band (and I’ve been worried that my site looks bad), and they’ve apparently been pretty productive while languishing in obscurity.

I love music–metal in particular–and I’ve been playing guitar for years, so you can imagine why I’d be interested in seeing a movie about underdogs chasing a dream as rock stars. There are so many bands that fell by the wayside over the years, but it looks like the guys in Anvil are legitimately making a run at relevance in this movie (of course, being Canadian, their only real competition in their homeland is Rush). I’m also glad to see movies about unheralded bands being made. The world really doesn’t need another Some Kind of Monster (There’s a reason why the movie was called Rocky and not Apollo, if you get what I mean).

When I heard about Anvil though, I started to get curious about why there aren’t more good rock movies. This is Spinal Tap and “Metalocalypse” are the only two that come to mind, the former for the same reasons listed in the last paragraph and the latter because it so easily mocks everything about metal and stardom. The thing is, every band out there seems to claim that their lives were no different from Spinal Tap, so I guess maybe filmmakers just don’t see a reason to make them. I think I was trying to hint at this in my “Legend of Master Legend” post, but a lot of rock bands exist in near-fictional worlds or arrested development anyway. We expect them to play music and entertain us, but there are very few bands I would actually want to watch in a film context.

(I hate to keep harping on Metallica, but that movie almost ruined the band for me as much as St. Anger did. I don’t want to watch anybody go through real therapy. I’d much rather watch fictional therapy, where all you have to do is have Robin Williams repeat “it’s not you’re fault” until Matt Damon cries and everything is fine. I don’t want to see a band that writes songs like ‘Seek and Destroy,’ ‘Fight Fire with Fire’ and ‘Harvester of Sorrow’ suddenly start taking themselves so seriously once they get to their 40s. The only good part of that was seeing Dave Mustaine cry. He has to be the only person who makes Lars Ulrich sound reasonable.)

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah. There are, of course exceptions to bands I’d want to see onscreen. Chief among them is Every Time I Die and their “Documentary” DVD Shit Happens. Those guys don’t take themselves seriously at all.

The other movie I really want to see made some day would be an adaptation of Henry Rollins’ Get in the Van. That would be the anti-Spinal Tap. Instead of getting lost behind stage, they’d get beaten by a bunch of skinheads behind stage. Or instead of having Stonehenge be too small, they have the show broken up by police. And instead of talking about amplifiers going to 11, Henry would just talk about how much he hates everyone.

But maybe I’m the only one who wants to see that one…