Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

A Mighty Wind Blu-ray Movie Review

(Queer as) Folk

Reviewed by Michael Reuben February 9, 2016

A Mighty Wind is the third of Christopher Guest's feature-length "mockumentaries", each of which was improvised by an informal repertory company of sketch comedians working from a story outline written by Guest and Eugene Levy. Ostensibly the film is set in the world of folk music, and the songs—written by the cast themselves—are good enough to have been released on an album that achieved respectable sales. But as in all of Guest's films, the real subject is eccentricity, the more obsessive, the better. Best in Show was populated by dog lovers who, whatever their different backgrounds, shared an intense passion for canine companionship. In A Mighty Wind, Guest chose a canvas that gave room to a far more diverse array of comic lunatics, from a catheter salesman whose true love is model trains to a Swedish-born public TV executive whose speech is so heavily freighted with Yiddish that he's barely intelligible. Many of the film's best moments have nothing do with music or the memorial concert that drives the plot. A Mighty Wind soars on an endless string of non sequiturs, all of them delivered with peerless sang froid.

A Mighty Wind was produced by Castle Rock Productions in an era when that company still maintained separate offices and post-production facilities, which allowed Guest and his crew substantial creative freedom. Castle Rock has now been folded into Warner Brothers, and the Warner Archive Collection has assumed the task of bringing A Mighty Wind to Blu-ray. Although the film was made only three years after Best in Show and shares the same documentary aesthetic, WAC's presentation is so good that I want them to go back and re-do the earlier film (but only after releasing Guest's Waiting for Guffman and For Your Consideration, which are still missing on Blu-ray).

After the death of iconic folk music manager Irving Steinbloom (Stuart Luce), his son Jonathan (Bob Balaban) organizes a memorial concert called "An Ode to Irving" featuring his father's three most successful acts. Only one of the groups, The Main Street Singers, is still actively performing, but with key replacements and the name changed to "The New Main Street Singers". The trio known as "The Folksmen" (Spinal Tap veterans Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and director Guest) haven't played together for years, but at least they still get along. Steinbloom's star-crossed duo, Mitch & Mickey (Levy and Catherine O'Hara), whose real-life romance helped fuel their musical popularity, split up long ago. Mitch is a basket case—whether from drugs or inherent psychosis is never clear—and Mickey has left show business and married the aforementioned train enthusiast and catheter salesman, Leonard Crabbe (Jim Piddock, who would go on to co-create Guest's HBO series, Family Tree).

The stresses of reuniting Steinbloom's former stars are only part of the challenge. Jonathan Steinbloom faces conflict among his siblings, brother Elliott (John Lake), who dislikes folk music so intensely that he moved away, and sister Naomi (Deborah Theaker), whose stream of tears seems designed to draw attention more to her than her father's cultural legacy. The PR firm promoting the event is run by a pair of clueless amateurs (Larry Miller and Jennifer Coolidge), who have no idea what they're promoting. (Coolidge, always a highlight of Guest's ensemble, speaks in an unclassifiable accent that gives new meaning to the term "affected".) The venue for the concert, Manhattan's venerable Town Hall, has only one opening for the event, with such short notice that there's barely time for travel and rehearsal. And Jonathan Steinbloom seems to have learned nothing about his father's business. An OCD fussbudget, he refers to the stage sets at Town Hall as "furniture" and drives the facility's manager (Michael Hitchcock) to distraction obsessing over imaginary hazards from lights, fixtures and even the flowers in the lobby. (Guest has reported that Bob Balaban's neurotic performance was so convincing that, when the Town Hall manager loses patience and smacks him, the entire film crew applauded.)

The songs in A Mighty Wind are often very funny, but as Guest discovered in editing, the demands of pacing prevented him from featuring any musical performance in its entirety, with the exception of the title song, which everyone at the memorial concert gathers on stage to sing. The faux folk milieu is enhanced by "vintage" clips, photos and memorabilia showing the bands at the height of their popularity in the Sixties and looking much different than they do today. (The three Folkmens' altered hair and beards are a comedy routine all their own.)

The new recruits, especially Terry Bohner, leader of the New Main Street Singers (John Michael Higgins), his subtly intimidating wife, Laurie (Jane Lynch), and former street urchin Sissy Knox (Parker Posey), are cut from a different cloth of crazy than the old-timers. They often seem more like cult members than musicians. In fact, Terry and Laurie do have their own religion, based on what Laurie calls "an unconventional deity, a power from another dimension" that "exists nowhere but in my own mind". The Bohners' peculiar faith doesn't exactly have anything to do with folk music, but a recurrent technique in A Mighty Wind is to let people talk for just a little too long, allowing the camera to capture revelations that probably would have been better kept private.

The irrepressible Fred Willard, who stole Best in Show from everyone, including the dogs, returns as the manager of the New Main Street Singers, Mike LaFontaine. A failed comic who doesn't seem to know that he failed, Mike keeps trying to grab center stage with an endless stream of lame punchlines and catchphrases. But Willard has plenty of competition for chief looney in A Mighty Wind, especially from Eugene Levy's Mitch, whose erratic behavior nearly sinks the concert. Levy turns Mitch's every utterance into a mini-sketch, with the broken-down singer struggling to eject each word, as if the pathway from his brain to his mouth were an obstacle course. It's hard to tell what Mickey ever saw in him, but Catherine O'Hara's gently understated performance makes it clear throughout that Mitch's former partner still loves him deeply (though she'll never admit it).

A Mighty Wind Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

A Mighty Wind was shot by documentary cinematographer Arlene Donnelly Nelson (The Beaches of Agnès) on 16mm film in the format known as "Super16". The film was made just before the era of digital intermediates. After editing (on the Avid system) and final conform of the 16mm source, the image was blown up optically for 35mm release prints. The Warner Archive Collection's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray derives from a recent scan of a 35mm interpositive, (i.e., two generations closer to the negative than a release print), on which Warner's Motion Picture Imaging performed substantial cleanup, with a mandate to retain the original's documentary texture. The result is so good that, while watching the film on a properly calibrated display, it's easy to forget the 16mm origin. Color, clarity and detail are excellent. The only reminder of the negative's smaller format is a slight fall-off in detail in long shots that is far more pronounced in screenshots than in motion. The production design of A Mighty Wind is full of small, jokey details, whether in the miniature town built by model-train enthusiast Leonard Crabbe or in the decor and bric-a-brac of the many offices where "interviews" are shot. (I particularly like the statue of three Siamese cats on the desk of a folk music historian played by the late Paul Benedict.) The Blu-ray image allows these background jokes to be appreciated to an extent not previously possible on home video. Tiny flickers of expression that ripple across the actors' faces register forcefully. Even individuals in the audience at Town Hall stand out from the crowd, and Guest's casting director seems to have packed the venue with interesting faces.

The 16mm film grain is readily visible but finely rendered. Where Warner Home Video might have squeezed A Mighty Wind onto a BD-25, as they did with Best in Show, WAC has mastered the 91-minute film on a BD-50 with its usual target bitrate of 35 Mbps. No artifacts appeared, compression or otherwise.

A Mighty Wind Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Consistent with its documentary aesthetic, A Mighty Wind features a 5.1 soundtrack that is mostly front-oriented, except during the climactic Town Hall concert scenes, where the audio perspective shifts as the film cuts back and forth between the auditorium and backstage. For the closing performance of the title song, with all three bands on stage, the surround array fills with the sound of both performers and audience. With lossless encoding in DTS-HD MA, clarity and dynamic range are excellent, and the only thing one could wish for is that all of the musical performances could be presented in lossless 5.1 in their entirety. The dialogue is clear, but it is often quick and overlapping, especially among the three members of The Folksmen. On repeat viewing, you almost always pick up an additional laugh line.

A Mighty Wind Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Warner and Castle Rock released A Mighty Wind on DVD in 2003 with a wealth of extras. Almost all of them, even some that were hidden in an "easter egg" on the DVD, have been ported over to Blu-ray. The sole exception is a series of text screens that provide fake "histories" for each of the bands and (in the easter egg) two fake newspaper articles, one about Mitch ("Folk Musician Pummeled") and one about Mike LaFontaine ("'Wha' Happened' Dumped").

• Commentary with Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy: As in their commentary for Best in Show, Guest and Levy are such masters of deadpan delivery that it can be hard to tell when they're joking. From a purely technical standpoint, this commentary provides an informative look at the challenges of directing a concert that is being simultaneously filmed for the movie and taped for the mock TV broadcast. Guest and Levy also discuss how the cast developed key characters, including Levy's Mitch.



• Additional Scenes (w/Optional Commentary) (480i; 1.85:1; 21:59): Some of these are deleted scenes, while others are extensions of scenes that exist in the film.
• The Press Conference
• Corn Wine
• Killington Hill
• The Good Book Song
• Piccolo
• Backstage Pitch
• North Dakota
• Folksmen Interview
• The Bohners Meet Their Fans
• XYZ
• Wally and the Balloon Guy
• Blues-a-Roo
• The Catheter Song
• When You're Next to Me Rehearsal
• When You're Next to Me Concert Footage



• TV Appearances (w/Optional Commentary) (480i; 1.85:1; 9:22): Of these early TV appearances by two of Irving Steinbloom's clients, the most interesting are The Folksmen's unsuccessful attempt to "go electric" with "Children of the Sun", and Mitch & Mickey's guest appearance on a TV drama as—what else?—folk singers.
• THE FOLKSMEN "In the Groove" 1968 Children of the Sun
• THE FOLKSMEN "Hoot-Nite" 1965 Old Joe's Place
• MITCH & MICKEY "Lee Aikman's Folk Hour" 1966 A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow
• MITCH & MICKEY "Dick Beyman—Private Eye" Late 1960s Guest Appearance



• PBN TV Broadcast of Concert (w/Optional Commentary) (480i; 1.33:1; 20:42): This is the complete version of the TV concert, uninterrupted by scenes backstage and outside the theater.
• Never Did No Wanderin'
• Potato's in the Paddy Wagon
• Old Joe's Place
• Barnyard Symphony
• A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow
• A Mighty Wind



• Extras (w/Optional Commentary) (480i; 1.85:1 & 1.33:1; 1:20): These brief items appeared in the DVD's "easter egg". Both are behind-the-scenes curiosities that Guest explains in his commentary.
• Crew Pounds Hotel Wall with scene reference
• Practice Shoot with Editors



• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:26): Remastered in 1080p, the trailer contains some funny footage that did not make the final cut.



• Sound Spot (480i; 1.85:1; 0:38): Narrated by Harry Shearer, this spot advertised A Mighty Wind: The Album.

A Mighty Wind Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Guest has said in interviews that he grew up playing folk music, which is why he chose to set a film in that world, but what most distinguishes A Mighty Wind is that it's primarily a retrospective. Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and For Your Consideration all involve events in the present, over which characters fret and obsess in various ways, but A Mighty Wind is about recapturing the glory days (even if, in Guest's historical recreations, the past doesn't always look so glorious). Beneath the comedic elan, the film retains an undercurrent of nostalgia and regret that makes it unique among Guest's creations. WAC has given it a superb presentation. Highly recommended.