Nice doc. Too bad they LIED about the order of events.

I'm amazed that you can assert it's "dishonest" yet prove the chronology from dates that actually appear on screen in the film. If the director were trying to be so dishonest, don't you think he'd blur out the dates on the boxes, or cover them with tape or something?

A story can be true even if told out of order. Most "true" stories have aspects of that. This is all a part of the documentary ART, which is about storytelling using real stories, real people, real footage. It's still storytelling. If you want nothing but chronological facts you'd put up a camera and just leave it running forever, with no edits. Any documentarian has a hundred times as much footage as they use in the film; they pick and choose the best elements to express the story of the subject. For example, if something really critical happens but they don't manage to film it, they may move back something they filmed later that helps express the same feeling. (That's a lot more honest than staging a scene, although sometimes they may have folks re-enact something that the camera missed. Like I think some of Lips & Robb's hugs may have been repeated for coverage from both angles. Not dishonest - they're still friends who love each other like brothers, so the hug is "real" even if not spontaneous. Or maybe they just hug a lot.)

Like if the storyline is about building tension between two participants, you will use clips that show greater and greater frustration until the big blowup - even if those clips are out of order. You do that either because you don't have all the real (in-order) clips to show the flow, or because real human emotions don't always run in such a smooth line, and showing more of an up-and-down will just confuse the audience. There are certain storytelling conventions in each culture and if you don't follow them, your audience won't follow along or understand what's happening. (In our culture, the happy ending is one - so you have to have a happy ending even it means re-arranging a bit. Or you can have a tragic ending. You just can't have a blah ending, everyone will hate it.)

And what no-one has mentioned yet in this thread - to my great surprise - is that ending with the big-venue concert in Japan is clearly meant to recall the same ending in Spinal Tap, as an homage. Putting that after receipt of an album issue which isn't being well distributed is the same Tap lead-up to the ending. It's showing how real the fake Spinal Tap film was, how reality and fiction can run rather close to each other. It was the perfect wrap-up to all of the prior Tappish moments in the film.

True. Good eye.

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That's why it has a director on it, and isn't just footage that somebody shot and released, as is... With this many crew working on it, of course editing tricks are going to be utilized...

I'd say the majority of documentaries do exactly the same thing... Are you telling me that you don't believe Michael Moore uses artistic license?! He's perhaps the most famous documentarian working right now. Even if you display a sequence of events in the right order, who knows what's been removed or added in order to 'enhance' the final cut. Strictly speaking, if it's just showing exactly what happened, then not even the interviews with the musicians should be there, because they are additional inclusions.

Everything is filmed as it is in order to tell a story; if some of the real detail isn't 'satisfying' enough, then it gets omitted or manipulated.






Love United. Hate Glazers.

As dozens of others have told you, the commercial CD release is not the same as the promo mailings which happen months or even years in advance. Didn't you see the scene where Lips burns a bunch of cds and sends them out to various agents, promoters and record labels? You don't even need to be a musician to know that's how the music biz works. What, do you think David Geffen stands in line at Walmart to buy the latest releases with the rest of us chumps?

As for the sequence of scenes, you need to realize that filmmakers show us scenes in arbitrary sequence in order to manipulate an artistic concept. The concert was the climax backing up the movie's theme that hope & perseverance is its own reward. So rightfully it was shown at the end to convey a triumph of spirit, even though they may not have achieved it materially. What exactly is your problem with that?

The point of a documentary is to tell a story.
If it's not in order, doesn't mean it's a lie.

Every documentary ever made is edited in order to tell a story.

I suspected that, since the goatee of Lips kept changing back and forth between the scenes. But it was ok. I didn't mind.

Just saw them few days ago opening for Alice Cooper, great performance, that Drummer Robb Reiner is a beast, totally blown away by his solo. It's like Lars Ulrich, and he acheived that level with *beep* equipments!