Mockumentary capturing 1960s folk music.

Without the satirical bite of his previous films, this is ultimately a bit silly.

Christopher Guest has made a name for himself as a master mockumentarian with films like Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. What topic has he chosen to satirise in his latest film The Mighty Wind?..... 1960's folk music....When Irving Steinbloom, legendary promoter of folk music, dies, his son Jonathan, Bob Balaban, decides on a memorial concert in his honour with some of the bands he helped make famous. Acts like The Folksmen, Guest himself, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, who at one time had a semi hit with Old Joe's Place but haven't seen one another in decades; like Mitch and Mickey, Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara, who broke up badly years ago after making love legendary, Mitch heading to mental rehab and Mickey to marriage with a man who sells catheters; and then there's the 'neuftet' The New Main Street Singers, these days mainly composed of singers who weren't even alive when the original Main Street Singers formed. Among the neuf are John Michael Higgins and his soulmate Jane Lynch, and Parker Posey. The comeback trail for all of them is more perfunctory than you might expect. Without the satirical bite of his previous films or the narrative drive, and yet with possibly even more fondness for his characters than usual Guest opts ultimately for the sentimental. Particularly impressive, as she is always in Guests's films is Catherine O'Hara as Mickey, she plays her straight and it works. I found some of the touches in this film a bit silly rather than amusing - Jonathan's childhood involving playing Jewish Children's polo on Shetland ponies and having to wear a helmet to play chess, and the catheter salesman who likes model trains - there are certainly less laughs in this than in Best in Show for example. Guest wrote this with Eugene Levy who makes rather heavy weather playing Mitch. This is the film of a man who's looking back to an era of some rather awful music nostalgically but strangely not at all politically.