A Mighty Wind

Is there any hope for the box office -- aside from Anger Management -- until the summer season begins next month? The answer, my friend, may be blowin' in A Mighty Wind, opening today (Wednesday). Christopher Guest's latest satire about the reunion of a 1960's folk-music duo named Mitch and Mickey is receiving mostly affectionate applause from critics, with A.O. Scott in the New York Times observing that the film could find a broader audience than Guest's previous satires, Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show (he is also partly responsible for This Is Spinal Tap), because it addresses a broader swath of American popular culture, making it more accessible. He concludes: The music may be perfectly awful _ actually it is both perfect and awful _ but its power, this movie suggests, is nothing to laugh at. Or so you might realize, if you could only stop laughing long enough to form the thought. Jan Stuart in Newsday writes that the film is a hilariously attuned and jauntily tuneful valentine to the squires and squares of folk music. Liam Lacey of the Toronto Globe and Mail, apparently a folk-music fan, praises the performances -- The character actors are all superb, deftly weaving back and forth over the line between sympathetic human characters and eccentric caricatures, so laughter and sympathy are indistinguishable, he writes -- but, in the end, he worries that it may devalue a social inheritance. As if in reply, Gary Thompson writes in the Philadelphia Daily News, Not to worry. A Mighty Wind is a send-up for, of and by people who know folk music best. In fact, the more you know, the more you'll like A Mighty Wind. Still, Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe finds the movie too flat, broad, and scrupulously nice ... a bummer. And Jami Bernard concludes that the film, compared with Guffman and Show, is merely amusing.