Rerun - The First Pick

Jack Black sees the mob of Hollywood critics heading his direction

So, what does a fledgling movie blogger choose for his very first post? It has to be something with weight. Something that shows he knows cinema. The Godfather? It's been done. Fargo? A bit niche market. 2001: A Space Odyssey? Who can make any sense of that film? What about Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny? Nailed it.

In truth, the Pick of Destiny just happens to be the most recent film that I've seen before starting this new enterprise, but it worked on a few levels. It is a film that, despite it's many, many flaws, I can't help but enjoy to some extent. However, at the same time, while watching it, I kept remembering better films that I could have been watching instead (stay tuned for my discussion of one particular example). It's funny enough to keep you watching to the credits, but so groan-worthy and crass that your brain keeps bugging you with more cultured things you could be doing: "He just said 'cock-gargler' then punched a guy in the balls. Did you know that there is a rendition of The Nutcracker in town tonight?"; "He just farted so hard that he took off into the sky. I literally have Camille Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre memorised. I could play it for you right now."

And yet? We keep watching. Let's try and find out why...

The plot of the film is not complicated: Jack Black and Kyle Gass as Tenacious D (an incredibly successful comedy music duo) play Jack Black and Kyle Gass as Tenacious D (a ridiculously incompetent and unfunny music duo) on a quest for the Pick of Destiny which will give them the awesome musical talent that they actually possess in real life. Frankly, it runs the line between meta and just straight up rubbing their success in the faces of poor people.

See? I'm just like all of you! My nose is red too!

Truth be told, you can figure out whether or not this film is going to appeal to someone with one simple test. The third and fourth words in the screenplay are "ass" and "fucking". If that makes you giggle with the boyish delight of a twelve year old, you're more than likely going to get some joy out of PoD. If that fact makes you turn up your nose then, well, go and watch Breakfast at Tiffany's again, Grandad, geez. But the shock and gross out humour is a double edged sword. The perfectly harmonised "Fu-uck" when Satan himself shows up is hilarious, as is the beatnick-bar audience being splattered with brain matter when Tenacious D rocks so hard that a poor redneck's head explodes.

Be fair. Scanners still had fresh Led Zepplin recordings - they were considerably more effective.

But for every one of these fairly well crafted gags, there are ten groaners. Examples are many, ranging from the unbelievably contrived joke of the band name coming from a birthmark on Jack Black's bum spelling "Tenac" and a similar one on Kyle Gass' saying "ious D", to the out of nowhere Sasquatch segment which is, bizarrely, broadcast from the beginning of the movie then, upon its arrival, serves no purpose whatsoever.

So the comedy is the epitome of hit or miss. However, story content does often suffer when it is used simply to serve the music - as is often the case in musicals. And make no mistake, bros, this is a musical you are watching.

Relax. Drink a Bud Light and we'll get through this together.

On this front, the movie actually holds up really well. The music, like the band, is utterly reverent of classic rock and the songs from Kickapoo at the beginning, to Beelzeboss at the finale are all tunes that you can come back to out of context and enjoy the heck out of.

With caution.

However, the fact that the music is so good and the story so average is perhaps the final nail in the coffin (or should I say Iron Maiden?) for KG and Jay-Bulls because it proves the main problem of the movie: that the funniest, most interesting and most impressive parts of the movie are the parts where attention is taken away from the duo themselves. Where the film truly excels is its use of cameos. They are all brilliant: Meatloaf showing up as the heavily Christian, anti-rock father figure; Dio as a Fairy Godmother of sorts; Ben Stiller (who even went so far as to lend his name as Producer to the movie) almost unrecognisable as the conspiracy theory spouting music store employee and Dave Grohl in an inspired turn as a sex crazed, goatee wearing, rock demon, able to play drums, guitar and sing like a mad man.

Unbelievable transformation.

The project, from beginning to end, ran a thin tightrope between the kind of niche writer's lovechild which becomes a cult classic (a la the Wachowski Bros), and the kind of pointless "only funny to the guy who wrote it" comedies (a la the Wayans Bros). Meatloaf very nearly declined to be in the movie as he thought it would ruin any chance he had of being taken seriously as an actor (and given that he has only averaged two or three projects a year since, you might think his fears were justified), and in the aftermath, the widespread panning of the film led Jack Black to say that he would never write another script. The 54% Rotten Tomatoes rating that the film currently sits on probably tells you everything you need to know - that every good quality is balanced by a bad one. Every funny joke is followed by an unfunny one. Every glimpse of pathos is snuffed out by gross out or shock humour. Every clever celebrity cameo ends and cuts back to Jack Black and Kyle Gass being stupid. And perhaps that's enough to write the movie off entirely.

However, there is something to consider. In 2006 when this movie was released, I was fortunate enough to see Tenacious D live on a tour that they were running alongside the film. The "story" of the concert ran along very similar lines as the movie (sans erroneous car chases and drug-fueled Sasquatch trips) - moving from squalid apartment of struggling artists, to a country bar, to hell (when they make a deal with the devil for the Pick of Destiny), to the big stage where they win their souls back. And it was funny. Like, really funny. During the final few songs where they've brought back the best rockers from hell (The Antichrist, Charlie Chaplin and Colonel Sanders from KFC, if you are wondering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCUrULlBON8), I remember going nuts over how funny it was, how mindblowing the music was, how great this band was!

So why doesn't it work in the movie? For me, it comes back to what I said earlier. In the concert, the story is only there to serve the music. In the movie, the music is only there - must only be there - to serve the story. The music of The Pick of Destiny is really fun, and there, but for the grace of a different medium, goes a fantastic idea from the creative minds of Tenacious D, but it's just not enough to distract from the fact that the film itself did a mega stage dive, and we didn't catch it.

That's a wrap.