I wasn't getting any work done last night (the story of my life), so I went to see A Mighty Wind up at the Esquire. It was good. Not great, but enjoyable and funny and, most importantly for my attention span, short. I hate all these two and a half hour long movies.

My one complaint with the movie is that it ignored the political side of folk music. My (pretty minimal) knowledge of folk is that it is tied to the antiwar movement and left-wing politics. You know, "Where have all the flowers gone?" and "Blowin' in the Wind" and Jenny in Forest Gump. But Christopher Guest ignores this, so we only hear treacly love duets and the rousing Appalachian choruses. It seems hard to divorce the political side of the folk movement from the rest of the movement.

Also, though Guest does a good job making fun of the not particularly artistically good singers, he ignores the fact that folk produced some very good musicians as well. It's easy to make fun of the Kingston Trio, harder to make fun of a movement that produced Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger along with the Kingston Trio.