Gervasi's "Anvil" wins rave reviews

Watch our video interview with Gervasi

Read our web coverage of “Anvil's” triumph at the Los Angeles Film Festival

TFT alum Sacha Gervasi, current holder of the Lew and Pamela Hunter/Jonathan and Janice Zakin Chair in Screenwriting at the School, is banging heads with cable music channel VH1. In a highly unusual move, VH1 Classic is distributing Gervasi’s passion-project documentary “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” a career and concert chronicle of a pioneering Canadian hard rock band that counted among its roadies in the 1980s the then-teenaged Gervasi, who grew up to become the successful Hollywood screenwriter of Steven Spielberg’s “The Terminal.”

The film has won rave reviews from such august Eastern Elite publications as The New York Times, whose flim critic Anthony Scott declares that

…the earnest, heartfelt striving of the two men at the center of Anvil makes the band's story more touching than comical. Mockery would be too easy and too mean, and the success of "Anvil! The Story of Anvil" lies in its ability to make you care about an enterprise you might initially have been inclined to laugh at.

The film … begins with an old clip from a rock festival in Japan, perhaps the high point of Anvil's early career. After tributes from rockers like Slash of Guns N' Roses, Lars Ulrich of Metallica and Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead, we catch up with Anvil at home in Toronto, where after 30 years the band is still thrashing.

Mr. Reiner, who plays drums, and Steve Kudlow, the lead singer and guitarist, who goes by the stage name Lips, turn out to be two nice Jewish boys from Toronto. Now middle-class family men, they seem a bit tired and defeated at times, but they are also open and passionate as well as reasonably talented. They met as teenagers, and the enthusiasm for music that they shared then has hardly waned, even as their partnership has clearly endured some ups and downs.

Anybody schooled in "This Is Spinal Tap" could be forgiven for assuming that there was no further amusement, let alone rarer emotions, to be mined from heavy metal. Somehow, though, Sacha Gervasi's documentary digs deep into a real-life case — the attempted resurrection of Anvil, who were founded in the early nineteen-seventies and banged heads with fame in the eighties — to emerge with a saga of devotion and perseverance that seems at once touching and absurd. Gervasi is especially fortunate in having the founding fathers of the group, Robb Reiner and Steve (Lips) Kudlow, now in creased middle age, to guide us through its many downs and very occasional ups. The action stretches from their native Canada to Transylvania, via Japan and Stonehenge (the last being an obvious must-see for any druid-haired rocker). By the end, to our surprise, we mind very much whether the fortunes of Anvil are set to soar or doomed to lurch once more; if most of their music sounds like a fight in a lumber mill, who cares?

“Anvil!” follows the band from playing on a 1980s stadium tour with Scorpion and Bon Jovi to playing in bars in recent years. Although the film has comic moments, it’s a poignant and ultimately uplifting story that has picked up a slew of festival awards, including audience awards in Los Angeles and Sydney.

The network plans an April 10 release in at least 18 cities for the film, accompanied by heavy on-air support. VH1 will run the movie’s full-length trailer like a music video and feature on-air appearances by the band.

…

VH1 Classic will present a series of seven events in U.S. cities timed to the release of “Anvil!” Each will include a screening of the film and performance by the band.

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