? Christopher Guest,
creator of the mockumentaries Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and Waiting
for Guffman, parodies the movie industry along with his frequent acting
collaborators such as Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Jennifer Coolidge, Parker
Posey, Harry Shearer, Bob Balaban, etc. The plot revolves around a group of
actors who excitedly react when their little independent film starts to
generate Oscar buzz. Along the way, the characters poke fun at the insecurities
of actors, the celebrity culture, the Hollywood publicity machine,
commerce-minded studio execs, film critics, and so on. This isn’t a
mockumentary, but used a similar process of improvising dialogue. (Guest and
Levy share the writing credit.)
+ Even though this
movie isn’t a great departure from previous Guest films, I think somehow all
the fictional titles and documentary trappings in the other films somehow
pointed up the artificiality of the gimmick. Although I’d kind of liked Best
in Show and A Mighty Wind, there was a preciosity that detracted
from my responding to the actors as real characters. In this case, that issue
wasn’t there, plus everything being mocked is familiar to anyone who’s ever
picked up a copy of People or Entertainment Weekly or watched Entertainment
Tonight. ET gets a fairly direct skewering, with Fred Willard and Jane
Lynch as the celebrity-whore co-hosts. As in Best in Show and A
Mighty Wind, Willard is the most over-the-top character, but his role as
idiotic TV interviewer seems like only a mild exaggeration and fits right into
the story. Worth the price of admission are the scenes of Home for Purim,
the movie-within-a-movie that the characters are supposed to be filming. The
movie is a World War II melodrama about a long-estranged daughter finally
returning to her Southern small town for the holiday, only the holiday is a
lesser-known Jewish holiday rather than, say Christmas, and the daughter has
turned out to be a lesbian. It’s probably even funnier for people from a Jewish
background, who will get the reference to kreplach and the Yiddish bits, but
the scenes really work because of the way they mix the clichéd plot and
dialogue with the less familiar elements.
- Even though the
plot is about the Oscar race, there’s no parody of an actual awards show, or
any reference to all of the other awards (Golden Globes, New York Film Critics,
etc.) that proliferate at year’s end. Seems like a missed opportunity. The end
of the movie’s a bit lackluster.
= ***1/2 Fans of
Guest’s other films will definitely want to see this one. For those who haven’t
seen them, this is as good an entry point as any. While I mostly chuckled to
myself at Best in Show and Mighty Wind, I laughed aloud at this
one.
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