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For Your Consideration (2006 - Christopher Guest)
Christopher Guest and company have been geniuses at composing multi-character improvised narratives about misfits and losers. Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind are hysterical while subtle, and the real secret to their success is how lovingly the characters are drawn. No matter how odd or pathetic or petty or clueless, you're made to care about what happens to them...even as you're laughing at them. Unfortunately that's a key ingredient missing from For Your Consideration.
Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara) and Victor Allen Miller (Harry Shearer) are two veteran actors who are working on the margins of Hollywood. Callie Webb (Parker Posey) and Brian Chubb (Christopher Moynihan) are two younger actors who are struggling to find those margins. They're all co-starring in a small-budgeted indie drama about a WWII-era family reuniting around a small Jewish holiday. Titled Home for Purim, it's a humorless and overwrought little piece that you might get if a local Jewish retiremement community put on a production of Tennessee Williams or Carson McCullers and videotaped the show. It is cliché-ridden and sprinkled with way too many Yiddish words. This dire little nothing of a film is being helmed by Jay Berman (Christopher Guest) and they're all plugging along shooting the movie when an internet rumor speculates that Hack may be in the running for an Oscar, her work in the dailies is so good. Media outlets follow suit, and soon the unfinished project has "Oscar buzz". This sends a bolt of energy through the production, from the actors to the producer to the P.R. man to the agents to the heads of the small Studio. But what will this new spotlight of expectation do to the little movie?
While thirty years ago the behind-the-scenes action of a set and the concept of Awards fever may well have been too "inside" for an audience to be in on the joke, after a couple decades of infotainment even a mild movie fan will know what's what. Too bad they didn't have anything to do with the concept, and that the characters never get developed more than brief sketches. With the stellar comedic cast which also includes Guest regulars like Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, John Michael Higgins, Jennifer Coolidge, Bob Balaban, Michael McKean, Ed Begley Jr., Larry Miller and Jane Lynch as well as new recruits like Ricky Gervais and Rachel Harris, there are definitely laughs to be had (for example Lynch, who has not many lines of dialogue, is fantastically funny every second she's on screen as she has perfectly adopted Mary Hart's bizarre phony posture and physicality). But it never comes together as a whole, and the charm and magic that these talented folks bottled for the previous three movies elludes them here. It's not bad, it just doesn't measure up to their own incredibly high standards.
If you want to see a much better Christopher Guest take on the shallow insanities of Hollywood, check out his first movie as a writer/director The Big Picture (1989) where Kevin Bacon's innocent film school grad learns some quick lessons about how things work in LaLaLand. That was a more straightforward filmmaking process, devoid of the improvisation that has become his trademark, but it's a much more insightful look behind the scenes and darn funny, too.
GRADE: C+
And how I'd grade his work as director thus far...
1. Waiting for Guffman (1996), A
2. Best in Show (2000), A
3. A Mighty Wind (2003), B+
4. The Big Picture (1989), B
5. For Your Consideration (2006), C+
6. "Attack of the 50 Woman" (1993), D
7. Almost Heroes (1998), F
For Your Consideration (2006 - Christopher Guest)
Christopher Guest and company have been geniuses at composing multi-character improvised narratives about misfits and losers. Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind are hysterical while subtle, and the real secret to their success is how lovingly the characters are drawn. No matter how odd or pathetic or petty or clueless, you're made to care about what happens to them...even as you're laughing at them. Unfortunately that's a key ingredient missing from For Your Consideration.
Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara) and Victor Allen Miller (Harry Shearer) are two veteran actors who are working on the margins of Hollywood. Callie Webb (Parker Posey) and Brian Chubb (Christopher Moynihan) are two younger actors who are struggling to find those margins. They're all co-starring in a small-budgeted indie drama about a WWII-era family reuniting around a small Jewish holiday. Titled Home for Purim, it's a humorless and overwrought little piece that you might get if a local Jewish retiremement community put on a production of Tennessee Williams or Carson McCullers and videotaped the show. It is cliché-ridden and sprinkled with way too many Yiddish words. This dire little nothing of a film is being helmed by Jay Berman (Christopher Guest) and they're all plugging along shooting the movie when an internet rumor speculates that Hack may be in the running for an Oscar, her work in the dailies is so good. Media outlets follow suit, and soon the unfinished project has "Oscar buzz". This sends a bolt of energy through the production, from the actors to the producer to the P.R. man to the agents to the heads of the small Studio. But what will this new spotlight of expectation do to the little movie?
While thirty years ago the behind-the-scenes action of a set and the concept of Awards fever may well have been too "inside" for an audience to be in on the joke, after a couple decades of infotainment even a mild movie fan will know what's what. Too bad they didn't have anything to do with the concept, and that the characters never get developed more than brief sketches. With the stellar comedic cast which also includes Guest regulars like Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, John Michael Higgins, Jennifer Coolidge, Bob Balaban, Michael McKean, Ed Begley Jr., Larry Miller and Jane Lynch as well as new recruits like Ricky Gervais and Rachel Harris, there are definitely laughs to be had (for example Lynch, who has not many lines of dialogue, is fantastically funny every second she's on screen as she has perfectly adopted Mary Hart's bizarre phony posture and physicality). But it never comes together as a whole, and the charm and magic that these talented folks bottled for the previous three movies elludes them here. It's not bad, it just doesn't measure up to their own incredibly high standards.
If you want to see a much better Christopher Guest take on the shallow insanities of Hollywood, check out his first movie as a writer/director The Big Picture (1989) where Kevin Bacon's innocent film school grad learns some quick lessons about how things work in LaLaLand. That was a more straightforward filmmaking process, devoid of the improvisation that has become his trademark, but it's a much more insightful look behind the scenes and darn funny, too.
GRADE: C+
And how I'd grade his work as director thus far...
1. Waiting for Guffman (1996), A
2. Best in Show (2000), A
3. A Mighty Wind (2003), B+
4. The Big Picture (1989), B
5. For Your Consideration (2006), C+
6. "Attack of the 50 Woman" (1993), D
7. Almost Heroes (1998), F