For Your Consideration uses a narrative format instead of Guest's usual documentary format.
Herald rating: * *
Verdict: Mockumentary team turn in their lamest film yet, a satire about the Oscar buzz in the movie biz
It's hard to work out why the new film from the team behind This is Spinal Tap and Best in Show never seems to get off the ground. Perhaps it's because writers Guest and Levy have dropped the documentary format this time in favour of a narrative.
But
this confirmed fan of the duo found little to laugh at in the new picture. The jokes are forced, the characters underdrawn (the ensemble has always been able to create characters, like Mitch and Mickey in A Mighty Wind, who were plausible while remaining ridiculous), and the situations contrived.
The film takes its name from the line that appears in the trade papers every Oscar season, above big display ads soliciting Academy members' Oscar votes.
It's about an ensemble of has-beens or never-weres and their co-dependents filming a low-budget drama called Home for Purim, set among Jews in the Deep South [sic].
When one of the crew lets slip to the very faded star Marilyn Hack (O'Hara) that her performance is generating Oscar buzz, all hell breaks loose, slowly.
Never mind that the film is incomplete and plainly appalling and that the "buzz" is on a random internet site. Appearance is reality in Hollywood, and once one TV show gets interested, it's all on.
Willard as Chuck Porter, the cheerfully brain-damaged co-host of Entertainment Now, is the only consistently funny character.
The rest mistake shrillness for energy and the whole package is full of in-jokes that have a self-satisfied air about them.
Ricky Gervais puts in an appearance as a smarmy distributor trying to change the film's ending on set. If he looked around and thought: "This is rubbish. Extras is much better" he was too polite to say so, but he would have been right.
Cast: Bob Balaban, Ed Begley jnr, Ricky Gervais, Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Parker Posey, Fred Willard
Director: Christopher Guest
Running time: 86 minutes
Rating: M (offensive language)
Screening: Rialto
