For Your Consideration

Of all Christopher Guest's comedies, For Your Consideration (2006) emerges as the most uncanny in its portrayals, this time of Hollywood. (Perhaps this is because I'm more familiar with movies than I am with folk musicians, dog trainers, and local theater.) Guest co-wrote the script with Eugene Levy, both of whom appear, along with the usual suspects, playing various members of the Hollywood community, from actors to crew members to publicists and talk show hosts.

If there is a central character, it's Marilyn Hack (played with stunning, hallucinatory, grotesque perfection by the great Catherine O'Hara). Marilyn is a virtual has-been actress who is finally returning to the silver screen in an over-the-top soaper that's part Tennessee Williams, part From Here to Eternity. It's a turbulent drama about a Jewish family's frosty reunion during the Purim holiday season, aptly titled Home For Purim. Marilyn hears rumors, via the internet, about an Oscar nomination coming her way, and inflates the rumors into Oscar buzz, some fake fairy dust that soon sprinkles onto the heads of her co-stars, played by Harry Shearer, Parker Posey, and Christopher Moynihan.

It's tragically funny to watch all the bees working their industry, all of them vying for queenhood, some of them with expert precision, others with an astonishing lack of self-awareness. You can only emerge from this movie feeling you've looked directly into the tortured, ironic, narcissistic soul of Hollywood itself, as though this least-documentary of all Guest's films is the one actual documentary: a record as exact and untouched by narrative intention as C-SPAN.

The supporting cast includes scene-stealing Fred Willard as the co-host of a movie talk show. He's really on fire in this movie, whipping out little throwaway lines with stunning ease and subtlety: his character seems like a complete moron, yet he's also brimming with ironic hostility, aimed at the Hollywood types that make his show. Jane Lynch plays his co-star. She's a delight, but she is a overshadowed by Willard's hammy deviousness. Jennifer Coolidge plays a dippy producer who appears to be constantly drunk. Coolidge never gets as much screen time as you'd want, considering how funny she is. With John Michael Higgins, Ed Begley, Jr., Bob Balaban, Michael McKean, and Carrie Aizley; and in cameo appearances: Ricky Gervais, Sandra Oh, John Krasinski, Paul Dooley, Hart Bochner, and Claire Forlani.

Role Models

Role Models (2008) is another one of those man-child-becomes-mature comedies, bolstered slightly by Paul Rudd's performance. He plays Danny, who pedals energy drinks to America's youth, with the help of his partner, Wheeler (Seann William Scott), who wears a giant minotaur suit. After Danny has a meltdown (following a rejection by his would-be fiance, he and Wheeler are ordered to participate in a mentoring program called Sturdy Wings. Their "littles" are a nerdy fantasy freak named Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and a foul-mouthed devil-child named Ronnie (Bobb'e J. Thompson). If watching a 9-year-old boy curse like a sailor is your idea of a good time, then Role Models is the movie for you.

It's an elongated sitcom, written by Rudd, director David Wain, Ken Marino, and Timothy Dowling, and between the four of them they couldn't come up with any original ideas or gags. The characters are all familiar archetypes: Danny is a sardonic curmudgeon, Wheeler is a horny man-whore, Elizabeth Banks, as Danny's girlfriend, is the beautiful, successful lawyer who's somehow put up with Danny's shiftless negativity for seven years, and Jane Lynch is the oddball director of the Big Brother-like organization. Lynch gives the film a few moments of relief, but her character is weird for no reason. There isn't anything credible about her, or anyone else. Forget motivation or story impetus. There are moments where Rudd and Scott mesh well together. They get into a comic rhythm that is funny and engaging, but the movie isn't well-thought-out enough to sustain their performances, and their performances don't do much for the movie overall. They may get you through it, but that's about it.

Best in Show

Best in Show is a mockumentary about a dog show and a handful of its eccentric contestants. They're all about their dogs. The obsession parallels the obsession parents have over their children. The only difference is that you have pity on the dogs. It opens with the most neurotic dog show entrants, played by Michael Hitchcock and Parker Posey. Their obsession with their dog Beatrice's psychological health is hysterically funny, but also grimly depressing. They play their parts so convincingly that you find yourself cringing on their behalf, feeling sorry for them on their behalf, and believing that people like this exist, for real. Director Christopher Guest appears as a Bloodhound owner from the Deep South. This was Guest's third mockumentary as actor (preceded by This Is Spinal Tap and Waiting For Guffman) and his second as director. The usual assortment of wonderfully sharp performers, who frequently improvised their dialogue--includes Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Jane Lynch, Fred Willard, John Michael Higgins, Michael McKean, Jennifer Coolidge, Bob Balaban, Ed Begley, Jr., and Larry Miller. Watch it with a group of people that appreciates this kind of humor.

Paul

Little Green Men: What a delight to start the 2011 movie year off with Paul. I'd been avoiding the movies all year, partly because I saw so many in December and needed a break, but more because, frankly, the selection thus far completely sucked. Seriously bad. It's important that the first movie you see of the year be one for which you have high hopes. While I had no clue what Paul was about (such a rarity these days to go into a movie almost completely fresh, but worth it!), I knew I liked the work of its stars, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. They're the guys from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and in Paul they lovingly spoof the science fiction genre the way they bastardized the zombie and buddy cop genres. I wasn't disappointed. This is a movie that has no fear of showing its audience a good time. The humor is both right in front of your face and unexpected, and that is perhaps the ultimate pleasure: the laughs aren't all cheap but they aren't all from out of left field either. And the movie references don't bog the film down from having its own wildly entertaining storyline, which isn't original, but doesn't need to be. The characters and their interaction are what's original (and funny as hell).

Pegg and Frost play two British sci-fi nerds who actually meet an alien while touring the famous alleged alien sighting locales of the Western U.S. It's the kind of pastiche you're used to from these fellows: irreverently irreverent, dead-on funny. Despite the fact that they play different characters in each movie, it seems as though their relationship at its core is the same and is developed with each successive story. There's a sense in which the audience is the same, loyal audience, and they've earned the right to speak directly to them with their performances.

Every time you think the movie might be trying to go sentimental, they pull the rug out from under you and you laugh with glee that there's always a wink behind the dramatics. It's a wonderfully enjoyable movie for buffs or non-buffs, because the cast is so game and the writing so funny. 

This time a wonderful cast of Americans joins them: Jason Bateman, Sigourney Weaver, Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio as alien-hunting government agents who are out to exploit Paul (voice of Seth Rogen), the likeable, wise-ass little green man trying to make it back home. Kristen Wiig co-stars as a fundamentalist whose experience meeting the alien rattles her faith and sets her free from the shackles of religion. Also starring John Carroll Lynch as her Bible-thumping father. Cameos by Jane Lynch and Jeffrey Tambor (and a small role by Blythe Danner at the end) round out the cast. Directed by Greg Mottola. Written by Pegg and Frost.

Julie and Julia

Julie and Julia is probably the warmest film of the year, and Amy Adams is quickly becoming one of my favorite actresses. Meryl Streep was terrific as the famous cooking expert Julia Childs, but I found Adams's story much more enthralling while Streep's half of the movie seemed sort of breezy. Indeed, the fun of watching Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci was enough to propel their portion of a film which is split into into separate stories of women in 1949 and 2002 respectively: one, a burgeoning culinary icon studying the art of French cooking in Paris, the other a devoted follower living with her husband in Queens, who decides to cook her way through Childs's French cookbook in one year--which she documents on her blog--and which soon becomes an obsession.
It went on a bit longer than it should have, but it was definitely a feel-good kind of movie, an ode to food (what's not to like about that, after all?) ★★½