Synopsis

The actors and film-makers involved in the production of a small B-movie have their lives turned upside down when their production begins to generate an Oscar buzz.

Pros:

• Nothing. Just nothing.


• Really, nothing at all.


• The movie has a cast of improvisational actors I've grown to love, but seeing good actors turn out a terrible film is not really a pro, is it? So, really, I got nothing.

Cons:

• This movie is supposed to be a comedy, but it IS NOT funny.


• No, it's not funny ... but it IS tedious, smug, ugly, slow, uninspired and downright mean.


• I actually think my life is a little worse for having seen this film.

Generally:

Zero stars. I considered giving it half a star because Ricky Gervais has one line that made me laugh, but that brief chortle just served to magnify how awful the rest of this movie is.

Extended Review:

Is there anything worse than hating a movie you hoped to really enjoy?

Last night Wendy and I watched Christopher Guest's most recent film, For Your Consideration. Wendy and I are both big fans of Guest and his movies. We both loved Best In Show and enjoyed Waiting for Guffman very much. Neither of us swooned over A Mighty Wind, but it wasn't a bad movie. So we thought we had every reason to expect For Your Consideration to be fair-to-excellent.

Guest has quite a track-record, and he's done a lot to deserve my admiration. He is one of the writers and actors behind This Is Spinal Tap, which I've called the second funniest movie of all time, right behind Blazing Saddles. And his outings as a director (the films listed above) have been mostly impressive. Guest works with a faithful cabal of improv specialists, and doesn't really script his movies. Instead he comes up with a story outline and allows his actors to improvise their lines and actions. This has resulted in some very funny films ... and, now, it's resulted in one terrible one.

...Consideration is a movie about a group of Hollywood has-beens and also-rans who begin to believe the hype surrounding their latest production. The word among industry insiders is that the movie and several of the actors are being considered for Academy Award nominations. As the hype grows, we see the characters morph into really desperate, superficial, delusional people. I guess Guest and his crew thought this was all good fun, but it was just depressing. As the actors become more and more obsessed with the idea of finally getting that long-denied recognition, they become phonier and harder to like. What's worse, they start out unfunny and become even more so. And that's the kiss of death for a comedy.

The gags are flat, predictable, tired and annoying ... and this movie hammers them into the ground mercilessly. Unfunny joke after unfunny joke reminds us that the characters in this movie are past their prime ... and that they don't understand the internet ... that their dreams have largely been frustrated ... and that they can't even interact in any meaningful way with each other. Then the "Oscar buzz" gets their attention and we see them get Botox injections ... and go on MTV style television programs ... and appear on talk shows wearing dresses cut low enough to make Mariah Carey blush.

Then, of course, their Oscar dreams are dashed. The Oscar nods go to other actors, and we get to see the principle characters cry ... and do local infomercials ... and put on terrible "performance art" in the aftermath of their perceived failure.

Look, dark stuff CAN make for funny films. I've seen and loved a number of really dark comedies (Fight Club, anyone?) But please don't get the wrong idea about ...Consideration. This is not a dark comedy. It's just a bad one.

It's as though Christopher Guest hated the characters in his own movie and wanted to make them suffer.

Which is fine. It's his movie, he can do what he wants. But I wish he'd warned me. See, I thought that we were renting a movie that would make us laugh.

What else? While I'm venting, I might as well get it all out. So here goes:

Why does Christopher Guest give Fred Willard open license to do any damn fool thing he wants to do in his movies? Fred Willard isn't really that funny. He's never been very funny. More often than not he's grating. Tedious. As annoying as a paper cut on a hemorrhoid. For Your Consideration is a little less than an hour and a half long ... but by the time it was over I felt like I'd spent about a week with Fred Willard. And I wanted to PUNCH HIM IN THE FACE.

And Eugene Levy isn't funny, either. In fact, the only actor I'd say is more annoying than Eugene Levy and Fred Willard is that moron David Allen Grier. But you know going into a Chris Guest movie that you're going to have to put up with Willard and Levy, and until now it's always been worth it. Not this time, though. No, no, no, no, boy, no, not at all. Watching this movie was like taking a long car ride sandwiched between Eugene Levy and Fred Willard ... and then an hour and a half into the trip they stop the car and let you out and you don't know where the hell you are or why you ever got in that damn car in the first place. And it's raining.

Even the people I generally enjoy most in Christopher Guest's movies were middlin' to bad in this film. I've been a Parker Posey fan for years now, but she was just blah here. Jane Lynch has been the best thing in a number of comedies, but in this movie all she does is a Mary Hart impression ... and you don't need Jane Lynch for that. You just need a mannequin. John Michael Higgins can usually make me laugh just by moving his eyebrows, but all he did in ...Consideration was wear a red wig and keep talking about his "Choctaw ancestors." And he was never ONCE funny. And Guest himself, the actor behind such memorably hillarious roles as Nigel Tufnel and Corky St. Clair, just phones in a half-ass Mel Brooks impression in this movie. It's just awful. Painful. Really, it's all painful to watch.

Even Jennifer Coolidge, for Pete's sake, never made me laugh in this movie.

Wendy and I had felt bad about putting off a Chris Guest movie for so long. This one had been on the shelves at our local video store for nearly two years before we finally picked it up tonight.

I wish we'd just left it there. We'd have been better off with anything else. A Vin Diesel movie, even. Anything other than this godawful waste of film and time. Chris Guest is officially in the same boat as M. Night Shyamalan, as far as I'm concerned. We trusted him, we sang his praises, we came to love him ... and he hath betrayed us. For Your Consideration is a miserable movie.

Trailer:

(PS - If you're curious, Wendy hated it, too.)

Labels: Movie Reviews, Movies