For Your Consideration
Catherine O?Hara, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey
Directed by Christopher Guest
Warner Home Video 2007
86 minutes
Word of mouth is For Your Consideration, a movie about word of mouth drawing attention to a basically bad movie, is a bad movie. The buzz is right and it is also a bad DVD. Writer director Christopher Guest, who wrote and directed the very funny and well-made A Mighty Wind, takes a few jabs at Hollywood, a very large target he not only manages to miss too often but punches like a girl.
The problem with For Your Consideration is it pays too much attention to the making of the premise of the joke. This comedy is about what happens when Oscar buzz hits the cast of a small budget movie titled Home For Purim but this only really happens about sixty minutes into the movie. Once you get the gag Home For Purim is a bad tearjerker drama about a Yiddish family with a southern drawl, that its cast consists of C-list actors, that rumors of Academy Award worthiness hits the movie soon before it gets retitled Home For Thanksgiving, you anxiously wait for the rest of the comedy to show up. It doesn’t.
The last thirty minutes of For Your Consideration are more or less where this movie tries to take off. Christopher Guest tries to get caustic with spoofs of the various entertainment shows that fuel Hollywood’s promotion machine. He mixes his targets a bit too much so his rip of Entertainment Tonight mixes a few to0 many other such shows to be effective. Same thing for the morning TV shows, morning radio shows, Siskel and Roeper, and Actor’s Studio. Many of them, especially Hollywood Now (Entertainment Tonight) are just too over the top to be unbelievable. Sarcasm and spoof only work if there is a degree of truth to them; watching Chuck of Hollywood Now interview the actors who were not nominated on the day the nominations came out is just not believable and Guest uses this failed bit more than once. Eugene Levy’s take on a Hollywood agent is far, far from original. Any movie that wastes Parker Posey did not deserve to be shot.
The only fairly entertaining bit in this comedy is the Marilyn Hack character played by Catherine O’Hara who goes from a normal looking woman before the nomination buzz to a botoxed hybrid of Bette Midler and Anna Nicole Smith. Even that, no matter how talented O’Hara is, gets old rather quickly and the rest of For Your Consideration crashes even more pitifully after that before it flops around miserably with a scene from one of the stars’ one-woman show
If you are considerate you will not even consider renting For Your Consideration