Christopher Guest (Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind) uses a big, broad brush to paint this satire of virtually all things entertainment. Employing his usual motley cast of regulars, including Catherine O’Hara and Harry Shearer as aging has-beens, Guest creates a film within a film (something I’m really not fond of) that should be taking on Hollywood’s obsession with self-congratulatory awards ceremonies.
Shooting Home for Purim, Marilyn Hack (O’Hara) is that actress whom everyone thinks was in that movie, you know, the one with that other, more famous actress. Her role as Esther, the dying matriarch of a Jewish family in the South during World War II, is meant to be nothing more than another job, a little film, until someone reports a rumor found on that “interweb thing,” as the internet is called by the film’s clueless publicist Corey Taft (John Michael Higgins), that Hack’s performance is good enough to warrant an Oscar nomination.
Taft is the catalyst the parlays a two line blurb from someone on some web site into an appearance on a local Los Angeles morning show for Hack and Victor Allan Miller (Shearer) which through utter stupidity gets spun into a potential Oscar nod for Miller as the family’s patriarch which gets taken to another level when Variety picks up that rumor and turns it into gossip about a nod for Callie Webb (Parker Posey) who is playing the black-sheep, lesbian daughter. What ensues is an uproarious indictment of celebutainment and people’s ability to buy into the rumor that they want to be true, particularly if it is a rumor that tells them they are valuable.
Guest and co-scripter Eugene Levy, who also makes an appearance in the cast as a slimy, not very convincing agent, spend more time poking a sharp stick in the eye of the industry that has sprung up to cover Hollywood, movie review shows, night time talk shows, entertainment reports, and the like, than they do dissecting that fact that Hollywood’s denizens believe they have a right to this sort of coverage. He’s none to kind to actors, portraying them as vain luddites more concerned with appearance than what’s inside.
Sprawling and with only the vaguest sense of structure, the film feels episodic. Still, if you’re even vaguely tapped into the culture of celebrity and the massive spin that surrounds it (pictures of Katie Holmes’ and Tom Cruise’s wedding anyone?) you will not be at a lost for laughs both broad and sly during the course of this film. For that, for the fact that all roads lead back to This Is Spinal Tap and for the complete irony that this film is probably just as worthy of anything that will receive an Oscar this year I’ll give this film 3.5 popcorns out of 5.
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