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indiedan
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Posts: 6022
From:Santa Monica
Registered: May 2000

posted November 16, 2006 06:52 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for indiedan   Click Here to Email indiedan     Edit/Delete Message
+ MOVIES: REVIEW | Buzz Kill: Christopher Guest's "For Your Consideration"

Documentary coverage presented by Yahoo! Search


by Michael Koresky (November 15, 2006)

[An indieWIRE Review from Reverse Shot.]

Breaking free of the mockumentary shackles that had become his exclusive domain, Christopher Guest gets back to mirthful basics with "For Your Consideration," which is less a La-La-Land satire than a glorious sketch comedy throwback. The Guest troupe, many of whom hail from the Seventies Canadian show "SCTV," as well as "Saturday Night Live," amass fresh talent with each new feature--one of the true pleasures of Guest's films is discovering additions to the gang and watching their talents blossom, such as the reliably gung-ho toothiness of Don Lake, the tremulous neuroses of Deborah Theaker, and the high-strung, bird-like mannerisms of Michael Hitchcock. Yet for an ongoing project so predicated on shucking common aesthetic and narrative practices, Guest's fake-doc form had become, well, predictable. While the actors always manage to find hilarious riffs (Fred Willard in "Best in Show") and pockets of surprising depth (Eugene Levy in "A Mighty Wind"), Guest and co-writer Levy'
s insistence on following a workable template from film to film (following a disparate group of regional sad-sacks on their deluded way to a climactic performance--community theater, dog show, folk revival--on which they hang all their outsized hopes) resulted in an increasing lack of spontaneity.

Read the Full Story @ indieWIRE.com
< http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2006/11/review_buzz_kil.html

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NEWSFLASH
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Posts: 5958
From:Hollywood, CA
Registered: Apr 2002

posted November 24, 2006 02:06 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for NEWSFLASH   Click Here to Email NEWSFLASH     Edit/Delete Message
Movie Reviews: 'For Your Consideration'


In the consideration of most critics, Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration, about the annual campaigning for Oscar awards, is funny -- but not so funny as Guest's "mockumentaries" like Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. (He also co-wrote and co-starred in the classic This is Spinal Tap.) Those films, writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times, "had a buoyancy and freshness that don't come through here." The problem, several critics suggest, may be in the subject matter itself. "Hollywood has been sent up so many times," writes Lou Lumenick in the New York Post,"that it doesn't present quite as fresh a satiric target as amateur theatricals, dog shows and folk music." Guest uses most of his "old repertory gang" for this film, Rick Groen observes in the Toronto Globe and Mail, but with this film, "the target is way too easy and the tone far too smug. This time, they're shooting fish in a barrel with a bazooka and congratulating themselves on their marksmanship." Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post also concludes that Consideration is far from being Guest's "best in show." Here, she writes, he "betrays a biliousness that never surfaced in his earlier work, and the effect isn't pretty." Perhaps, Jan Stuart suggests in Newsday, one of the reasons for all the sour reviews is that film critics had anticipated a far more trenchant put-down of Oscar awards mania than Guest delivers. At the press screening, he writes, "This was, after all, a navel-gazing satire about the false allure of word of mouth, how movie-industry hype can take on a life of its own and grow so big that it caves in on itself." And Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal has this word of advice to fans of Guest's previous films: "You'd best lower your expectations."

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