For Your Consideration [DVD] [2006]

The team behind A Mighty Wind and Best in Show return with this sly satirical take on how the 'buzz'on a movie can lead to all sorts of trouble.When the cast of the small Jewish themed movie Home for Purim start to find out that there is such a buzz on their movie the actors,producers and PR all start speculating what may happen.As the buzz grows what started as a gossip item on an internet web site gets into the mainstream and the local LA media start to take interest.

The usual suspects Christopher Guest,Gene Levy,Catherine O 'Hara,Harry Shearer are joined by the likes of Parker Posey and Ricky Gervais who plays a smarmy Hollywood studio 'suit' who wants the title of the movie changed to give it a wider audience.As the time passes the studio gets its way and the movie becomes Home for Thanksgiving and the actors involved veterans Marilyn Hack and Victor Allen Miller played by O'Hara and Shearer change from jobbing actors into semi-stars.

The main cast have done this thing before and are uniformely good and the ending set three months after the day of the Oscar nominations and the disappointments that are involved are also funny to anyone who has even a smidgen of knowledge of how Hollywood works.

After reading quite a few disappointing reviews of this film, I felt less and less in a hurry to go and see it, even though I am a big Christopher Guest fan. But boy, am I glad I finally did buy a copy! Even if it feels a bit sketchy in places, every scene is a joy to watch, and the outtakes on the DVD are easily as good as anything that did make the final cut. Christopher Guest generously gives each member of his wonderful cast at least one scene to shine, and shine they do. Much has been said about Catherine O'Hara's performance, and she IS wonderful, both heartbreaking and hilarious as the character actress who gets bitten by the Oscar-bug. Fred Willard and the wonderful Jane Lynch are absolutely hysterical as the morning-tv show hosts from hell, who aren't that far away from anything we actually see on tv every day. As with all good satire, it feels like you are watching a documentary. When you see Catherine O'Hara's character watching the oscar nominees being read out on tv, waiting for her own name to be mentioned, you realise: that's what it actually must be like for these actresses! So, all in all, perhaps not Christopher Guest's most solid film, but I assure you, if you have liked his work before, you are going to love this one. I certainly did!

When a rumor spreads that an aging, passed-by actress named Marilyn Hack is in line for an Oscar nomination for her role in the yet-to-be-released corn-pone movie, Home for Purim, the gods of ambition, resentment, hope, angst and envy descend on Tinsel Town. This isn't one of Christopher Guest's and his partner Eugene Levy's docu-comedy satires, it's a cocked-eyebrow story about Hollywood pretensions. For Your Consideration has some clever set-ups, some genuinely funny actors strutting about while they improvise and some funny bits. But how do you successfully satirize something -- Hollywood -- which already is so bloated with self-esteem we snicker at the name?

Guest and Levy give us great takes on such smarmy situations as the Oscar race, the E! Network and it's clones, actor neediness, agents and writers, and self-justifying ambition. Trouble is, it's all being done in the real world while we watch. Few things in fiction are as awesome as in real life studios and stars campaign for Oscar wins. Few things are as awful as entertainment "reporters" with their inane, insincere questions and perfect grooming. Can one satirize performance art by screaming the p-word when in real life an artist on stage covers her nude body with Hershey's chocolate syrup and moans?

The idea of the movie, for me, just doesn't work, but that doesn't mean it lacks lots of funny piece-parts. The stand-out is Catherine O'Hara. She plays Marilyn Hack, an over-the-hill actress who is stunned to hear her name used in the same sentence as "Oscar." She doesn't believe it...she wants to believe it...she does believe it. From an actress resigned to hanging on by her fingertips in the movie world, she winds up blow-dried, lips plumped, in a too-tight short-short skirt doing the TV late-night entertainment rounds. O'Hara is magnificent...totally unafraid as an actress to show herself as the dumpy Hack, and then transformed through chemistry, injections, dye and corsets into a caricature of a Hollywood star. More importantly, O'Hara is so skilled as an actress she makes us like Marilyn Hack. Plus, she's funny.

Too bad, but I didn't heard any rumors about O'Hara and an Oscar nomination.