For Your Consideration (2006)
Country: US
Technical: col 86m
Director: Christopher Guest
Cast: Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey
Synopsis:
When the publicity manager of a small Hollywood Jewish picture entitled Home for Purim picks up an internet blog qualifying one of the cast's performance as 'Oscar-worthy', it starts a snowball of media-fuelled, PR-managed hype that in turn results in the studio emasculating the project to give it broader appeal and leads to inevitable disappointment on nomination day.
Review:
The trouble with this satire on the insecurities of movie industry folk is that the target is both too soft and too familiar. Consequently the film within the film is an unrecognisable travesty of what a Hollywood-Independent feature might be, and does not even rank as convincingly Jewish when placed alongside similar parodies in Woody Allen's films. The familiar cast of faces mostly embarrass themselves in a series of jokeless scenes; furthermore the 'mockumentary' shooting style is largely discarded to the point where even the 'observed' scenes being shot for the film exploit the mismatch between the single camera we see being used and the multiple camera setups and edited footage played to us. Any remotely informed follower of industry practices knows that films are not made that way, and the opportunity to educate the uninformed, not to mention a number of comedic possibilities involving the interplay of real and assumed characters, the stop-startiness of film-making life, is lost.
Country: US
Technical: col 86m
Director: Christopher Guest
Cast: Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey
Synopsis:
When the publicity manager of a small Hollywood Jewish picture entitled Home for Purim picks up an internet blog qualifying one of the cast's performance as 'Oscar-worthy', it starts a snowball of media-fuelled, PR-managed hype that in turn results in the studio emasculating the project to give it broader appeal and leads to inevitable disappointment on nomination day.
Review:
The trouble with this satire on the insecurities of movie industry folk is that the target is both too soft and too familiar. Consequently the film within the film is an unrecognisable travesty of what a Hollywood-Independent feature might be, and does not even rank as convincingly Jewish when placed alongside similar parodies in Woody Allen's films. The familiar cast of faces mostly embarrass themselves in a series of jokeless scenes; furthermore the 'mockumentary' shooting style is largely discarded to the point where even the 'observed' scenes being shot for the film exploit the mismatch between the single camera we see being used and the multiple camera setups and edited footage played to us. Any remotely informed follower of industry practices knows that films are not made that way, and the opportunity to educate the uninformed, not to mention a number of comedic possibilities involving the interplay of real and assumed characters, the stop-startiness of film-making life, is lost.
Country: US
Technical: col 86m
Director: Christopher Guest
Cast: Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey
Synopsis:
When the publicity manager of a small Hollywood Jewish picture entitled Home for Purim picks up an internet blog qualifying one of the cast's performance as 'Oscar-worthy', it starts a snowball of media-fuelled, PR-managed hype that in turn results in the studio emasculating the project to give it broader appeal and leads to inevitable disappointment on nomination day.
Review:
The trouble with this satire on the insecurities of movie industry folk is that the target is both too soft and too familiar. Consequently the film within the film is an unrecognisable travesty of what a Hollywood-Independent feature might be, and does not even rank as convincingly Jewish when placed alongside similar parodies in Woody Allen's films. The familiar cast of faces mostly embarrass themselves in a series of jokeless scenes; furthermore the 'mockumentary' shooting style is largely discarded to the point where even the 'observed' scenes being shot for the film exploit the mismatch between the single camera we see being used and the multiple camera setups and edited footage played to us. Any remotely informed follower of industry practices knows that films are not made that way, and the opportunity to educate the uninformed, not to mention a number of comedic possibilities involving the interplay of real and assumed characters, the stop-startiness of film-making life, is lost.