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Nov. 17, 2006
Home for the holiday
Guest hits another homer, with Jewish humor.
BAILA LAZARUS
All the usual suspects are back, and for those who are die-hard
Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara fans, get your
tissues out ... you'll cry with laughter. With the additional icing
of Jewish humor thrown in, Guest's latest creation, For Your
Consideration, is a must-see.
For those unfamiliar with Guest's previous work, he's the comic
genius behind the mockumentaries This is Spinal Tap, Waiting
for Guffman, the hilarious Best in Show (some say it
was Guest's best in the series) and the side-splitting A Mighty
Wind. Though Consideration is not done in the same style,
the behind-the-scenes story still has that mockumentary feel.
For Your Consideration follows director Jay Berman (played by an
unrecognizable Guest) as he tries to make a touching film called
Home for Purim. In it, a Jewish family, comprised of O'Hara
as the mother, Harry Shearer as the father, Christopher Moynihan
as the son and Parker Posey as the daughter, comes together to celebrate
the mother's favorite Jewish holiday – Purim.
The older actors – O'Hara and Shearer – are feeling as
though they're sliding into the has-been pit when a rumor starts
that they will be nominated for Academy Awards for their roles in
Home for Purim, which is still in the midst of filming. As
the rumor spreads, the entertainment talk-show vultures swoop down
to pull the senior actors up into stardom.
What follows is a series of hilarious interviews that the film's
stars have to make on the requisite talk-show circuit. Skewering
everybody from Entertainment Tonight to David Letterman,
Guest keeps the absurdities coming. Shearer and O'Hara have to bear
the humiliation of moronic entertainment TV hosts Cindy and Chuck
(Jane Lynch and Fred Willard), an insulting radio show hosted by
"Dinky and Don" and a daytime talk show where the weather
is read by a puppet monkey. Though he's been in the business 40
years, Shearer has to dance on a rap show called Chilaxin,
to show how cool he is now that he's been nominated for an Oscar.
On one program, O'Hara, so concerned about saying the right things,
goes catatonic and can't answer a single question.
Then come the marketing gurus and one of the best scenes in the
movie – Sandra Oh showing one of the film posters she's created
for Home for Purim, where all of the characters are disembodied
heads, each floating in the centre of a giant hamantashen on a table.
Enter the producer (Jennifer Coolidge, who played the rich-dog-owner-turned-lesbian
in Best in Show), who says, "It looks like a horror
film. Somebody killed their children and made them into cookies.
I'd want to go see that."
Of course, as the filming of the movie progresses, the backers start
worrying that its Jewish nature will make it less popular and want
to "tone down the Jewishness" by changing the name of
the film to Home for Thanksgiving. And when the Academy Award
nominations are finally announced ... well ... you'll have to see
for yourself who wins.
Although O'Hara didn't stand out in this movie, the other "usual
suspects" – Levy as Shearer's talent agent, Willard as
the TV host, Coolidge as the producer and Ed Begley Jr. as... OK,
that's not clear, but he really did dress funny – were as good,
if not better, than in earlier Guest films. And, of course the Jewish
content makes this even funnier.
Some of the zaniness seems taken to the extreme but, as Guest says
when he throws away the script of Home for Purim and gets
the actors to walk in a circle on set, "It's a way to motivate
them, so they'll think, 'Ah, shpilkes, what's happening?' "
For Your Consideration opens Friday night at Fifth Avenue
Cinemas.
Baila Lazarus is a freelance writer, photographer and
illustrator living in Vancouver. Her work can be seen at www.orchiddesigns.net.
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