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FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION Send This Review to a Friend
Presented at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, this comedy is definitely for your movie-going consideration. Director Christopher Guest, who has amused us with such mockumentaries as “Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show” and “A Mighty Wind,” this time turns his satirical aim at the frenzy and manipulations in connection with the annual Oscar race. Once again the result is mostly hilarious, apart from a downslide here and there. Once you’ve seen “For Your Consideration,” you may never be able to look at the Oscars in the same way, thanks to the belly laughs inherent in the screenplay, which Guest wrote with Eugene Levy, and to the finely tuned cast.
The film developing an Oscar buzz is itself a joke, titled “Home for Purim,” involving a heavy-hearted reunion of a Jewish family, the matriarch of which has the kind of schmaltzy dying role few would seriously consider Oscar material. Can a film so ethnic win hearts and minds? Will a way be found to make it more universal?
Good sense notwithstanding, a buzz is created that makes the participants think Oscar nominations are a sure thing, and the rumors suddenly bring the spotlight. Catherine O’Hara is hilarious as Marilyn Hack, the ill-fated “Purim” mom, Harry Shearer is funny as Victor Allan Miller, known for a hot dog commercial and now playing Marilyn’s husband, and Parker Posey is a hopeful ingénue who also has Oscar stars in her eyes.
TV interviewers get a good going over in the persons of Fred Willard and Jane Lynch as Chuck and Cindy, who won’t let their program guests get a word in edgewise. Levy is as rib-tickling as ever, this time as an agent who tells his client nothing is more important them him while interrupting their conversation to take a cell phone call. Christopher Guest also gets into the screen action, appropriately as the director of hyped flick.
You get the idea. And wait until you see what Marilyn Hack looks like after all the facial alterations. A Warner Independent Pictures release.
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