Chris recently went to London to tape a special with Ricky Gervais about his comedic infuences. The two took some time to chat about For Your Consideration.

You can see video from the convo here:

Salon - Chris and Ricky

For Your Consideration
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

MOVIE GRADE
EW Grade: A-


Dust off the mantel, book the Botoxologist, do whatever it is that needs to be done when buzz rises to a supersonic whine as the awards season looms: The astute, Oscar-loving/Oscar-tweaking showbiz satire For Your Consideration is a shoo-in to sweep every trophy available in the competitive category of best coif in this crazy business we call show.

Truly, the level of tender, ruthless, inspired, lethally accurate study that has gone into the follicular expression of each and every character in Christopher Guest's latest hilarious cultural corrective is something inspiring to behold. Eugene Levy (who co-wrote with Guest) goes for a tragically thinning Caesar cut as schlock agent Morley Orfkin. As magnificently ignorant and self-involved Hollywood Now TV cohost Chuck Porter, the incomparable Fred Willard sticks to a bleached and tufted faux-hawk.

Guest himself favors a cloud of frizz hoping to pass for Eraserhead cool to play Jay Berman, shlubby director of an indie period-piece drama infelicitously titled Home for Purim. The movie within the movie gathers a Jewish family .. including father, son, and lesbian daughter (Parker Posey) .. for the favorite holiday of the dying matriarch, Esther Pischer. (In Yiddish, pisher means ''bed wetter'' .. and, more broadly, a nobody.) The production is barely on the radar of the studio honcho (Ricky Gervais, British guest of Guest). But then veteran actress Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara), who plays Esther, is mentioned in some blip on some blog as being Oscar-worthy. And soon the whole dum-dum production is twisted by hurricanes of hype, gusts that blow into enterprises as blithery as the Ebert/Roeper-like TV show Love It/Hate It, and as blathery as a Charlie Rose-like chin tugger. Soon enough, the buzzed-about actors have been cosmetically restyled, and the Jewishness has been steamed out. (Seriously, laurels and swag ought to be handed over to O'Hara for her brilliant portrayal of aging-actresshood.)

For Your Consideration doesn't have the universal appeal of Guest's Best in Show or Waiting for Guffman; the work is more inside baseball, more like A Mighty Wind, with its loving eye roll in the cultish direction of folksingers and their Birkenstocks. But something about that specialized self-mockery moves and tickles me even more, I think .. the precision of the skewering, the scholarship in the details. By now the Guest rep company (also featuring Ed Begley Jr., Jennifer Coolidge, Michael McKean, and Larry Miller) runs with such economy of movement that a simple Mary Hart-felt squaring of the shoulders by Jane Lynch as Hollywood Now's cohost reduces me to tears of joy .. and this from a showbiz junkie at a magazine that has already run its first Oscar predictions before Thanksgiving. So if you like EW, you'll love For Your Consideration. And you can quote me.

Greetings AICN, MiraJeff here with a review of For Your Consideration for your consideration. For the record, I'm not the biggest Christopher Guest fan in the world. To tell you the truth, I just don't see what all the fuss is about. I have friends who swear by his films and others who refuse to go see them. I fall somewhere in the middle.

My earliest Guest memory is of watching This Is Spinal Tap at summer camp when I was 15 years old. I don't know if I was too young or what, but I hated it and so did everybody else in my bunk, so we shut it off about halfway through. Sorry Meathead. I haven't seen The Big Picture although it seems like something I'd enjoy. I'm ashamed that I haven't seen Waiting For Guffman, which I've heard is his finest hour. Almost Heroes almost made me throw up in my mouth. I thought Best in Show was pretty funny but A Mighty Wind just wasn't for me. So ignorance aside, the guy was batting below .500 for me. That said, while I'm predisposed to getting a kick out of a Hollywood satire more than the world of competitive folk singing, I'm still a bit surprised at just how much I enjoyed Guest's latest picture, a sneering, often hilarious send-up of the film industry that finds Guest biting the hand that feeds him.

For Your Consideration is an all-out attack on stupid studio executives, clueless Internet movie sites, selfish agents, egotistical actors and talking head Oscar pundits, all of whom live off the buzz the media conjure up. FYC follows Marilyn Hack, a past-her-prime actress who lets all the talk go to her head when her performance in the schmaltzy Jewish drama Home For Purim starts to generate Oscar buzz on an internet site not terribly dissimilar from the one you are reading now. Of course, we here at AICN aren't concerned with awards or accolades, and if there is any writer guilty of including predictions for Oscar noms in their reviews it's probably me, which may be why I laughed so hard at this movie.

Back to the film, Marilyn's not the only thesp getting media attention, there's also a lot of heat for Victor Allan Miller (Harry Shearer) and Callie Webb (Parker Posey). Alas, Brian Chubb (Christopher Moynihan) receives no recognition and is relegated to hiding behind his co-stars' shadows. All four of the main performers give solid but unremarkable performances, but that doesn't detract from the film's impact, because that's where the supporting cast comes in, and let me tell you, it's a doozy. In particular, Fred Willard upstages everyone as Chuck Porter, a faux-hawk-wearing, earring-clad anchor on an Entertainment Tonight-style program which he co-hosts alongside Cindy Martin (the statuesque Jane Lynch, who so memorably stole scenes of her own in The 40 Year-Old Virgin).

FYC's next best performance belongs to Jennifer Coolidge as Whitney Taylor Brown, the platinum-blonde producer of Home For Purim, who suggests changing the title to Home For Easter and focusing on the bunny when studio interference dictates a title-change. (It's eventually renamed Home For Thanksgiving.) Meanwhile, John Michael Higgins (Jennifer Aniston's gay brother in The Break-Up) is hilarious as socially awkward publicist and master of the non sequitur Corey Taft. Keep an eye on this guy, cuz he'll be lending yuks to Evan Almighty and Fred Claus in the near future.

We're also treated to Ed Begley Jr. as a cheerful make-up artist, Eugene Levy (who also co-wrote) as Victor's greedy agent, Guest himself as eccentric, deli-loving Purim director Jay Berman, Michael McKean and Bob Balaban as the film's beleaguered screenwriters, Ricky Gervais as The Stereotypical Suit, Don Lake and Michael Hitchcock as a pair of Siskel & Ebert-type critics, plus Richard Kind, Sandra Oh, John Krasinski, Carrie Aizley, Mary McCormack, Larry Miller, Claire Forlani, Rick Gonzalez, Craig Bierko, Rachael Harris, Loudon Wainwright III, Skylar Stone and
The Grove's Kevin Sussman in smaller roles.

FYC is a light, often-hysterical romp, with a dizzying flurry of hilarious one-liners. The story doesn't add up to all that much (there's no real character arcs or lessons learned or plot for that matter) and it ends rather abruptly, but the brisk running time make it a visit to the multiplex worth considering. If there's one complaint, it's that Guest wastes too much time showcasing the melodrama that is Home For Purim, whose scenes are never really that funny. I understand it's supposed to be a bad film (that point is impossible to miss) but I felt like we're shown too much of the movie, and yet not enough to really follow its cheesy lesbian-centric plot. If we had seen nothing from the film-within-the-film, I think it'd be a stronger piece that leaves you guessing about why it failed to capitalize on the Oscar buzz and just what was so good about it to generate awards talk in the first place.

Levy also is a bit of a letdown, failing to get mileage out of a character that should've been comedic gold in his hands. But you gotta love how ready he always is to downplay his own failures and swoop in to take credit for Victor's success. The ending is a tad lackluster, but really, those are the only problems and they're minor, I swear.  But I do understand how Quint might not have liked it, being a big fan of Guest's coming in. Maybe I haven't seen enough of his work to merit calling this his best film, but the least I can say is that it's my favorite.

And you gotta appreciate the lengths O'Hara will go to for the sake of her art. She'll do anything for a laugh (Surviving Christmas anyone?) and the thing is, most of the time, she gets it. The decision to release this sly, subversive comedy in the midst of awards season is funny in itself, and it's no coincidence how, as Corey Taft says, "All it takes is a little buzz, some fairy dust and they're off to the races." Because the most telling line in the film is about how the Oscars are the backbone of an industry known for not having a backbone.

The question is, will the Academy take the bait and be able to laugh at itself and grant Guest and Levy an original screenplay nomination, or will the film simply go out with a few "For Your Consideration" ads in the trades? Only time will tell, but one thing is clear, if you're in the mood to laugh and you've already seen Borat twice, you should definitely consider seeing For Your Consideration, and I'm not just blowing a mighty wind up your collective asses. That'll do it for me, folks. 

Entertainment Weekly lets Fred & Jane talk For Your Consideration in the November 17th issue.

Hooray for Christopher Guest's Hollywood, where Purim gets Oscar buzz and Charlie Rose his due

by Nathan Lee
November 14th, 2006 2:40 PM

For Your Consideration pulls off the neat trick of skewering the movie industry while remaking it in its own image. The latest ensemble comedy by Christopher Guest and company may take place in Los Angeles, but its imaginative provenance lies somewhere between the la-la lands of Entourage and Mulholland Dr. It's as weird and whimsical an invention as Guest's Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, or A Mighty Wind.

The scenario is more or less anchored in reality, or at least what passes for it in Hollywood. Anxiety mounts for cast and crew on the indie production Home for Purim when a blogger forecasts Oscar consideration for leading lady Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara). As the hype metastasizes to include her co-star, the famed hot-dog spokesman Victor Allen Miller (Harry Shearer), as well as supporting beauty Callie Webb (Parker Posey), a story for the media, if not a star for the ages, is born.

All of which would be perfectly reasonable if Home for Purim weren't utterly ridiculous. Directed by neophyte nebbish Jay Berman (Christopher Guest), it revives some forgotten mode of hysterical melodrama without a trace of irony or competence. Home for the holidays, a preposterous clan of Georgian Jews..we're talking Dixieland here, not Eurasia..rally around their dying matriarch. It's the sort of film where a lady about to swoon first puts a wrist to her forehead.

Elsewhere on the set, producer Whitney Taylor Brown (Jennifer Coolidge), heiress of the Brown diaper fortune, struggles with polysyllabic words; bumbling agent Morley Orfkin (Eugene Levy) gobbles down bagels; and unit publicist Corey Taft (John Michael Higgins) calls for the marketing campaign to be "timely, quantifiable, and orotund." Corey's ignorance of the "Interweb" is typical of the way the Hollywood of
Consideration often seems as outdated as the Georgia of Purim.

Guest's movies revel in marginal cultures and obsolete sensibilities, whether it's the podunk thespians of Waiting for Guffman or the dog nerds of Best in Show. By infusing his antiquated sympathies into au courant Hollywood, he risks a disconnect in the material. But it's exactly that tension, a bristle of styles, that lends Consideration a more memorable texture than Guest's prior foray into Hollywood satire, 1989's The Big Picture.

The movie doesn't lack for topical zingers. The Charlie Rose Show receives its definitive mocking, and, as Chuck Porter, meathead co-host of TV tabloid Hollywood Now, Fred Willard is done up with faux-hawk, diamond earring, hot-pink tie, and the pathetic exuberance of a professional ass kisser. Yet in an amusing send-up of an Ebert & Roeper..style duo, the best bit isn't the squabbling personalities or blurb-whoring inanity, but a tossed-off quip, barely overheard as the scene fades out: "This film reminds me of your wife and her ceramic turtle collection."

Lines like that (the screenplay is by Guest and Levy) go to the heart of Consideration, a movie about insiders from an outsider perspective. Hoopla in Hollywood isn't the real subject here, merely the pretext for another oddball ode to lovable losers.