|
|
|
| FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION (2006) - PG-13
|
|  |
|
SBD Star Rating:
by Lew Irwin
View Credits | See Other Reviews
|
 In the consideration of most critics, Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration, about the annual campaigning for Oscar awards, is funny -- but not so funny as Guest's "mockumentaries" like Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. (He also co-wrote and co-starred in the classic This is Spinal Tap.) Those films, writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times, "had a buoyancy and freshness that don't come through here." The problem, several critics suggest, may be in the subject matter itself. "Hollywood has been sent up so many times," writes Lou Lumenick in the New York Post, "that it doesn't present quite as fresh a satiric target as amateur theatricals, dog shows and folk music." Guest uses most of his "old repertory gang" for this film, Rick Groen observes in the Toronto Globe and Mail, but with this film, "the target is way too easy and the tone far too smug. This time, they're shooting fish in a barrel with a bazooka and congratulating themselves on their marksmanship." Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post also concludes that Consideration is far from being Guest's "best in show." Here, she writes, he "betrays a biliousness that never surfaced in his earlier work, and the effect isn't pretty." Perhaps, Jan Stuart suggests in Newsday, one of the reasons for all the sour reviews is that film critics had anticipated a far more trenchant put-down of Oscar awards mania than Guest delivers. At the press screening, he writes, "This was, after all, a navel-gazing satire about the false allure of word of mouth, how movie-industry hype can take on a life of its own and grow so big that it caves in on itself." And Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal has this word of advice to fans of Guest's previous films: "You'd best lower your expectations." |
|
|
|
