Lisa Picard Is Famous

This film is brilliant and it accurately portrays the lives of many struggling NYC actors, from the fact that talented actors are passed up for models for jobs, how do you try to stay in your craft, how no one really cares about their "survival job" and how many actors don't have an off switch.

This film was brilliant, funny, heartwarming and a real gem.

I wasn't looking forward to seeing Griffin Dunne's film from the start, especially knowing that it was a "mockumentary" about fame. As well, I was quite skeptical about the use of the DV format to give the film a realistic look. However, I was pleasantly surprised...at least for the first half of the film. Famous is one of those movies that doesn't know how to end. It's very funny - the "Wheat Chex" gag is hilarious! And I have to give credit to anyone who humorously uses a Charlie Sheen cameo (Spike Jonze included). Unfortunately, the film runs out of steam and the comedic possibilities are wasted. The cast is solid, and the film's subversive feel must be praised. For Dunne, this could be the direction he could be looking for in terms of further projects. Alas, with this project, he is treading the familiar ground of "Spinal Tap" and "Waiting for Guffman," two highly superior projects that set the standard for all mockumentaries on the same subject.

I saw this in Lawrence, KS, where one of the co-writers & principal characters (Laura Kirk/"Lisa Picard") had gone to college. The reviews of it in the Topeka paper made it look interesting; the paper said it was a very small budget production and there were only six copies of the film so I wanted to see it before it moved on to other theaters.

I'm glad we saw it. It's an interesting film, built on the premise that a director is making a documentary of an aspiring actor (Laura Kirk/Lisa Picard) who is just passing the cusp on her way to fame and stardom. Some of the film's questions are, "what does fame/success do to a person -- does it change their walk, talk, the way they behave?" And so this documentary will answer those questions.

This form is called a "mockumentary" -- somewhat in the vein of "Waiting for Guffman" and others. "Slice of life" would also be as appropriate and more accurate for this film in my view. "Waiting for Guffman" was a parody of the community theater scene in which the characters were all as broadly drawn and about as deep as most cartoon figures. While there was a slight tinge of that in "Famous," the characters are more complex, more layered, more fully formed as people.

The actors are excellent in their roles, both major and minor parts. All the roles are psychologically believable and quite realistic. The film is kind, funny, yet still letting us see a layer or two below and beyond surface appearances.

On the way to its conclusion, we get several surprises.

As a view of the lives of aspiring actors trying to break in, it was great. It would have been an even more touching movie if it had allowed us to empathize or identify just a little more with its lead character.

But what talent, in both writing and acting!! We'll see more from these people and they'll be even better.

Historically, Hollywood has done a lousy job of capturing what really goes on behind the scenes in its own industry. The "dream factory" that thrives on creating glossy visions of idealized lives has never been very good at examining its own underbelly.

The sole exception to this rule is Robert Altman's "The Player," a film that satirically nails Hollywood's shallow desperation with pitch-perfect accuracy. "The Player" finally has its bookend companion piece in "Lisa Picard is Famous," a "mockumentary" about an aspiring actress.

It comes as no surprise that this very funny and painfully true-to-life film was created by actors. Produced by actress Mira Sorvino ("Mighty Aphrodite") and directed by actor/director Griffin Dunne ("After Hours"), the movie was written by and stars unknown actors Lisa Kirk and Nat DeWolf.

Kirk plays Lisa Picard, a fiercely determined New York actress who, after a series of minor parts and commercials, is poised for her major breakthrough "in a small but pivotal role" in a tv movie starring Melissa Gilbert.

DeWolf plays Lisa's gay friend and fellow actor Tate Kelly whose major credit is an ill-fated gig as an extra on "Days of Our Lives." He's set to debut in his autobiographical Off Off Off Broadway one man show that "deals with issues of gay bashing and homophobia" (although he's had no first hand experience with either).

The gloriously deadpan film is told through the eyes and lens of a documentary film maker (played by Dunne) who's trying to capture the esssence of fame by following Lisa. Tossing her beret into the air a la Mary Richards, she appears to be on the brink of stardom.

Although it borrows the mockumentary style of "This is Spinal Tap" and "Waiting for Guffman," the film ultimately goes beyond mere satire. By scrutinizing the lives of these desperately hungry actors (in squirmingly painful detail), it sheds much more meaningful light on the subject of fame than Woody Allen's "Celebrity," which focused on the lives of the shallow and famous.

While Hollywood typically depicts actresses as vain divas (see Catherine Zeta Jones in "America's Sweethearts"), Kirk's performance beautifully captures more fundamental elements of an actor's pathology including a self-absorption that runs so deep that she doesn't even know it's there.

She experiences a callback audition for an Advil commercial as a desperate matter of life and death. In analyzing her character's motivation in the Japanese horror flick "A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell," she's careful not to give away the film's ending, "in case it's ever released."

The underlying joke of "Lisa Picard is Famous" is that by chronicling the unknown actress' every move, the documentary itself elevates her to a kind of unwarranted fame, while plaguing her daily life with fame's intrusiveness.

Contributing additional irony, humor and depth are sly interviews with the likes of Carrie Fisher and Buck Henry. A handful of cameo performances aid in the illusion of documentary reality, including Sandra Bullock, Charlie Sheen, Penelope Ann Miller and Spike Lee.

While some of the gags push the limits of deadpan reality (like Lisa's erotic Wheat Chex commercial), most of the film's humor is dead on. Tate's hilariously banal gay monologue is sure to strike a chord with those who've seen one too many self-revelatory one man shows.

Lisa Picard Is Famous is a film that never achieves greatness, but comes close to deconstructing that nebulous and intriguing world of fame. Numerous movies have been made on this subject, but Lisa Picard Is Famous is the first that follows an actress on the verge of stardom, and where the "impartial" documentarian (Griffin Dunne) makes sure she gets there. This breakdown of observer and subject is the central theme in this movie, reflecting the generalized tendency of the average person's inability to resist the temptations of fame and stardom. Watching this movie and the antics of Dunne and Picard, I wondered who wanted to be more famous, the director who wants respectability, or the actress who just wants work and money. This dynamic of observer and subject works well to inject laughs and insight to the phenomenon of fame, including some memorable encounters with the likes of Mira Sorvino, Sandra Bullock, and Spike Lee (Buck Henry appears to make wry observances, including this gem: the root word "fame" is derived from "famine"). One example is the hilarious scene where Picard, in all seriousness, compares her appearance with famous celebrities, and the director complements the absurdist moment by adding their faces on the screen, inviting the audience to made the ridiculous comparisons. Without giving away the ending, it was of great interest to see that no matter how much energy was expended on Picard's career by Dunne, chance plays an unexpectent and important role to derail Dunne's self-serving needs; proving that fame may be more of a random act, than a self-charted destiny.