For Your Consideration

I love this acting troupe. They are a well tuned machine. Though this movie is perhaps a little "inside" of the Hollywood Movie Industry, and the publicity machine on which it is driven, all of the regulars and the new faces invited into the fold give wonderful performances and play their parts with just the right amount of camp with their tongues in their cheeks. I mean after all. don't many of us WANT to know about the inside of the industry? The duo entertainment reporters ( Jane Lynch and Fred Willard) are hilarious and Catherine O'hara's performance is masterful. (do I hear Oscar Buzzzz?) But that is not to say any of the cast's performances were not noteworthy. My whole family had a great time. This is not meant to be a Great panoramic epic, this is good clean hilarity from some of our favorite actors.

If you are a fan of "Best in Show", Waiting for Guffman etc, or you just want to get to know these gifted actors, DO go see this film, nap before you go so you can be happy and rested and hear the inside jokes that spark the guffaws heard throughout the theater. Zaina

I'm surprised by the number of negative reviews here for what I thought was in many ways Christopher Guest's most developed movie yet. Granted, you either like his movies or not, but as someone who loved Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and Mighty Wind equally, I was in no way disappointed by For Your Consideration.

Maybe some of the humor here is easier to appreciate if you're Jewish, but that can't account for more than 5% of the jokes, and all of the actors were great. Particular kudos to O'Hara (as usual), Shearer, Lynch and Posey. The ET/Charlie Rose/Ebert & Roeper spoofs were hilarious and dead-on. The ending of the movie was truer than that of his previous films, and the ever expanding cast of Guest players made the viewing experience more fun than in the past (Sandra Oh, Ricky Gervais etc.).

My theory is that it's hard to approach a new Christopher Guest movie without justifiably expecting a lot, and great expectations often lead to disappointment. I was anxious to see For Your Consideration, but found it to be rewarding, very funny, and a little more poignant than usual (a good thing). Give it a chance and it'll grow on you.

The thing most Christopher Guest movies have going for them is their humanity. I always could believe the universe the characters were operating in, and their realism (see the dog owners in Best in Show or the small town citizens of Waiting for Guffman). That humanity transcended the satire and made the movies both hysterical and moving. FYC completely lost the humanity that drives these films. Almost all of the characters were not believable. In this instance Guest's improvisational technique failed him as the actors were all over the top, playing too much to the satire. Only two actors seemed in touch with their characters - Parker Posey (who we really saw too little of to understand her) and the great Catherine O'Hara, who sold both the aging actor she was portraying and the Jewish mother in the film within the film.

Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. In an impressive string of wonderful mockumentary farces over the past few years, guiding lights Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy, and their brilliant comedic acting ensemble, have joyfully savaged the self-important cultural "worlds" of small town amateur theater ("Waiting for Guffman"), dog shows ("Best in Show") and folk music ("A Mighty Wind").

But a winning formula can't go on forever unchanged, nor should we expect it to. Inevitably, the group have hit a bump in the road with their latest film, "For Your Consideration," a send-up of Hollywood movie making and the assorted vanities of movie makers. Not that it's bad. But compared to those earlier works, it isn't inspired; it doesn't grab you with its efforts to lampoon; and the performances of the actors - always uniformly of a high caliber in most of their movies – is highly variable in this new movie. Perhaps the theme hits too close to home: it's hard to gain the distance necessary to properly ridicule your own ethos, your own cultural world. Or maybe it's just that the recipe Guest and Levy have used to such delightful advantage has just gotten old, for viewers and for Guest's company.

The plot, for what it's worth, concerns a film within a film: the making of a new movie, the ethnically freighted "Home for Purim," which is later rewritten and retitled "Home for Thanksgiving" to broaden its commercial box office appeal. All the stereotypes one expects are on hand: the avaricious executive producers; the harried director; the screenwriters, pained by the incremental decimation of their work; the aging stars in decline; the young up and comings; the vain chase after that holiest of grails: an Oscar, the hangers on – the parasitic, disingenuous talent agent, talk show hosts, film critics and entertainment reporters. They're all here.

Parker Posey (young actress possibly on the way up), Catherine O'Hara ((veteran actress on the way out), Jennifer Coolidge (ditzy producer), and Eugene Levy (actors' agent) provide decent turns but none of these superb talents gives a truly inspired performance here. Harry Shearer is better as a long-suffering actor who is glad enough just to star in a feature film after years of making commercials, Oscar or no Oscar. But the comedic scene stealers in this movie are three pairs of actors who play off each other to wonderful effect: Fred Willard and Jane Lynch as a TV entertainment reporting duo, Bob Balaban and Michael McKean as the beleaguered screenwriters, and Don Lake and Michael Hitchcock as Siskel-Ebert style TV critics. There are several competent cameo contributors as well, the best of whom is Carrie Aizley, a movie journalist.

This is decent fare, but I think Guest and Levy need to re-imagine their formula for successful farce. I never thought the day would come when I would regard a comedy written by David Mamet as superior to work by Guest & Levy, but here's a tip: if you want to see a good send-up of movie making, try Mamet's 2000 film, "State and Main." My grades: 6.5/10 (low B) (Seen on 11/15/06)

I'm also surprised by some of the negative commentary around 'For your Consideration'. The satire seemed to me to be to be quite precise - particularly in its analysis of the average actor's life - which is a lot more like "For Your Consideration" or Ricky Gervais's brilliant "The Extras" than anything you're likely to see on Entertainment Tonight that is for sure.

Having studied method acting over several years (a long time ago), and having worked as an extra at different low points in my life (never ever again), I have to say that I laughed till I cried. Without giving the ending away,Marilyn Hacke's closing scene is so on the money - what a cracker!

Acting, actor training and film are all open to exploitation of the gullible because so many people are desperate to be part of it; consequently it's an area ripe for satire. For me, this was more on the money than "Waiting for Guffman" although I enjoyed that too. For your consideration has sharper edges. I think it's great that Ricky Gervais performs in this film. Gervaise is such an 'English' comic whilst Guest's sensibilities are very American - but in the shared fascination with human idiosyncracies, banalities and foibles, they both create a very contemporary form of the comedy of manners.