Day 53 - 2/22/09 - Movie 51
BEFORE: My BFF Andy's visiting, and as my guest, I asked him to pick a movie from the list. He picked perhaps the PERFECT film to watch before the Oscar ceremony airs. I have been meaning to watch this for some time, being a big fan of Christopher Guest's mockumentaries.
THE PLOT: Three actors learn that their respective performances in the film "Home for Purim," a drama set in the mid-1940s American South, are generating award-season buzz.
AFTER: I'm afraid it didn't really live up to my expectations, it's no "A Mighty Wind" or "Best in Show". Knowing what I know about filmmaking and the Oscar-nominating process, I had some problems with the timeline - namely, actors don't usually go on talk-shows and promote a movie WHILE it's being shot. The media also wouldn't speculate on Oscar nominations, and a studio wouldn't promote a performance, before a film is edited and is given a release date. I didn't like the portrayal of entertainment reporters either - they're tools, sure, but they're not necessarily idiots, like Fred Willard portrayed. OK, maybe Billy Bush is, but that's it.
RATING: 5 out of 10 trailers
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This one inspires me to contact my congressman and see if we can't get a rider attached to the omnibus bailout bill that prevents Christopher Guest from doing any more of these improv movies. This one proves yet again that he uses this method as a labor-saving crutch and as a readymade excuse for making a movie that really doesn't work.
ReplyDeleteThat's all there is to it. Improv movies can be utterly brilliant. The producers and cast of "Reno: 911 Miami" clearly didn't do anything the easy way. They worked out a spine of a story that would give the cast plenty to work with and remained committed to doing a story that worked.
But it really doesn't seem as if Guest even cares. The characters aren't believable? Scenes are shot that don't contribute a damned thing to the story? There's no momentum whatsoever to the story? And it follows the same "Buildup to The Big Show" story structure that he's used in every OTHER one of his movies? So what? "You have to give us a free pass on all of that! It's improv!"
We talked about your insider perspective. I certainly understand your point. I didn't have as much of a problem with it. I found it easy to just accept that the publicist was desperate to rescue the movie from oblivion by grasping at any possible publicity he could possibly get as soon as he could possibly get it, and when the anchor of some anonymous morniing show said "Oscar-worthy" he was smart enough to see if you could exploit that to get some buzz going.
But I guarantee you that in that paragraph I thought more about the logic of the movie than Guest did!