Daily Blague

Not in the best of moods, I set out yesterday for the movies without being absolutely sure where I was going. It was ten o'clock. If I could find a cab, I'd cross town to see For Your Consideration, a film that Kathleen forbade me to see without her but which I wasn't willing to wait for DVD to see, at 10:30. It was playing across the street from here on Thursday, but then it disappeared (Friday marks the changing of the guard). If I couldn't find a taxi, then I'd see Borat, which I really don't want to see at all, at 10:10. If, thanks to looking for a taxi, I was too late for Borat, I'd go to Casino Royale at 10:15. I don't want to see Casino Royale in the theatre, either. Although I'm a big fan of Daniel Craig, I have no use whatever for James Bond.

These options simmered right up until ten past ten, when, at the corner of 86th and Third - right across the street from the AMC complex where Borat and Casino Royale were showing, I spotted a free cab. So I got to see For Your Consideration after all, at the AMC complex at Broadway and 84th.

Boy, did the critics screw up on this one! Lavishing mostly tepid reviews, they failed to see what I was in fact expecting, an even stronger distillation of the essence of parody that Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy have been producing in a remarkable string of films, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind. Every moment of For Your Consideration is electrically amusing. Filmmakers have been making fun of Hollywood for years, but never before, I think, has a movie focused, as this one does, on the eagerness with which Hollywood's victims surrender to its ministrations. Nobody fights back. Nobody goes home, worldly-wiser, in the way that Lynn Bracken returns to Arizona at the end of LA Confidential. All one can say of Marilyn Hack, the character at the center of For Your Consideration, is that it's a pity that she's still alive at the end.

Catherine O'Hara is beyond brilliant as Hack, so painfully good that she appears to have crucified her face for the sake of the story. It's the kind of story that Americans hate: crazed by the promise of fame, a more or less well-adjusted person goes off the rails. Hack is an instant-coffee version of Norma Desmond, and although Ms O'Hara is much funnier than Gloria Swanson, she is no less serious. In another totally remarkable performance, Parker Posey allows her face to be more conventionally lovely than it has ever been before - this is to say, more blandly beautiful. And then she lets us drink this face in as it drinks in the awareness that, in Hollywood, pretty faces are a dime a dozen. And, finally - because I can't praise everyone in the show; we'd be here all day - I want you to know that, if you think that you have seen Jennifer Coolidge do airhead to perfection before, you are mistaken. While I hope that Hollywood will eventually make it up to Ms Coolidge by letting her play the Nobel Prize-winning operator of a particle accelerator or, in the alternative, the editor of The New Yorker, I think that the bimbos that she has impersonated for Guest & Co are as delicious as a box of treats from the chocolatier, Belgique. And while we're talking about nailing roles for life, nobody, but nobody is a bigger asshole than the assholes that Fred Willard plays. His hairstyle, in For Your Consideration, deserves its own billing.

Do not miss this movie!