I wouldn't call it a bad movie by any measure - it's well put together and performed, certainly - I wouldn't necessarily want to portray it as a good one either. Leastwise, it's certainly not a very satisfying one.
The reason for this is that so little of it is funny. That's really the bottom line there. The only things that made me crack up were one line from Ricky Gervais and just about everything out of Jennifer Coolidge's mouth. The rest was met with slight chuckles and silence.
Part of the reason that it wasn't very funny was that the film lacks something very important - a moral and/or sympathetic center. This is usually the function of Eugene Levy, but it was abandoned in favor of a one-joke character that he could do in his sleep. Catherine O'Hara's performance as an aging actress was extremely good, but I wouldn't call it sympathetic.
This leads to two other problems. One, it becomes a big insider joke, which can be boring to the rest of us out here in the real world, and two, because all the characters appear to be treated with maximum disdain by the filmmakers. If the filmmaker hates his characters, why should the audience like them? I have had some doubts about Christopher Guest since "A Mighty Wind," a movie I mostly liked, but was annoyed by as well. I couldn't understand why Guest was giving so much screen time to the cheap laughs from the one-joke entity of the Main Street Singers, thus stealing away precious moments with Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara's tale of funny sadness. Then I saw all these DVD outtakes with some great scenes between those two which were apparently expunged in order to include more porn jokes and I thought "this guy has lost any sense of sophistication in comedy." "For Your Consideration" did not make me feel any better about him.
The reason for this is that so little of it is funny. That's really the bottom line there. The only things that made me crack up were one line from Ricky Gervais and just about everything out of Jennifer Coolidge's mouth. The rest was met with slight chuckles and silence.
Part of the reason that it wasn't very funny was that the film lacks something very important - a moral and/or sympathetic center. This is usually the function of Eugene Levy, but it was abandoned in favor of a one-joke character that he could do in his sleep. Catherine O'Hara's performance as an aging actress was extremely good, but I wouldn't call it sympathetic.
This leads to two other problems. One, it becomes a big insider joke, which can be boring to the rest of us out here in the real world, and two, because all the characters appear to be treated with maximum disdain by the filmmakers. If the filmmaker hates his characters, why should the audience like them? I have had some doubts about Christopher Guest since "A Mighty Wind," a movie I mostly liked, but was annoyed by as well. I couldn't understand why Guest was giving so much screen time to the cheap laughs from the one-joke entity of the Main Street Singers, thus stealing away precious moments with Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara's tale of funny sadness. Then I saw all these DVD outtakes with some great scenes between those two which were apparently expunged in order to include more porn jokes and I thought "this guy has lost any sense of sophistication in comedy." "For Your Consideration" did not make me feel any better about him.