A safe and silly comedy from Christopher Guest and gang. After dog competitions (Best of Show), the folk music scene (A Mighty Wind), and amateur theater (Waiting for Guffman), the ensemble turns their patented improv humor on Hollywood but comes up with a less satisfying film than usual.
Catherine O’Hara plays a desperate, aging actress whose life is thrown into convulsions when she dares to hope for an Oscar nomination. Co-writer Eugene Levy plays a worthless agent, Fred Willard an obnoxious entertainment TV host, and Jennifer Coolidge a ditsy diaper heiress/producer. Guest-mainstays Parker Posey, Bob Balaban, and Harry Shearer are all reliably amusing.
But "amusing" is just about the best I have to say. Guest's Hollywood is somehow even more absurd than the real thing, but the movie industry has been satirized and abused so much before that For Your Consideration feels tame and scattershot by comparison. Everybody gets made fun of a little: actors who take themselves too seriously, actors who don't take themselves seriously enough, journalists both pompous and superficial, writers who care too much about art, producers who care too much about money.
There's none of the bite of Robert Altman's The Player, nor any of the ridicule disguised as love letter to the movies that makes Francois Truffaut's Day for Night such a pleasure. Catherine O'Hara turns out to be mean-spirited and selfish, and seeing her implode along with the other hacks and hucksters isn't nearly as much fun as you might expect.
