Sunday, October 29, 2006

London Film Festival: 'For Your Consideration' Screening

Had my first disappointment of the London Film Festival with the screening of For Your Consideration at the Odeon West End in Leicester Square.


In many ways this is my own fault. I love American TV comedy, which is usually far superior to our own British sit-coms, but so-called 'funny' movies leave me cold. The "brat pack" of the endlessly-gurning Saturday Night Live crowd (Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Owen whateverhisnameis) have me running a mile, and given the choice between watching Jack Black and his so-called 'wit' or watching paint dry for two hours I'd choose the latter every time. But director/writer Christopher Guest wrote Best in Show which I loved, and the idea of mixing his dry humour and satire with Hollywood oscar campaigns seemed too good an opportunity to miss


Alas, the jokes are pretty thin on the ground, and Guest's approach of 'let's improv around a very thin skeleton of a script' (ie any real jokes!) is risky. It's blatently obvious that nobody could be bothered to write any really funny or clever jokes, and the movie is mostly reduced to variations of what we've already seen in his previous movies


Even our own Ricky Gervaise resorts to reprising his David Brent character from The Office. There are some laughs here, mainly based around doing send-ups of existing American entertainment review programmes, but not enough to sustain a movie, and this all felt like a rather weak hour of American sit-com rather than a proper film.


Perhaps the biggest surprise was the appearance of the end credits just as the film seemed to be starting up. This is a VERY short film, which only added to the feeling of being generally ripped-off. At £12 admission and £6 for the tube fare each way (Ken Livingstone seems to be getting away with murder on underground rail pricing) this was an expensive trip for not much over 60 minutes entertainment.


I wasn't impressed with The Odeon West End either - although that may have more to do with the braying upper-class twit sat next to me, who seemed to think that every second sentence spoken needed him to rock backwards and forwards in hysterics, rather like an epileptic having a bad fit, so that the whole row of seats shook like a roller-coaster ride seat for most of the film's duration.


I'm not sure when For Your Consideration goes on general release, but when it does (IF it does!) I'd say give it a miss!

2 comments:

LeighAnn said...

I saw the trailer for "your consideration", looked pretty dull. I do want to see "running with scissors" though. I watched "hard candy" and found it to be very good. Have you ever seen "house of yes", the comedy about the Kennedy assasination. It's excellent. I also recommend "the three burials of Melquiades Estrada" with Tommy Lee Jones. Also very good.

Unknown said...

Hmm. Have you heard the latest Ebert and Roeper movie review podcast? They give "Running with Scissors" a rating of "two thumbs down... way down"!

I haven't seen "House of Yes". I HAVE seen "The Three Burials" which I reviewed on this blog a couple of months ago when it came out on DVD - I felt it had been overhyped to be honest. Not bad, just nowhere near as good as people kept saying it was. There was something that just seemed a bit too precious about it all, despite some excellent acting (mainly from the guy who played the 'bad' cop) and beautiful cinematography.