For Your Consideration is a movie that couldn't come at a better time. We're at that stage in the year where it isn't quite full-on awards season but the buzz is building, much like with Home For Purim the movie-within-a-movie that is the basis for Christopher Guests' lastest improvise-a-thon.
Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara who, ironically enough, deserves serious Oscar consideration for this role) is an aging actress who is happily toiling on a tiny blip of an indie directed by Mr. Jay (Christopher Guest, aiming for crazy cool with that haircut of his) when she hears that someone has posted something on some blog about the possibility of an Oscar nomination. Suddenly Hack has turned her insecurities out against her, using them as weapons of mass self-destruction and laughter for us. As the buzz builds the rest of the cast and crew is swept up, soon Callie Webb (Indie Queen Parker Posey) has been mentioned by "them" and everyone is full to burst.
What keeps the movie afloat is that fact that it is self-aware: it knows the insanity of the business it is mocking but is too in love with itself, and thereby a very Hollywood picture, to care. It loves the Oscars as much as it despises what alittle "buzz does in this town".
Christopher Guests' crew (including mainstays like Eugene Levy, Jennifer Coolidge, Fred Willard, and Jane Lynch) is so amazing at what they do and such loving research has gone into this movie, the blustery Love It/Hate It is a pitch-perfect gag, that even the slightest murmur from Jennifer Coolidge has me laughing very, very hard. A satire that loves its victims with touching, almost tragic, affection? Only from Guest.
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