Waiting for Guffman (1996)

Very disappointing...

Too much of everything

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Thanks be to cable for reviving this very non-commercial film. It's a sweet send-up of small town America that comes across like an extended version of Second City Review or Saturday Night Live. Sure, some of the parody is pointed, but it's never mean-spirited. Blaine, Missouri, in the heart of the state, is having its 150th anniversary, and by golly the town's theatrical types are going to do it up right. Never mind that the talent is spread pretty thin from the stage struck town dentist (Eugene Levy), to travel agents (Fred Willard & Catherine O'Hara), to Dairy Queen princess (Parker Posey). Or that their inspiration comes from an off- off-off Broadway impresario (Christopher Guest), "temporarily on leave" from the Big Apple. He may not be your typical macho mid-western type, but he did serve on a destroyer and does have a wife, somewhere, so he says.It's all handled with just the right amount of tongue-in-cheek, as we watch the cast lumber, stagger, and flounce through their dance routines and dream of Real stage success. Naturally, we expect the final result, the pageant performance before the whole town, to nose-dive., But it doesn't. Instead, the stage performance comes across rather sweetly, with just the right amount of unpolished success that brings the whole town to its feet in a boffo finale. What happens then is comical and not too surprising, considering all the low rent motels surrounding Hollywood. Levy, Willard, and the others are uniformly excellent as would be expected of veteran sketch artists. I don't know who to thank for the movie that had no obvious future, commercial or otherwise. But for darn sure this little sleeper goes into my tape library for repeated viewing.

It's all there. The ridiculous characters who live a ridiculous delusion centered around a particular niche of people. The dry, awkward, intentional but not portrayed to be that way humor. It's classic Christopher Guest mockumentary and it's exactly what "Waiting for Guffman" is. The only thing is that Guest never goes the extra step to make these characters anything more than hysterical and it's there for the taking."Guffman" centers around a fictional Missouri town called Blaine in which a local theater director Corky St. Clair (Guest) has agreed to create and direct a show about the history of the town for its 150th anniversary celebration. The film goes through the whole process by interviewing everyone involved and following St. Clair as it all happens. When they hear that a Broadway scout of sorts named Mort Guffman is to attend their performance, they all get incredibly excited.Guest and his usual cast of actors playing yet another set of actors are great once again in this film. Eugene Levy is great as the town's dentist who discovers his theatrical side when he's cast in the show. Fred Willard and Catherine O'Hara continue to apply their off-beat senses of humor to their roles as a husband and wife that run a travel agency despite never having left Blaine in their lives. Parker Posey also demonstrates a great subtle humor to her part as a young Dairy Queen employee.The greatest statement that Guest makes with this film is that it's completely absurd that these people expect their lives to become anything more than dull. You follow them and they're so passionate about it despite clearly having no talent. But at the same time, Guest never really explores that. He just shows you the process of putting on the show in this film and relies on humor to carry you through it. With such great actors and characters like in all his films, it shocks me to see it all get wasted or at the least never fully developed. We never get to see these characters for who they really are despite the fact that we enjoy laughing at them.

Um, Parker Posey is a red-hot babe. Wait-MOM--could you not TOUCH THE COMPUTER so I could WRITE PLEASE! Anyway this is areally funny movie.Parker is soooooo hot. Anyway, I was not bored by this movie, for the most part.Christopher Guest is a really good director except that he gets these two boring actors, Eugene Levy and that chick who plays his wife- and they just go on and on and on. Catherine O'Hara just doesn't play real. She tries too hard. Dear Catherine--------------------------------------Less is more.The concept is parody. Do parody sweetie.Don't demonstrate acting-just act. The role is not 'performing your resume'.

The current climate of cinematic comedy is comparable, to an extent, to the trend in horror: everything is geared toward pull-out-all-stops excess that is more disgusting than entertaining. We should thank our lucky stars for Christopher Guest, a consistently surprising filmmaker (he directed "Best in Show" and wrote "This is Spinal Tap") who makes 'mockumentaries' that play like actual documentaries. "Waiting for Guffman" follows Corky St. Clair (Guest), a flamboyant stage director who gathers a group of 'eclectic' locals (a cross-eyed dentist; a husband-and-wife travel agent team; a Dairy Queen employee) for a production about the sleepy town in which they live (its claim to fame being home of the footstool). There is a hilarious authenticity to the behind-the-scenes footage, but the film never laughs at its subjects--as viewers, we share Corky's (admittedly delusional) passion with bittersweet good humor. The supporting cast--consisting of Guest regulars Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Parker Posey, Fred Willard, Bob Balaban, and Larry Miller--is in top form here. "Waiting for Guffman" is a quiet comedy gem about a dull, quiet town. And it's also ridiculously rated "R" for two quick instances of F-word usage (way to call it, MPAA!).