BEST IN SHOW
directed by Christopher Guest
starring: ensemble with Eugene Levy, Parker Posey, Michael McKean,
Catherine O'Hara, Fred Willard, Christopher Guest, others
Guest has decided to make the "mockumentary" form his own, after serving as
a writer/actor on Spinal Tap and then whipping out Waiting for
Guffman--with a similar cast to the one he used on Best in Show. This time
(as opposed to the rock band shenanigans or small town theatre pageant of
yore) we get the inside scoop on a national dog show. The Mayflower dog
show, an apparently elite competition in Philadelphia, has attracted a
number of ardent dog lovers, mainly couples (but one individual played by
Guest himself). We follow each couple and their dog to the show, observe
how they "deal" with the various trials and travails which meet them at the
show, and ultimately share in their triumph or defeat. As before, Guest
uses stereotypical characters (the Yuppie couple, the Gay couple, the
Low-Class couple) but manages to endear us to them and "humanize" them,
rarely winking at the audience or acknowledging that they are indeed
stereotypes (they are). The humor arises mainly from "character study"
though Fred Willard, as one of the dog show announcers, is allowed a few
(bad) jokes. I always liked Fred Willard--he plays dumb in a truly deadpan
way. It's hard to judge a film like this as a comedy--though it is very
funny--if only because it is so improvised and it is such a play on the
documentary style, that the rules are different. One shouldn't expect to
laugh out loud throughout--but then again, I laughed at this more than at
most of the over-written "comedies" you see nowadays. But there was
something more, when the winner of the dog show was declared, I felt a tear
well up in my eye. Somehow, I came to care for these ridiculous characters
and the ending brought some emotion. OK, maybe that's just me. Well worth
seeing.
MEMENTO
starring Guy Pearce, Carrie Ann Moss, others
A film noir with a striking structural conceit that puts it in the same
field as The Usual Suspects. In this case, the protagonist (Pearce, an
Aussie actually) suffers from a rare disorder (not amnesia) which means
that he cannot create any new memories. He _can_ remember everything that
happened before his accident (an attack by an intruder or intruders in
which his wife was raped and killed and he suffered a head injury) but he
can't store any information that has come afterward. How long it has been
since this "accident" is unknown to us. When we come in, the protagonist,
Leonard, is in the midst of a pursuit to find and kill the intruder who
raped and killed his wife. In order to keep "on task", he must write
himself notes (or tattoo important information on his body), and take
polaroids of the people he meets so that he might jot down their names and
little bits of info about them to aid his recall when he meets them again
(and fails to remember them, of course). To add to the sheer confusion
this creates in the viewer, the movie then proceeds to progress
backwards. That's right, we see the end of the events portrayed first and
then move gradually backwards (in overlapping flashbacks) to the start of
the episode. This is a movie about memory that requires audience members
themselves to do their best to hold early events in their memories; the
unconventional narrative structure makes it very difficult to do this, thus
replicating in some way the mental state of Leonard in the audience
member. Add to this, the fact that each new "memory/fact" that is revealed
to the audience (but that has already been forgotten by Leonard) changes
our understanding of events which come after (at the start of the movie)
and changes our sympathies with the various characters willy-nilly. As you
can see this is a striking and highly recommended movie for its style
alone. That said, aside from some rather simplistic points about memory
itself, the movie is nothing BUT style. But perhaps that's what those of
us who enjoy otherwise standard genre pictures really want.