Like Ed Wood's camp classics "Glen or Glenda?" and "Plan Nine From Outer Space," some movies are so bad they're good.
Correction: They're bad in ways that make them entertaining by default. Wood did the best he could with lunch-money budgets and seemed not to know how gifted he wasn't.
You can't say that about "Jiminy Glick in Lalawood," a satire that is so clearly the work of smart people that you wonder how it misfired to the degree it did.
It was directed by Vadim Jean from a screenplay by Martin Short and Pete Flaherty and based on a Comedy Central character Short has been playing for more than six years.
The 90-minute film feels like a couple of sketches that were spliced together and pasted page by page to a wall, and then lots of inconsistently realized add-ons were scribbled in the margins without consideration as to if or how they'd fit.
Sketch humor generally doesn't bear stretching, lest its self-contained cocoon-like reality be exposed.
Jiminy Glick (Short in a fat suit, with prosthetic padding from the neck up) is a flabby, fatuous TV entertainment reporter from Butte, Mont., who -- in a way only possible in spoofy exaggeration -- becomes one of the media folks who has exclusive interviews with lots of stars (Steve Martin and Kurt Russell, improvising) at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.
In the film's gem-like moments, he babbles about movies he hasn't seen, as when he interviews director Ben DiCarlo (Corey Pearson) about the prize-fighting drama "Growing Up Gandhi" in which the boxer wears wire-frame glasses during bouts.
Or quite obviously isn't listening to his subject's answers. In his babbling, he regularly misidentifies celebrities, as he introduces Forest Whitaker as "the wonderful Forrest Gump."
It's believable enough that Glick fawns and bitches in alternating currents, but the film can't decide whether he's the ultimate obsessive fan, an idiot of one sort; or a clueless oaf who somehow has stumbled into media stature -- an extremely abundant species these days.
There's a movie in Glick's Pilgrim's Progress, despite his ineptitude.
There's also one to be made about major film festivals, like Sundance and Cannes, which can degenerate into circuses. I'd love to see the take of filmmaker Christopher Guest ("Best in Show," "Waiting for Guffman") on the subject.
This festival features a lesbian remake of "The African Queen" called "The Queens of Africa."
Familial hotel scenes involving wife Dixie Glick (Jan Hooks) and their twin sons Matthew and Modine as much hit as miss.
But a major Lynch-like subplot tied to Glick's nightmares and to a (real) 1958 murder case involving actress Lana Turner, daughter Cheryl Crane and mobster Johnny Stompanato is an unmitigated misfire.
Short and company were on to something here. They figured out too late what to dump and what to develop further.
Additional Information:
Details
'Jiminy Glick in Lalawood'Director: Vadim Jean
Stars: Martin Short, Kurt Russell, Jan Hooks
MPAA rating: R for language and crude sexual content
Now playing: Penn Hills Cinemas
