Preview
JIMINY GLICK IN LALAWOOD
Starring Martin Short, Jan Hooks and Linda Cardellini
Directed by Vadim Jean
Opens Friday, May 6
Check listings
Comedy is full of clichés, the least of which is that comedy is hardest when you’re using clichés as your material. Airplane food, the differences between men and women, foreign languages – it’s all territory that has been trod over so many times that the humour isn’t in the joke, but in the fact you are making the joke.
Martin Short has made a career of satirizing and mocking the stereotypes and clichés of Hollywood. Though he became known stateside for ridiculous characters such as Ed Grimley, he was already revered in Canada for his innate ability to not just impersonate but to capture the spirit of well-known celebs. So it should be no surprise that a character such as Jiminy Glick would arise from such a comedian.
The fat-suited, self-obsessed character created by Short for TVs Primetime Glick embodies all that he – as both a critic and member of Hollywood – has both mocked and experienced. Glick is a non-listening, impatient, celebrity-obsessed interviewer, but rather than making the celebrity the brunt of the joke, as so many shows do, Glick himself is the focus of the laughs. And despite initial appearances, there is more to the character than a simple skewering of shallow media types.
"It isn’t all about interviewers," Short explains. "It could be the principal of your kid’s high school. It’s really about someone self-absorbed, and with power."
For anyone who has seen the show, that much is clear. And Short’s big-screen endeavour with the character, Jiminy Glick in LaLaWood, only makes the notion of power and servitude in the celebrity culture even more concrete. The film takes Glick from the faux studio he inhabits on Primetime Glick and drops him into a bizarre murder mystery situation framed by the Toronto International Film Festival.
How bizarre? Well, the movie opens with a nod to Lost Highway and the
entire film is set-up with Short laying out the murder mystery plot by impersonating David Lynch. But as the low-budget, improvised film plays out there are two things that become clear. First, Short has a keen eye not for how film festivals work, but how the celebrity factor fuels the machine. Secondly, and most importantly, Short understands the parallel dynamics of "celebrity" and "the rest of us," achieved through the christening of Glick as a celebrity himself simply through the fact he didn’t know enough to give a terrible film a bad review.
"Comedy is a subjective word and it is more offensive to be dull than it is to be missing the mark," says Short. While it would be easy to pan Jiminy Glick’s confusing screenplay, thin-as-a-wire plot and desperate character machinations, you’re left to pause for a moment. Short brushed away the option for mockumentary, which would have been an easy choice given his show’s success, and he gave up ownership of the situational comedy he has so much control of to such actors as Elizabeth Perkins, who Short admits "had never improvised before she walked through the door."
Short emphasizes that he wants the filmic quality to be noticed, and for this he should be applauded – he refused to make a movie that was the easy cash-in, namely him interviewing celebrities as he does on TV. The problem is, the funniest moments of the movie are the few times he does this onscreen. And perhaps most depressing, yet most hopeful, is that Short has proven that as a fat man who is an idiot, he can’t succeed on the big screen.
Here’s hoping that he gets rid of the latex and proves that a comedian as talented as he is can succeed without everything he mocks: gimmick, artifice and ego. If anyone can, it’s Short. |
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