The Critical Filmmaker

If this had been billed as a student film, I might have tolerated it a bit better.  Sadly, this first-foray by Clara Mamet (daughter of David Mamet) is just not smooth enough to be considered off-beat or quirky comedy.  The problem is that it tries too hard. It's supposed to be autobiographical, which is even crazier.  Does David Mamet hide under his bed all day? I'm all for absurdest humor.  I love Monty Python and have enjoyed some classic off-the-wall comedies from the UK as well as the US.  But maybe that's my problem.  Nothing seemed original.  Sure, dancing fish and ballerinas out of the blue does make one pause and wonder, but I was a teenager when MTV was born.  Oddball videos were a part of my childhood, so I have seen this all before. Sometimes a film is funnier to those involved in making it than it is to the audience.  I have a feeling the cast and crew laughed themselves silly, but maybe because it was a lot of fun to do so...

William H. Macy wrote, produced  and starred in this film which also featured Meg Ryan, Jason Ritter and LL Cool J. It's a comedy about a down-on-his-luck producer who decides he's going to get one of the major studios to agree to film a movie about Benjamin Disraeli, only it has to star the recently-converted-to-Judaism action star played by LL Cool J. Elliot Gould is in this as a rabbi who also serves as technical advisor. There's a lot of jokes about Hollywood, lots of Hebrew spoken by LL Cool J, lots of deal-making scenes that are quite clever (and probably true), and a few really funny moments. It was an amusing film, but for the most part it didn't have the strength for a theatrical release.  I'm not sure if it has been screened anywhere since I saw it a few year ago.