by Christopher Guest, 2000.
Starring: Bob Balaban, Jennifer Coolidge, Patrick Cranshaw, John Michael Higgins, Michael Hitchchock, Don Lake, Eugene Levy, Jane Lynch, Michael McKean, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, and Fred Willard.
Rating: 8.5/10, 7/10.
I don’t know how to talk about Best In Show without being entirely unfair to it. All I can think of to say is how it compares to Christopher Guest’s previous mock-documentary, Waiting For Guffman.
And how does it compare? Well, on a first viewing, thinking back to the first time I saw Waiting For Guffman, I laughed more. But Guffman is much, much funnier than Best In Show; the newer one just has more obvious laughs. More sight gags, more humorous character twitches, things like that. An example: Waiting For Guffman had nothing as blatantly funny as Eugene Levy’s character here, who literally has two left feet.
But one of the great things about Guffman was that it didn’t feel the need to go for easy laughs. It trusted the audience to be thoughtful and intelligent, to be able to see above the surface. Best In Show certainly has that element to it, but the other kind of humor is much more prevalent here. Another comparative weakness of this one is that the first was all about the interactions of the characters; here, they interact very, very little outside of their pairings.
And that’s OK. This is a very, very funny movie. My favourite addition to the cast from the last one was Jennifer Coolidge (the wonderful woman who played Reese Witherspoon’s manicurist in Legally Blonde) as Sheri Ann Cabot, the owner of Rhapsody in White, a truly hideous poodle who won last year’s Mayflower Dog Show, and who Sheri and the dog’s trainer (Lynch) are fully confident will win again this year. They’re very good friends, but there might be more going on...
So yes, for a very funny movie, see Best In Show. But to see the full comic genius of Guest and this extremely talented bunch of actors, see Waiting For Guffman.