Infinitive Splitter

I saw For Your Consideration last night, and I consider it awful.

Not relatively awful, in a “Christopher Guest is off his game, but this is still better than most movies” kind of way. It’s just a bad, bad, bad, bad movie. No one involved with it should have agreed to its release.

The degree of badness doesn’t even make sense. All the right pieces are there, but together they comprise a package worth far less than the sum of its parts. The half-improvised dialogue that has worked so well in Guest’s other movies just sounds like bad writing in this one; the losers aren’t lovable; and the jokes are totally lame. It is horrible from start to finish — and with a plodding pace and scenes that last whole minutes longer than they should, the movie feels far longer than its actual 86 minutes.

(The only other two people in the theater left at about the 50-minute mark.)

It’s difficult to think of another movie with so many funny people that fails so miserably to be funny. Parker Posey and Catherine O’Hara give particularly (and uncharacteristically) cringe-worthy performances; John Michael Higgins and Guest are irrelevant; and just about everyone else is forgettable. Eugene Levy plays an indifferent, incompetent agent identical to Stephen Merchant’s character in BBC’s “Extras,” while Merchant’s co-star Ricky Gervais plays pretty much the same character he plays in the series (and repeats some of the same lines). Only Fred Willard — whose “Hey, wha happened?!” in A Mighty Wind remains the most memorable line in Guest’s second-most disappointing film — sparks anything like consistent laughter.

The jokes aren’t too insider-y (“Entourage” isn’t over anyone’s head); they’re just not funny.

As with Guest’s great movies, the plot in For Your Consideration is mostly beside the point. Nobody cared what became of Guffman or who won the dog show. But (and here comes a spoiler, which doesn’t matter anyway, as I’ve just said) if For Your Consideration is such a cutting send-up, at least one of the stars of the movie-within-the-movie should have been nominated for an Oscar. (None are. That was the spoiler.) The suggestion that Hollywood is too consumed with hype looks pretty weak when none of the hyped actors gets a nod.

It occurred to me, around the time that the other couple in the theater was walking out, that perhaps the first hour of FYC might be setting up some truly brilliant finale. Maybe Christopher Guest was putting us on, maybe this was his Springtime for Hitler.

Nope, just a truly terrible film. Oh well.

And now I’ve spoiled the whole thing for you, just as it spoiled my evening.

Way back in May, I wrote that Pennsylvania’s Primary Election Day had been “a good day for right-wing bedwetters in my parents’ neighborhood,” thanks to child candidate Mark Harris’ victory over an incumbent Republican state representative. Not surprisingly, especially in Democrat-friendly 2006 and extra-especially in a district that has been trending Democratic for years, young Mark lost on November 2 and the seat flipped to the Democrats.

The icing on the cake came today, when election officials in another county certified razor-thin Democratic victories in two final races, meaning the next legislative session will feature 102 Democrats and 101 Republicans.

Couldn’t have done it without you, Mark. Thanks.

There is a container of pretzel rods in the office kitchen. I eat a lot of the pretzels. When a container is empty, someone replaces it with a full one.

There is also a water cooler in the office kitchen. I drink a lot of the water (on account of my taste for the pretzels). When I see that the water tank is empty, I replace it with a new one from the supply room. When the supply room runs low on water tanks, someone delivers more of them.

There is always more paper for the copier. There is a constant supply of Post-It notes. Staff meetings are always on Tuesdays, and they always last an hour.

Sisyphus redux.

Since the Cleveland Browns rejoined the NFL in 1999 (after a three-season interruption caused by the original team’s move to Baltimore), the Pittsburgh Steelers have beaten them in 11 of 14 regular-season games and a 2002 playoff contest.

Last season’s 41-0 Christmas Eve rout was particularly enjoyable. Among the highlights of the game was James Harrison’s sideline body-slam of a (presumably, understandably, and likely regretfully) intoxicated Browns fan. It certainly put me in the holiday spirit, but its familiar lopsidedness also struck a damaging blow to what for many people was becoming a “rivalry” of vanishing significance.

That’s why it’s so encouraging to see the advances toward parity the teams have made this season.

As they head into their game on Sunday, both are 3-6, at the bottom of their division and just behind Tennesee and Oakland in the race for Worst Record in the AFC. (Oakland, as you might know, earned one of its two wins against the Steelers on October 29; the Browns beat the Raiders on October 1.)

May the less-bad team win!

How about this fucking guy.

A week after Democrats picked up at least 29 seats in the House of Representatives and six in the Senate, James Carville and his big mouth have decided that the guy who oversaw the effort did a bad job.

Said Carville, of Dean:

“I would describe his leadership as Rumsfeldian in its incompetence.”

It is, to say the very least, a counterintuitive conclusion.

Remember, pending the outcome of a still-close U.S. House race in Georgia, the Democrats did not lose a single congressional seat. Much credit for this surely belongs to Carville’s pal, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel, but Dean’s comprehensive effort supported both this success and the hundreds of down-ballot victories in which the DCCC had no hand.

Dean’s so-called “50-state strategy” involved building local- and state-party infrastructure across the country to help Democrats mount viable challenges for elected office at every level. As you may have heard, Democrats picked up at least 275 state legislative seats last Tuesday, winning new majorities in nine chambers and cementing veto-proof power in several more. Only in Oklahoma and Montana, where Democrats held narrow majorities, did Republicans taste anything like victory — both states now have equal numbers of Democratic and Republican legislators. (In Montana, tiebreaking votes will be cast by the Democratic governor; in Oklahoma, by the Republican lieutenant governor.)

Rumsfeldian in its incompetence. What an asshole.