John Kenneth Muir

Christopher Guest's idea of comedy is reality plus "one step further." In his movie comedies, the reality is just as important as that one step further. He wants the characters portrayed in his films to seem just like the people one might actually find at a dog show or at a reunion of folk singers from another era. They are just a wee bit off center, like the travel agent couple in "Waiting for Guffman" who have, with one small exception, never left the town they live in, or the dog owner in "Best in Show" who keeps encountering former lovers she had before she became happily married.

John Kenneth Muir's book, "Best in Show: The Films of Christopher Guest and Company," reflects on the making of those two movies, plus "A Mighty Wind." The book was published in 2004, before the release of "For Your Consideration."

Guest doesn't like the term "mockumentary" to describe his films because he thinks that suggests he uses the films to mock dogs shows, folk singers and small-town people with aspirations for Broadway. He prefers calling them comedies done "in a documentary style." Muir uses "mockumentary" anyway, and I think he is justified in doing so. First, the word has become widely used in reference to Guest's comedies. Second, the term means not just belittling or making fun of something, but also imitating something, such as a mock battle or mock turtle soup. Guest's movies play like true documentaries, but with that one step further that makes them great comedies.

Guest's screenplays are much shorter than the screenplays for most movies simply because he omits all dialogue. He chooses actors such as Catherine O'Hara, Eugene Levy, Michael McKean, Parker Posey, Jane Lynch and Fred Willard who have great improvisational skills. Then Guest just sets the scene, starts the cameras rolling and lets the actors make it up as they go along. Most of this footage never sees the screen. The editing process can take more than a year. In the case of "Best in Show," 60 hours film was trimmed into an 84-minute movie. For "A Mighty Wind, Guest cut 80 hours down to 90 minutes. Sometimes the funniest scenes don't make the final cut simply because Guest decides they are not necessary to tell his story.

I read this book over several days, and in the evenings I watched yet again the three Guest films Muir writes about. I have always liked "Best in Show" best because it is the funniest, and I liked it best again this time. Yet Muir makes a good case that "A Mighty Wind" may actually be the best movie, "the apex of the director's career." It may not be the funniest, but it has more heart and it ultimately tells the best story.… (meer)

This was an interesting book for those who would like more detail about Mira Nair's work up to The Namesake. However, I felt the structure of the book was very apparent. The author combined interviews with a handful of people that worked on Nair's films - it was very apparent which were telephone conversations and which had responses that were emailed. He combined it with contemporary reviews that appeared about her movies, and whatever audience reaction was available. This exposure made the reading a bit tedious, although I certainly have looked at the career of Naveen Andrews with new eyes. I would only recommend it to people who are seriously interested in Nair's work.… (meer)

While the book cover couldn't look more like a high school sociology textbook, the contents are nicely organized and well illustrated. Muir starts each year off with a timeline of events and then moves into an alphabetical listing of the films reviewed from that year. Each movie includes complete cast and crew information, and many movies also include quotes from external reviews (both contemporary and retrospective), some of which contradict Muir and each other. Enveloping all this detailed information is a well-written introductory essay on the 1990s and how current events influenced the horror movies of the decade, and some intriguing appendices, including common themes from the 1990s (the police procedural, the interloper, the "meta" horror movie, etc.), movie tag lines, and Muir's personal top ten.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2013/02/horror-films-of-1990s-by-john-kenneth.html ]… (meer)

I read this beefy volume after Clark and Senn's similarly ambitious Sixties Shockers. While the 1960s were a transitional decade for horror movies, the 1990s were allegedly an ebb tide, in which horror was little-produced and hardly marketed as such. Muir does indeed cast a wide net, including such films as Jurassic Park (1993). "Interloper" and "police procedural" themes are among the elements that characterize the typical horror movies of the decade.

The central reviews section of the book is organized by year, and each year's chapter begins with a timeline inventorying events of major cultural significance for that year. The critical emphasis is on the relationship of cinematic themes to then-current events. So much is this the case, that the reviews tend to omit comparisons to earlier films, except for the most overt sequels and remakes. For example, the review of Body Parts (1991) does not mention the seminal Hands of Orlac (1924, 1960) Nor does discussion of The Masque of the Red Death (DTV 1991) bring up Roger Corman's magisterial 1964 version of the Poe tale. The stand-out exception is "Appendix D: Movie References in Scream," which catalogs dozens of film allusions that occur in that 1996 post-modern meta-movie.

The reviews are fully equipped with star ratings and opinionated verdicts, which seemed awfully "accurate" to me, when I was in a position to compare my own views. I was especially pleased with the glowing review of The Ninth Gate (1999) -- often the object of critical derision -- Muir even placed it at number five in his "Ten Best" list for the decade.

That list is one of a number of clever and useful apparatus elements placed as appendices. "1990s Horror Conventions" provides an index of movies by common tropes, such as "Car Won't Start," "H.P. Lovecraft," and "Vampires." (The absence of my favorite "Girl on Altar" is sadly due to its general neglect in the movies themselves.) "The 1990s Horror Hall of Fame" is an inventory of notable performers. Having noted that theater horror features were at a disadvantage in the 1990s because of small-screen competition from The X-Files, Muir backs up his claim by tabulating about thirty matches of central plot elements between 1990s horror films and individual X-Files episodes as "Appendix E."

On the whole, this book accomplishes its goals capably and with a fair amount of style.… (meer)