Please join BVFCC for our January Screening Series: A Parker Posey Retrospective. We begin with BEST IN SHOW at on Tuesday, January 9th at 7 pm. Entry is FREE to BVFCC members/$7 for non-members. The BVCoffee Bar will be open for beer, wine, and café drinks along with FREE freshly-popped popcorn!
Best in Show is a 2000 American mockumentary comedy film co-written by Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy and directed by Guest. The film follows five entrants in a prestigious dog show as they travel to and compete at the show. Much of the dialogue was improvised. Many of the comic actors were also involved in Guest's other films, including Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration, and Mascots. The film's score was composed by C. J. Vanston.
From ESQUIRE Magazine:
“If rewatchability's any measure,Christopher Guest's Best in Show is one of the best comedies ever made. Maybe one of the best films ever made? Sure. Why not? Guest's talent for caricaturing Middle American weirdness basically makes him the Errol Morris of mockumentary. And like Morris, Guest's films bestride that fine line between sympathetically sending up their oddball talking heads and condescending to them.
The most broadly patronized characters in Best in Show are Meg and Hamilton Swan (played by Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock). The sort of urbane yuppie archetypes that may seem dated circa 2013, the couple actually proves prescient, portending a world where words like "chai tea latte" and "lactose intolerant" are common parlance, not just the rarefied patois up aspirant Upper West Side elites, a world where pretty much everyone uses a Mac.
Though they are probably the de facto villains of Best in Show, their introduction touches on that weird sympathy that makes the film seem something other than out-and-out mean. Their story of constantly missing each other by showing up at the wrong Starbucks location is sweet despite its obnoxiousness. Carried by Posey and Hitchock's dopey, aww-shucks improvisations, the scene captures most of what makes Best in Show work: the satire, the canny mix of compassion and cynicism, the breathing room afforded for these talented comic actors to explore their characters, coloring within the confines of their ostensible one-dimensionality. This is the kind of stuff that makes Best in Show the kind of movie you can watch every six months, the kind of movie you stop what you're doing to show someone who hasn't seen it.”
BVFCC would like to acknowledge and thank several organizations for their generous funding which allows us to present our monthly Screening Series. Special thanks go to CT Humanities, CT Office of the Arts, and The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.