Jiminy Glick in La La Wood (review)

Is the movie silly? Yup. Even maybe kinda dumb? You betcha. I laughed anyway — I admit it. I think maybe it’s cuz I’ve missed Martin Short all these long years since SCTV. Remember Ed Grimley? I loved him. His Nathan Therm on Saturday Night Live? (Of course I remember Nathan Therm? What makes you think I don’t remember Nathan Therm?) Short’s small-time celebrity interviewer/obsequious fanboy Jiminy Glick isn’t anywhere near as satisfying as satire — he’s too like all those real, fawning “journalists” you see on the entertainment “news” shows, who are admittedly probably beyond satire, but that means the “joke” of Glick focuses too much on the fact that Short (Treasure Planet) is in a fat suit. Here, in this too-stretched-out sketch, Glick travels to the Toronto Film Festival and gets involved in a murder mystery surrounding a glamorpuss movie star (Elizabeth Perkins: The Ring Two), her petulant daughter (Linda Cardellini: Scooby-Doo 2), and her down-to-earth publicist (Janeane Garofalo: Big Trouble). What made me laugh? John Michael Higgins’s (Blade: Trinity) hilarious caricature of a Eurotrash film director. Short’s weird-ass impersonation of David Lynch, who serves as a sort of one-man Greek chorus commenting on the action. And for humor created out of sheer dogged repetition, the bit in which Glick shouts “Kiefer! Kiefer! Kiefer! Kiefer! Kiefer! Kiefer!” at a red-carpet event and gets completely ignored by Mr. Sutherland got a grudging chuckle out of me.