Word: showbiz
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...Idle might have been born to showbiz. His grandfather, Henry Bertrand, had been manager of a circus called Robey's Flying Midgets. "I ended up in a circus too, and a flying one at that." In fact, his childhood was more Dickensian-poignant than Python-comic. In 1945, when Eric was two, his father died when coming home from the Army for Christmas; the car he'd hitched a ride in was hit by a truck. The family had few resources, so for a dozen years, from age seven, Eric was raised at the Royal Orphanage in Wolverhampton, an institution...
...TIFF is so routinely described as the launching pad for awards season that it's only apt that For Your Consideration is premiering here. It relates the making of a small, indie film - Home for Purim, about a Southern Jewish family - that some showbiz blogger unaccountably tips as an Oscar contender. In a trice, the non-starry cast (impersonated by Catherine O'Hara, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey and Christopher Moynihan) gets dreaming of statuettes - an addiction that infects the film's director, sitcom veteran Jay Berman (Guest, funny) and the studio boss (Ricky Gervais) who now thinks the film could...
Director Robert Greenwald has produced more than 50 TV movies and a handful of feature films during his 30-year showbiz career. But he's best known now as the rabble-rouser behind politically charged attacks on Rupert Murdoch's Fox News (Outfoxed), big-box department stores (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price) and now the mercenary and munitions companies getting rich off of U.S. Defense Department contracts. Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers will open the same innovative way Greenwald's previous documentaries have screened - in a select few theaters starting September 8th, a DVD release...
...makes his first appearance onstage at the top of a lavish Hello Dolly staircase - with his head cut off by the top of the proscenium. It's a fitting way to get things started, since Fame Becomes Me, his slick, scattered, very funny new Broadway musical, is all about showbiz ego being cut down to size. Short calls it a one-man show - but five terrific performers are on hand to share the spotlight (and on occasion upstage him). He bills it as the story of his life - troubled childhood, years of hoofing in Broadway chorus lines, the inevitable drug...
...Fame Becomes Me uses the autobiographical device as an excuse for a demolition of earnest showbiz tell-alls, Broadway-musical clich?s and just about any other media target that it can lay its hands on. Some of it goes by so fast you want to do a quick rewind - Short's buttery impression of Ray Bolger, as an animated fencepost in a spoof of The Wizard of Oz, for example, or the spot-on impressions of Jodie Foster and Ren?e Zellweger announcing the nominees in Marty's Oscar category (he loses, but makes a soused acceptance speech anyway). Some...