Christopher Guest's gallery of caricatures of the people at and around the fictitious Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show: funny, yet disappointing. Or in other words: not as funny as his Waiting for Guffman, and lavishly overpraised in the reviews. (It gives reviewers a chance to be funny, in turn, by passing along the jokes.) The so-called "mockumentary" technique, at least as practiced by Guest, is too inherently faulty to merit enthronement as a formula. The de rigueur interview bits, more convenience than necessity, are simply an easy way (a little akin to voice-over narration) to dispense information, tell jokes, etc., without the trouble of constructing serviceable scenes and situations. At the same time, or rather at different times, the hand-held camera is privy to behind-closed-doors activities to which no documentary film crew would ever gain access -- and without the responsibility of selecting an angle, setting up a composition, etc. It is a technique that yields more excuses than results. The cast members -- Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Michael McKean, John Michael Higgins, Michael Hitchcock, Parker Posey, Jennifer Coolidge, Jane Lynch, Bob Balaban, Fred Willard, Jim Piddock, Guest himself, several of whom were also in Guffman -- are well in tune with the semi-improvisatory comic style, though not free from the occasional overreaching clinker. A special gold star, each, to O'Hara as a small-town Norwich owner whose extensive sexual history is forever catching up with her; to Willard as the ex-jock TV commentator whose speech is never preceded by thought (Joe Garagiola, on the Westminster telecasts, would be the obvious model); to Piddock as Willard's strait-laced British straight man; and to Guest for his Carolinian drawl and his loping gait alongside his prize bloodhound (but not for his out-of-character ventriloquism). The dogs themselves are accorded little room to roam, little space to stretch. That, too, is disappointing. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.