Christopher Guest and his repertory group turn their "mockumentary" style -- a style of expedience at best -- to a reunion of Sixties folkies for a live concert on public television. There's a peppy New Christy Minstrels-like nonet known as the Main Street Singers (led by the well-scrubbed faces of John Michael Higgins and the dimply Jane Lynch), a Limelighters-like trio called the Folksmen (Harry Shearer on bass, Michael McKean on guitar, Guest on banjo), and an intensely romantic but bitterly divorced Ian and Sylvia-like twosome (Eugene Levy, looking frighteningly like Alan Rickman, and Catherine O'Hara). There's a total absence of Lefty politics among them, an absence that can certainly be found, when you look for it, in the mainstream folk movement of the day, but an absence of a potentially rich vein of humor all the same. Guest is not about to change his nasty habit of poking fun at the weak and defenseless: an aging, marginal, over-the-hill metal band in Rob Reiner's This Is Spinal Tap, a small-town community theater in his own Waiting for Guffman, monomaniacal dog people in Best in Show. The gradual decline continues, a little less gradually, as the "mockumentary" premise goes well over the verge of mannerism and shtick. This present mutation seems as high concept, if not as high budget and high profile, as any Adam Sandler comedy, and likewise more of a "pitch" or a "package" than a finished and polished film. By the law of averages, albeit far below past averages, there are some funny moments (a snatch of a calypso number by the Folksmen in rehearsal, a scrap of rhyming lyric to do with a "smelly old blanket that some Navajo wove"), and Catherine O'Hara merits the best-in-show ribbon for staying always in character and never pushing too hard for a laugh. Bob Balaban, Fred Willard, Parker Posey. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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