Word: guested
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...good playing would be well advised to check out Sam Bush's latest CD. The mandolin virtuoso has long been a fixture at Telluride's annual bluegrass festival, and "Ice Caps" is a collection of those performances from over the years featuring Bush and a cast of equally gifted guest performers. Among the most notable of these are newgrass veterans Jerry Douglas on dobro (who gets a great ride on "Girl from the North Country") and especially banjoist Bela Fleck, whose inspired playing puts the instrument through paces that Earl Scruggs could hardly have imagined...
...counting? You have to go with Guest's erratic flow. And you have to admire his unique way of making a picture. He and Levy did not write a script. They outlined a narrative, sketched in some characters and then invited their actors to improvise within those broad parameters. There were no rehearsals. Guest shot everything they did, then spent eight months editing the results into this sharp and shapely movie...
...controlled skids is Fred Willard as Buck Laughlin, a supremely confident, supremely clueless TV commentator filling time with proctologist jokes, making awful wordplay when the shih tzu appears. He's the outsider trying fecklessly to gain a purchase on a closed world. He is also, one suspects, one of Guest's inner voices, an assertion of the reality principle saved from contempt by its self-satirizing edge...
...that Guest would ever admit to such a subversive agenda. He will own up only to "refining" a technique he first employed as the cowriter and one of the stars of "This Is Spinal Tap," that perfect satire about a heavy metal band on the treadmill to oblivion, which is presently enjoying a welcome rerelease and a new DVD version. He is also the force behind "Waiting for Guffman," in which he plays Corky St. Clair, a small-town hairdresser who deludes himself into believing that the historical pageant he has directed may be Broadway-bound...
...These movies, like "Best in Show," are about people lost in their banal dreams, and their appeal depends on not calling attention to their silliness, on permitting them to maintain their premises. This is something Guest is good at. He says the idea for his new film arose at a dog park where he took his own pooches. He liked the "very low-key nice people" but noticed that their discussions about dogs "sounded like they were about children...