PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 5/05/05)


Martin Short is so odd that apparently, neither he nor the film industry know what to do about it. In a way, Jiminy Glick in La La Wood is both a fictional riff on this very fact and hard proof of it.

In the character of Glick, Short fashions an unpredictable jumbo-spaz—a gushing, gross but lovable small time talk show host, forever star struck and forever from left field. The porky charmer is complemented by his southern white trash wife Dixie, played with inspiration by Short's fellow SNL alum, Jan Hooks. On “Prime Time Glick,” their Comedy Central series, these two had no restraints on improvising their way into the most warped corners of consciousness. But they make a very bumpy transition to the big screen realm of 90-minute storytelling.

This is meant to be the tale of how Jiminy bounced from low-budget, cable access host in Butte, Montana, to the hottest interviewer in Hollywood. The story is narrated by Short doing an impersonation of David Lynch, who sees Jiminy's biography in his own creepy style. The joke is that Jiminy's exploits in Hollywood were much like those of the characters in Mulholland Dr., but it's too awkward a framing device—too random even for the A.D.D.-addled protagonist.

Not that you'd necessarily buy a ticket to a film like this for a well-knit plot. The attraction here is improv, there's plenty of it and it's plenty strange. John Michael Higgins of A Mighty Wind and Best in Show is almost as nutty as Short here playing a Euro-trash Hollywood hustler with no handle whatsoever on the English language. But Higgins brings the much more organic and carefully constructed worlds of Christopher Guest's movies to mind. Jiminy Glick in Lalawood is consistently disappointing because unlike Guest's films, it keeps wrenching its out of control improv around an unbelievable corkscrew of a plot and the results are so all over the place, they can't fail to lose you. Still, that fat man's funny.

—Kevin Allison