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[Short Reviews]

LISA PICARD IS FAMOUS

From The Larry Sanders Show to America’s Sweethearts, celebrities have made grand sport of mocking their own efforts to stay famous. But even the still-obscure can get in on this game, as Lisa Picard Is Famous proves. Written by struggling actors Laura Kirk and Nat DeWolf, the film is a mockumentary about two struggling actors (played by the screenwriters) who see this project as a shortcut to fame. Lisa Picard (Kirk) has just wrapped a tiny role in a woman-in-peril TV-movie that’s soon to air; gay pal Tate Kelley (DeWolf) is rehearsing a hilariously awful monologue full of self-pitying victim chic. Hoping to catch them on the cusp of fame — and ride their coattails to celebrity himself — is Andrew, the filmmaker-within-the-film (played by the movie’s real director, the almost-famous Griffin Dunne). Lisa has mastered such star behavior as talking emptily to interviewers, preparing obsessively for auditions, and shmoozing with the truly famous (she runs into Sandra Bullock and treats her like an old friend) — everything except actually displaying the talent and charisma that would make people notice her.

Unlike the mean-spirited Waiting for Guffman, which made fun of powerless and ordinary people for being powerless and ordinary, Lisa Picard is less about skewering the untalented than about dissecting the pathology of celebrity culture. Lisa, Tate, and Andrew treat fame as if it were easily communicable, like a sexually transmitted disease, instead of as unpredictable and arbitrary. Dunne gets a lot of comic mileage out of the surrealism of fame, either from the blackly satirical twists in his stars’ quest or from deliberately absurd testimony from real stars. If there’s a lesson here about celebrities, it’s that their lives are just as miserable as the rest of ours, but with the bonus of having all their humiliations played out in public. Yet they probably wouldn’t have become famous in the first place without a superhuman amount of shamelessness, exhibitionism, and desperation.

BY GARY SUSMAN

Issue Date: November 1 - 8, 2001