FILM REVIEW - Confetti

Well, this was a disappointment. Being a great admirer of Christopher Guest's improvised movies I was hoping this English effort would be good,or at least passable. In the end it was neither, it was a pile of poo!

It had all the right actors and a quirky idea. Whoever devised this movie, if indeed there was such a person, put spontaneity in subservience to plot. In improvised work the book has to be left open or the drama wont go anywhere remotely unexpected or original. The problem for this movie is it feels as if it's been shoe-horned into a storyline that's had it's laughs preset by rather predictable set pieces.

Guest's movies are primarily vehicles for the creation of characters, not jokes or plot lines. The storyline for 'Best in Show' is:- a number of characters come to a Dog Show and one of them wins. The humour emerges from the well developed, rounded nature of the characters. If improvised drama has a weakness, it's in a tendency towards broad caricature. It's there in Mike Leigh's work and on occasions even in Guest's. To counteract this Guest does huge amounts of filming. Some of that work never gets shown in the cinema. The process does ,however, develop and flesh out the characters and brings a certain level of believability to them. Confetti gives the distinct impression of skimping on this sort of background work and filming. It's like they said, 'Now, here we need some shots of the contestants in Marriage Therapy' and so they did a few minutes worth. What was needed was a few days of improvised 'therapy sessions'. This would allow the actors time to develop ideas about the scene and it's significance to their character. It would also have given the director lots more material to edit and select from.

'Confetti' falls into the huge gaps left by an ill thought through film concept. Confetti fails to connect you with its characters, because they're one dimensional cut outs. They're not appealing, they're not even funny. This film, like wet confetti in a gutter, is soppy, limp and hardly worth noticing.