½*/****
starring Jason Biggs, Isla Fisher, Joe Pantoliano, Michael Weston, Edward Herrmann
written and directed by Michael Ian Black
by Bill Chambers To paraphrase comedian Andy Kindler talking about The Three Stooges, I finally figured out why I don't like sketch comic Michael Ian Black: he's not funny. Until The Pleasure of Your Company, Black's hyphenate debut, I thought maybe it was a/n natural/irrational aversion to his countenance–he looks bizarrely like a member of Our Gang, one who just keeps getting taller. But that ferret face is only the most appropriate avatar for Black's hipster snottiness. Around these parts, we often talk about movies that hate movies; The Pleasure of Your Company is by and for people who hate movies. There were a lot of laughs at my press screening, and I can't help but think it's because we'd reached the halfway mark of the Festival: the audience was bloated on cinema and thus up for anything that facilitated schadenfreude towards it. The plot essentially finds perfect strangers Anderson (Jason Biggs, informally reprising his American Pie character) and Katie (Isla Fisher) getting engaged on a whim and then making bad first impressions on each other's friends and future in-laws; The Pleasure of Your Company is all sarcastic contrivance and convention and you're supposed to laugh at it (and at rom-coms in general by proxy), but a snake can't subsist on its own tail for very long. (Less than ninety minutes, it turns out.) Putting quotation marks around contemporary junk cinema–even the edgy jokes are "edgy"–is just more of the same hollow irony Black practises as VH1's resident Mike Nelson. The man's neither a satirist nor a postmodernist–he's a parasite. If you're wondering how the movie managed a half-star, it's because I'm an ape and Fisher looks awfully good in black lingerie. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations
