If Christmas Eve means cookies and milk for Santa (and carrots for the reindeer), Thanksgiving Eve means popcorn and new movies for the long weekend. A half-dozen films open this day, with "Deja Vu" and "The Fountain" leading the pack and these other pictures joining them at the multiplex. "Bobby" opens tomorrow, when the Post-Gazette's review will appear in Weekend Mag.

	Suzanne Tenner Jennifer Coolidge as Whitney Taylor Brown, Ricky Gervais as Martin Gibb and Larry Miller as Syd Finkleman in director Christopher Guest's "For Your Consideration." Click photo for larger image.

'For Your Consideration'

The Oscar buzz that moves through the cast and crew of "Home for Purim" is more like a buzz saw. It starts with an aside by a crew member that a middle-aged actress with the unfortunate name of Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara) has been mentioned on the Internet as a possible Oscar contender for her role as a dying Southern matriarch.

Once the seed is planted in her mind -- and on the set of the indie picture -- it grows like the monster plant from "Little Shop of Horrors." It changes everyone and everything in its path in this latest comedy from director Christopher Guest ("A Mighty Wind," "Best in Show," "Waiting for Guffman") which is perfectly timed to coincide with the real awards season.

"For Your Consideration," which takes its title from the promotional ads placed in the trades, skewers all things Oscar, from insincere agents to vapid interviewers on entertainment programs to studio heads who want to "tweak" a project to appeal to a wider audience.

It's all about the delicious details, the way Mary Hart -- er, the Jane Lynch character named Cindy Martin -- strides onto the set of "Hollywood Now," the faux-hawk hairdo worn by Fred Willard's character, the addiction to cell phones and PDAs, the electioneering on TV talk shows, the extreme makeovers and the nail-biting wait for the nominations at 5:30 one January morning.

Guest's previous three films incorporated a documentary crew into the story, but "For Your Consideration" doesn't use that device. He and co-writer (and co-star) Eugene Levy provided the cast, led by O'Hara, Harry Shearer and Parker Posey, with a 27-page script with scene set-ups, brief character backgrounds and occasional jokes, and they ran with it.

The real world of entertainment has become so fawning and fatuous ("The Tomkat wedding!" "Anna Nicole Smith's baby girl!" "Brad the dad!") that it's almost hard to mock. But "For Your Consideration" manages. And while not everything is uproarious, much of it is -- especially one transformation that you should discover for yourself.

It holds a mirror up to Hollywood's face and finds it properly taut. You, however, will end up with laugh lines.

Rated PG-13 for sexual references and brief language.

-- Barbara Vancheri,
Post-Gazette movie editor

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'Deck the Halls'

Every year, newspapers and TV stations do stories about the house with so many Christmas lights that it can (almost) be seen from space. Imagine living across the street from that home, especially if you were once the self-proclaimed king of Christmas.

That is the premise of this comedy starring Danny DeVito as the newcomer who thinks more is more and even more is even more when it comes to holiday decorations, from blinking, winking lights and plastic Santas to a manger with live animals (camel included) and holiday music that can be heard at the North Pole.

DeVito is a job hopper who sees the decorations as his chance to do something monumental in life. Playing his Christmas competitor is Matthew Broderick, an optometrist who was an Air Force brat who missed out on holiday traditions as a boy and embraces family photos in matching sweaters, Christmas tree harvesting and caroling. They go mano a mano, with their wives (Kristin Chenoweth and Kristin Davis) and children witnessing the merry madness and wintry warfare.

Despite echoes of Chevy Chase's "Christmas Vacation," "Deck the Halls" has a couple of things in its favor: Although shot in Canada in the summer, it looks like snowy New England. DeVito and Broderick play their roles with a light touch and don't turn into real rotters and, in the end, the ultimate message is a good one even if it strains to incorporate modern touches.

While it's no "Elf," and it includes a couple of suggestive jokes about a robe that falls open and a cross-dressing lawman, it's a far better movie than "The Santa Clause 3" or last year's "Christmas with the Kranks." In other words, not exactly a warm, freshly iced Christmas cookie, but not a dry, store-bought one, either.

PG for some crude and suggestive humor and language.

-- Barbara Vancheri

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'Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus'

Just when you thought it was safe to go into uncharted biopic waters, along comes "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus" -- one of the most bizarre and baffling entries of the year.

Director Steven Shainberg says it was inspired by Patty Bosworth's brilliant biography of the iconoclastic photographer. Shainberg also says it invents people, situations and relationships that never existed.

Chief among the inventions is Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.), a mysterious new neighbor who moves into the Manhattan apartment above Arbus' in 1958. Diane (Nicole Kidman) has been suffocating under the social and domestic demands of her family's fur-and-photo businesses. She finds Lionel hypnotically alluring despite -- well, actually, because of -- a certain abnormality: He's a middle-aged werewolf, completely covered with hair from head to toe.

Lionel is beyond electrolysis or psychoanalysis, and so is Arbus' fascination with him, aside from the obvious beauty-and-beast awakening parallel. Suffice to say, Diane and her (future revolutionary) photographs gravitate toward the grotesque set of midgets, misfits, amputees, transvestites and fabulous freaks with whom Lionel keeps company.

Nothing wrong there -- except that, in Schainberg's ponderous fictionalized telling, we get hardly a glimpse of what's in her camera. He's too busy showing us her psyche to show us her art.

Kidman and Downey -- two of their generation's greatest actors -- inhabit their strange parts fully and soulfully. But there's only so much they can do. Much of the time, Kidman wanders around like Audrey Hepburn as the blind girl, stumbling in and out of hirsute Downey's den to the strains of spooky music.

They should've called it "Wait Until Darkroom."

R for graphic nudity, some sexuality and language.

-- Barry Paris,
Post-Gazette film critic

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'Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny'

Some critics groused that Jack Black was miscast in "King Kong." Well, he cuts loose here, and all the eyebrow calisthenics in the world can't save this movie.

It looks cheap, with a "Rock and Roll History Museum" in California that would fit into the gift shop of the real hall of fame.

Beyond that, it panders to young men with jokes about flatulence, butt birthmarks, bongs, genitals, magic mushrooms and the desire to write a rock masterpiece and woo the ladies.

After running away from his ultra-conservative father (Meat Loaf), a young Jack Black takes the advice of his rock god, Ronnie James Dio, and heads to Hollywood. He discovers Kyle Gass performing at the beach and becomes his pupil and then partner as they embark on a quest to find a guitar pick with a storied history.

"Pick of Destiny" may strike a chord with every kid who dreamed of winning open mic night or doing the power slide to the front of the stage.

I just wanted to sidle to the door.

R for pervasive language, sexual content and drug use.

-- Barbara Vancheri