Best in Show

TCM ran a night of Christopher Guest movies a few weeks back. I had already done a post on This Is Spinal Tap, so I didn't record that one. I did, however, record Best in Show, and that one is going to be on Flix tonight at 11:30, along with various other channels in the Showtime family of channels multiple times this coming week. So I made a point of watching it to do a review on here.

You've probably heard the term "best in show" before, referring to the animal that wins the prize for being the best example of its breed in a show of animals either at a county or state fair, or in the case of this movie, at a dog show. The movie starts off in the style of a documentary, interviewing people who take part in dog shows, although this being a mockumentary, these aren't real people. There are five dogs together with their owners:

The Swans, Meg (Parker Posey) and Hamilton (Michael Hitchcock) are a yuppie couple from the big city who have a Weimaraner that they think is neurotic, and visit a psychologist to get therapy for the dog.
The Flecks, Cookie (Catherine O'Hara) and Gerry (Eugene Levy) are a lower-middle-class couple from Florida who own a Norwich terrier. Gerry has a defect that he literally has two left feet, while Cookie was quite the social butterfly before she met Gerry, with a running joke being that so many of the men she runs into happened to know her in her earlier days.
Harlan Pepper (Christopher Guest) is a North Carolina man from a family that's had a history of breeding hounds to do actual work; Pepper's current dog is a bloodhound.
Scott (John Michael Higgins) and Stefan (Michael McKean) are a stereotypically gay couple from New York who breed shih tzus.
Sherri (Jennifer Coolidge) is married to an octogenarian sugar daddy and has a lesbian handler (Jane Lynch) for her poodle, who has won the grand prize two years running, and Sherri is decidedly out to make it a threepeat.

Each of the five is making their way to Philadelphia for the big show, which is organized not so much by breed, but by type of dog above the breed: terriers, toy dogs, and the like. In each section, there's one winner from each of the breeds, and they all go against each other with one being selected for the grand final. The dog show is televised, with expert Trevor Beckwith (Jim Piddock) and color commentator Buck Laughlin (Fred Willard).

Apparently, much of Best in Show was improvised, and director Guest and the actors did a damn good job of it, because most of the movie is quite funny. From reading reviews, people who know dog shows claim that the characters shown here are actually somewhat realistic, at least in the sense that they recognize the character types. I don't know dog shows, and the only real pedigreed dog we had was one that was about to get sent back to the puppy mill because she had an ear that wouldn't come up. (The ear came up a day or two after we bought the dog at a steep discount, and she lived another 13 years.) But in any case, I found the characterizations mostly hilarious. I think you will too.