Waiting for Guffman

Blaine, Missouri, "a little town with a big heart in the heart of a big country," is celebrating its sesquicentennial, and the locals are putting on a show, the preparations for which are chronicled in Christopher Guest's mock (too much emphasis on the "mock")-documentary. Guest wants to do for community theater what This is Spinal Tap did for heavy metal, but the joy of watching Catherine O'Hara, Fred Willard, Eugene Levy, indie-queen Parker Posey and Guest himself as the flamboyantly excitable theater director Corky St. Clair, is tempered by the film's often condescending and mean-spirited tone. Some scenes are clearly improvs that lead nowhere, but the final show is a hoot and the auditions are the funniest since Mel Brooks' The Producers. The best line belongs to Levy's dentist: "I wasn't the class clown, but I sat beside the class clown and I studied him." Optional. (K. Lee Benson)