Waiting For Bluffman

About a year and a half ago, I decided I was officially sick of ensemble improv movies. And I think the nail in the coffin for me was 2006’s For Your Consideration, the woefully limp Hollywood satire directed by Christopher Guest, the man whose Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show spawned a wave of pale imitators: Ham and Cheese, Blackballed, The Delicate Art of Parking, The Big Tease, The Foot Fist Way, It’s All Gone Pete Tong, The Life and Times of Guy Terrifico. What had once seemed loose and unpredictable now seemed merely sloppy, the plots about large groups of eccentric losers competing against each other in some esoteric sport, hobby, or music genre as rigid and formulaic as any scripted comedy. Enough, I thought. I hadn’t seen a decent improv movie in years, and I wasn’t really interested in looking for one.

But as a very bad amateur poker player and a compulsive watcher of televised poker tournaments, I decided to break my embargo and give Zak Penn’s The Grand a whirl now that it's out on DVD. And while I can’t claim that this all-star spoof of the world of professional poker players rejuvenates the improv movie or does anything even remotely innovative with the genre, it’s certainly amusing enough to be worth a rental, and to make me wonder why critics reacted to it with such hostility. Maybe they felt even more burned by For Your Consideration than I did, or maybe they just haven’t watched enough poker on TV to appreciate The Grand’s sly jabs at those shows’ overheated player profiles and rampant product placement. I mean, the plot revolves around the annual $10,000,000 tournament of NAIPL, the North American Indoor Poker League. Come on! “The Indoor Poker League”? That’s funny!

Penn focuses on seven players in particular: Jack Faro (Woody Harrelson), the booze- and drug-addicted ne’er-do-well grandson of the casino’s late owner; Harold Melvin (Chris Parnell), an Asperger’s case who recites the Mentat oath from Dune before every game; Andy Andrews (Richard Kind), a Wisconsin naïf who accidentally qualified for the tournament while searching the internet for a place to buy antique fireplace pokers; Deuce Fairbanks (Dennis Farina), an old-school gambler who thinks Vegas started going to hell when they started letting people wearing culottes into the casinos; The German (Werner Herzog), a psychopath who checks into the hotel with several cages of rabbits and guinea pigs, explaining that he doesn’t feel alive unless he kills a living creature every single day; and Lainie and Larry Schwartzman (Cheryl Hines and David Cross), twin siblings whose father (Gabe Kaplan) has ruthlessly pitted them against each other ever since infancy.

Maybe it was low expectations, but I laughed pretty consistently through the first half of The Grand. There are plenty of gags here—especially the montage of Cross obnoxiously taunting his fellow players, a cameo by Michael McKean as a developer whose latest mega-hotel consists of one room that will cost $1,000,000 a night, and a bit by Judy Greer as Kind’s wife, who looks around the ribbon store she runs and confesses to the camera that she occasionally dreams of lighting up a blowtorch and burning the whole damn place down. Poker fans will also chuckle at the way Kind’s character cluelessly insists on referring to Doyle Brunson as “Tex.” Seriously: these bits are as good as anything in Best in Show.

Where The Grand fails to equal its predecessor is its second half, when the tournament takes over. Penn and his cast aren’t able to find a way to make the action at the tables as funny as the stuff leading up to it, and Michael Karnow’s character—a moronic announcer clearly modeled on Fred Willard in Best in Show—is a giant dud.

Unlike the $10,000,000 tournament in The Grand, improv movies tend to play for pretty low stakes—a few mild chuckles and some amusing character interactions and we comedy fans tend to go home happy. Sure, Zak Penn probably was hoping he’d get a little luckier with his camera than he did in The Grand, but a director can’t always rely on luck. As The German would say, “Luck is a crutch anyway.”