Guest Again: Who's Who In the Parody

Comedy gun locked and loaded, Christopher Guest's aim is normally precise and lethal. In "Best in Show," for example, the world of dog shows takes a bullet of hilarity right in the temple.

Funny, then, that Guest's latest film, "For Your Consideration," is arguably more scattershot compared with "Show" and "Waiting for Guffman," his take on small-town amateur theater. Everything from its title to its trailer implied it would be an indictment of filmdom's ravenous Oscar campaigning, but what really gets the ruthless Guestian treatment is the television industry that covers it.

Now, the real-life genetic makeup of the fictional TV characters in "For Your Consideration":

Nancy O'Dell ("Access Hollywood") + Mary Hart ("Entertainment Tonight") = Jane Lynch as Cindy Martin

John Tesh ("ET") + Mark McGrath ("Extra") + David Beckham's hair = Fred Willard as Chuck Porter

You see them if you turn on the TV a shade early for the evening news: those swaggery entertainment news anchors, groomed and shellacked, finishing up a half-hour of celebrity worship. In "For Your Consideration," Lynch meshes O'Dell's severe poses and Hart's winky-wink delivery; Willard wears a sunburned, stony-wrinkled face underneath an age-inappropriate fauxhawk.

The result: "Hollywood Now," a loud pink burst of infotainment in which Willard and Lynch rev the engine of the Hollywood buzz machine (and almost save "For Your Consideration" from itself). They play two shameless anchors who hound the cast of "Home for Purim," the film within the film, using an actual "Access Hollywood" set and a lot of boorishness.

"That was my own hair," Willard says of his copper swoop. "I sat in that chair for five hours. They cut and cut, brought in some expert hair guy from outside, bleached it and I said, 'Oh my God, this is very extreme.' "

"Mary Hart is a classy dame," Lynch says. "Nancy O'Dell's stance is more military and I went more that way. They have this bombastic style of delivering the information."

Ebert & Roeper + Carlson & Begala = Don Lake and

Michael Hitchcock as Ben Lilly & David van Zyverden

Lake and Hitchcock play good critic and bad critic on a fictional movie review show called "Love It/Hate It," a takeoff on confrontation-style news programs that substitute finger-wagging debate for actual news. What matters aren't the merits of the movie under discussion but the degree of apoplexy to which each critic can rile himself: