Showboy (2002)
Average Rating: 5.7/10
Reviews Counted: 15
Fresh: 11 | Rotten: 4
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 4/10
Critic Reviews: 6
Fresh: 3 | Rotten: 3
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 2.8/5
User Ratings: 730
Movie Info
Written and directed by co-stars Lindy Heymann and Christian Taylor, Showboy is a comedic mockumentary about a Hollywood writer trying to make it onto the Las Vegas stage. Real-life British filmmaker Heymann takes her documentary crew into Southern California to report on Britons working in Hollywood. She overhears Taylor (a real writer and producer for the HBO series Six Feet Under) getting fired by executive producer Alan Ball. The documentary crew then follows Taylor to Las Vegas, where he
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All Critics (16) | Top Critics (7) | Fresh (11) | Rotten (4) | DVD (2)
This would-be satire isn't funny enough to be entertaining, nor is it clever enough to fool us.
Top CriticSlyly amusing yet poignant.
Showboy is enjoyable if you're comfortable with the mix of fact and fiction and don't care what's true and what's not.
A clever hide-and-seek game of reality versus fiction that reveals itself as not the movie you thought it was when the final credits roll.
A no-budget vanity production that almost instantly wears out its welcome.
An ill-conceived, often implausible hybrid of fact and fiction.
a legitimately smart and appealing work
The most entertaining part of Christian Taylor's "Showboy" is deciphering fact from fiction... and that's not a compliment.
Silly only begins to describe this, but along the way, bitter truths are revealed and some real laughs delivered.
Made all the more fascinating by keeping a small and twisted foot in a bizarre reality befitting the glitz and glamour of show business.
plays for laughs extremely well, though it's all dry as the Las Vegas air
Witty, touching, and slightly wacky.
To their credit, the filmmakers don't repair their hero's aching heart, but they do grant him a brief moment in the Vegas spotlight, surely all that any chorus boy (or girl) could ask.
Taylor, while perhaps a little small to become a real Vegas showboy, makes for a very charismatic hero, while Joaquin Baca-Asay's cinematography captures all the glitz and slightly tawdry glamour of the Vegas strip.
Audience Reviews for Showboy
Super Reviewer
The story is simple. It's the execution which makes it unique. Christian Taylor is a writer for "Six Feet Under." While a documentary crew is making a film about him, his boss fires him. Christian doesn't think that the film crew knows, so he pretends to "research" for a script where he must become a dancer - a showboy. [i]Showboy [/i]is done in the form of a mockumentary, but it is nowhere up to par with the films of Christopher Guest. Nowhere as realistic as [i]Spinal Tap[/i] or as funny as [i]Waiting For Guffman[/i].
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Movie: ID: 22197 Title: Showboy Release Date: 2002-06-22 00:00:00.0 MPAA: 6 Status: 1
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