This pop-culture satire came under fire for being all over the place, but that’s like complaining that a trapeze artist shouldn’t be performing so far up in the air. The movie exhilarates precisely because it takes random, high-altitude risks. Among the contestants of a televised talent show is a small-town girl with big-city ambitions (Mandy Moore) and a member of a terrorist sleeper cell (Sam Golzari) who inadvertently becomes a novelty audience favorite. Dennis Quaid also is on hand as the George W. Bush stand-in, who becomes a guest judge on the title show. If there is a fixed target in this barrage from writer-director Paul Weitz (About a Boy), it’s celebrity culture in all its pervasive, seductive inanity.
