SHOWBOY

If you feel runaway product-placement ads in movies are omens of the apocalypse (or at least “Apocalypse Now: The Pepsi Edition”), reconsider your prejudices with SHOWBOY, a droll DV feature shot in cooperation with several major Las Vegas hotel casinos. The corporate types took no gamble at all by lending suites, stages and gaming-floors to clever filmmakers Lindy Heymann and Christian Taylor as the gaudy, glittery backdrop for a dry-witted mocku-drama that's got a few aces up its sleeve. The biggest is Taylor, portraying himself, a gay British expat rising through Hollywood ranks as a writer on HBO's acclaimed “Six Feet Under.” Our hero is smugly self-effacing and happy to allow Heymann's BBC-TV crew to follow him and document his success except that straightaway Christian Taylor gets fired…by “Six Feet Under” creator Alan Ball…for consistently-poor scripts. Ignorant of the fact that Heymann and her voyeuristic crew know full well of his dismal dismissal, Taylor pretends to be taking a sabbatical to “research” a new screen project in Vegas. The rudderless, unemployed scribe drifts into a routine of choreography practice and entry-level auditions for kitschy stage shows. Slowly, hilariously and touchingly, like the Japanese salarymen in SHALL WE DANCE? (21st CIFF 1997), a new Christian Taylor begins to emerge, while Lindy's impatient producers clamor for the old one to be confronted about the elaborate lie he's perpetuating. Think you know what's going to happen next? Don't bet on it.