Levinson made his mark as a director with box-office-friendly chowder like Good Morning, Vietnam and Rain Man back in the '80s, and has chugged along a similar middle-of-the road furrow since, so it's unsurprising that he's accumulated ample material for this lightly comic take on the film industry.
Robert De Niro stars as a producer on the wane having to deal with the usual mountains out of molehills built up by stars sending themselves up in cameos (most notably, Bruce Willis's primadonna) and the banal debris of his divorces. The ingredients are all the standard ones in Hollywood on Hollywood - backstabbing, shrinks, vanity, diet pills and pill diets - and the send-ups tame stuff after Extras (that De Niro also turned up on). But the handling of its topics is deft, and a couple of killer lines hit the spot unforcedly. Above all, it's palpably lacking in pretension, never purporting to offer revelations about the business, and so, like De Niro's character, the whole muddles on through amiably.
6/10
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