Good Buzz on The Beaver

Kindly stifle your chortling so I can keep going with this important news report.

It’s a serious posting about what insiders are murmuring about The Beaver, the Jodie Foster-directed film starring Mel Gibson as a disturbed guy with a special relationship with his puppet.

From the beginning, it sounded like a colossal joke, and when you add Mel’s very public marital troubles and embarrassing rage issues into the mix, it started to seem deader than a stomped-on finger puppet.

But now people in the biz are buzzing that The Beaver is actually a work of genius and Mel is absolutely amazing in it.

And it would be Oscar bait if only he hadn’t fucked up so grandiosely!

You heard me: The street buzz in Hollywood is that Mel gives an even better performance in this than in his drunken rants against humanity.

So the studio is now torn between two options:

Rush it out for release this year to qualify it for Oscar consideration, praying that people will forgive Mel’s mouth long enough to give the movie a fair shake.

Or forget the Oscar race and wait till next year, when the public might feel as if more of the fetid smoke has cleared from the wreckage of Mel’s career.

Of course this is just “buzz,” so keep it under your beaver.