I bought about a dozen DVDs at a Hollywood Video closeout sale last week, and when I finally found the time to sample from the pile, the only one that didn’t look like a downer was “Jiminy Glick in Lalawood.” That’s Martin Short’s send-up of celebrity journalism, a movie that never played in St. Louis. I figured it had to be an embarrassment. But I should have remembered: Martin Short is a funny guy, an alumnus of both “SCTV” and “SNL,” and the feature-length format allows to him do a variety of characters and parody bits that are worthy of his hero, Jerry Lewis.

Short plays Jiminy Glick, a portly, self-important reporter for a TV station in Butte, Mon. When Glick goes on assignment at the Toronto Film Festival, an event that I know intimately, Short captures the fatuousness on both sides of the velvet rope with a quintessentially Canadian touch–that is, he’s never truly mean-spirited. Which helps explain why so many real celebrities make cameos in the film, agreeing to red-carpet interviews with the fat-suited Short-as-Glick

But the real treat in the movie is Short’s impersonation of oddball director David Lynch, who contemplates making a noirish film about a middle American movie critic who doesn’t realize how clueless he is. (If you ask me, that would be a fabulous idea for a film, and I’ve got a casting suggestion for him.)