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 Eugene Levy will honour this year's inductees to Canada's Walk of Fame. |
Eugene Levy's hosting skills lie somewhere between "best in show" and "worst in show."
"I don't think I'm a bad host, but it depends what you're looking for," said Levy, who will be in charge of the Canada's Walk of Fame induction ceremony Saturday in Toronto. CTV will televise the event on tape-delay Sunday night.
"Hosting is not something I want to make a habit of doing, because I keep thinking there probably are people who could do it better," said Levy, who was inducted himself last year. "But if I had a choice between me and, say, Tom Green, I think I'd opt for me."
Well, duh.
Truthfully, Levy knows exactly how he wants to approach the hosting task. In a nutshell, a good host needs to be funny, but not too funny.
"For something like the Oscars, the ideal host is somebody who doesn't use that as a platform to come out with the funniest jokes they ever have written," said Levy, who first gained fame on SCTV and subsequently has enjoyed a lucrative and acclaimed film career. "My job for the Walk of Fame is to get things off to a funny start, and yet keep the focus on why we're there, which is the inductees sitting in the front row.
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"With Billy Crystal or Steve Martin or anybody who hosts the Oscars, it's the opening and the monologue that really is the critical part. But once the show starts, you're into the show. And what you don't want to see, like last year, was three-quarters of the way through the Oscars, Ellen DeGeneres comes out with a vacuum cleaner and she's vacuuming the front row. No! Enough already! We know you're funny! We get it! But we have three awards left and we're kind of into the awards part of it!"
The eight Walk of Fame inductees this year are Catherine O'Hara, Jill Hennessy, Johnny Bower, Lloyd Robertson, Ivan Reitman, Gordon Pinsent, Rick Hansen and Nickelback. O'Hara, of course, is a frequent Levy collaborator, so her presence "warms up" the event, according to Levy.
"But honestly, I've met just about every inductee on several occasions," said Levy, 60. "Ivan Reitman is my old McMaster school chum. Gordon Pinsent is just a charming, warm guy, and an amazingly talented actor. I've met Lloyd Robertson a number of times and he has indicated that he liked the Earl Camembert and Floyd Robertson references (on SCTV). That probably didn't hurt Lloyd too much.
"I haven't met the guys from Nickelback, but I played golf with Johnny Bower last week. That was a big kick for me. I was on the phone as soon as I got back from the course, telling people, 'Guess who I was golfing with today?' I told him I remember listening to the first game he played as a Maple Leaf in 1958."
To younger generations Levy is the dad from the American Pie movies, the sixth of which is on the way. But generally speaking, Levy isn't a fan of the humiliation-based, shock-comedy trend that is dominating the landscape, so he chooses his projects carefully.
"Catherine (O'Hara) and I have been talking about getting together and writing something," Levy said. "It's a ways off, maybe September, but I'm excited about that.
"I'm looking for things now that perhaps run a little deeper, a bit more adult in theme. I can't do the other stuff anymore. Except for American Pie, because that pays very well."
Levy not crazy about man-on-man shock comedy
Legendary comedian Eugene Levy had an interesting reaction when he saw Will Ferrell and Sacha Baron Cohen kissing at the MTV Movie Awards last weekend.
"They (the people in the audience) are screaming and squealing, and you know, to me the torch has passed already," said Levy, who is hosting the 2007 Canada's Walk of Fame ceremony. "The business already has moved on to a younger generation of kids who find that this is what is funny and outrageous."
Levy is lukewarm on shock comedy, so it's getting hard for him to find things in film and TV that really make him laugh these days.
"A lot of comedy is going in a direction that I don't find particularly interesting," Levy said. "When I saw Borat (which starred Cohen), I got it, I thought a lot of it was funny. Some of the stuff I understood why it was funny, but it's not necessarily what I personally find funny. He's one of the great character comedians, just brilliant, but you know, he tends to push the envelope."
Occasionally something surprises Levy, though.
"I saw Knocked Up (with Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen) the other night and I actually really loved that movie," Levy said. "Not that I laughed all the way through it, but it's one of the few movies I've seen, one of the few comedies I've seen lately, that I actually loved, you know?"