I don’t know that anyone issued a call for a female Jim Carrey, but Amy Sedaris seems determined occupy that niche. As Jerri Blank, the 40ish hardcase at the center of this film adaptation of the Comedy Central series, she sports a set of buckteeth and holds her face in a perpetual grimace that suggests Carrey’s Fire Marshall Bill from his In Living Color days. Sedaris seems wholly unencumbered by personal vanity: If a laugh can be gotten from her wide hips or pot belly, she’s there in skin-tight sweat pants. It’s rather a surprise to Google her and find that off screen she’s a reasonably attractive woman: If the Oscar people were to institute a Lon Chaney award for Most Uncomfortable Performance, she’d be a lock.

“It wasn’t just that I didn’t know anything about documentaries,” director Sydney Pollack (Tootsie, The Firm) says self-effacingly near the beginning of Sketches of Frank Gehry. “I didn’t know anything about architecture.”