When the word got out that Christopher Guest's next film project would skewer the idea of sports team mascots, I nearly drooled in anticipation. People who willingly dress in full and oversized costumes to try to encourage drunk fans through pantomime, shooting T-shirts out of a cannon, or dancing on top of a dugout or racing other mascots around a baseball diamond deserve to be made fun of. Guest is a genius at this stuff as per his takes on folk music ("A Mighty Wind"), high school theater ("Waiting for Guffman"), dog shows ("Best in Show"), and Oscar nominations ("For Your Consideration"). Alas, though Guest assembles many of the principals of his reliably great repertory group (Parker Posey, Jane Lynch, Fred Willard, etc.), "Mascots" is only occasionally funny. I think the problem is that Guest chose an international competition as the backdrop — instead of studying mascots in their natural "habitat," during actual games — and that seems a very similar set-up to some of his earlier work. Too, by including mascots from foreign countries or more obscure sports, it felt to me as though Guest went too broad, conceptually.