{"id":5197,"date":"2010-05-21T04:58:19","date_gmt":"2010-05-21T08:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5197"},"modified":"2010-07-26T12:00:36","modified_gmt":"2010-07-26T16:00:36","slug":"macgruber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=5197","title":{"rendered":"MacGruber"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Those of us lucky enough to have seen Exhausted<\/em>*, the 1981 John Holmes sycophant-umentary, may remember something the now world-weary director Julia St. Vincent, said on the DVD commentary. She described Holmes\u2019 pursed lip expression during his moment of climax as one of his \u201cmonkey faces.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now as the title character in MacGruber<\/em>, the adaptation of his reoccurring Saturday Night Live<\/em> sketches, Will Forte doesn\u2019t offer monkey faces exactly, but during his sex scenes, one of which is with his dead wife\u2019s ghost, he offers a similarly ridiculous variation. Such excess is where Jorma Taccone\u2019s MacGruber<\/em> succeeds. When Taccone leaves behind the one note MacGyver<\/em> parody that MacGruber<\/em> was as a sketch and turns his movie into something energetically absurd, MacGruber<\/em> becomes funnier than it has any right to be.<\/p>\n

\"\"Of course Taccone\u2019s reliance on parodying goofy 1980s action montages and music gets pretty tiresome early on, when MacGruber <\/em>is nothing but a rather lethargic Rambo III <\/em>parody, something that was funny as late as 1993 during the opening moments of Hot Shots: Part Deux<\/em>. But once MacGruber <\/em>shaves his long hair into a character appropriate mullet, Taccone, who along with Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaeffer make up the comedy troupe The Lonely Island<\/em>, properly focuses on being totally unfocused in his comedic targets. The 80s theme probably seemed like it would work considering how surprisingly effective it was in Schaeffer\u2019s Hot Rod<\/em>. But in Hot Rod<\/em>, Andy Samberg is more successful about being blissfully idiotic than Will Forte is in MacGruber<\/em>. As a performer, Forte is only fearless to a point, hurt by his Saturday Night Live <\/em>training to always let the audience know he\u2019s better than the material. As he\u2019s played in the movie, MacGruber is an abrasive character, but Forte just won\u2019t let go completely, requiring specific set pieces, like a scene where he walks around naked with a stick of celery sticking out of his butt, to allow the silliness to embrace him. Saturday Night Live<\/em>\u2019s tendency to boil everything down to one joke and pound at the one idea for five or six minutes makes their performers lazy and stagnant. There\u2019s no spontaneity and the same is true of MacGruber <\/em>as a movie, as long as Forte is front and center.<\/p>\n

\"\"Luckily, Taccone got a real pro at being a ham to be the villain. Val Kilmer<\/span><\/a>, who oddly enough played John Holmes in Wonderland<\/em>, takes an underwritten part and a character given a filthy name (Dieter Von Cunth) and plays it up as much as possible. Generally, the villain in a SNL inspired film, such as Rob Lowe in Wayne\u2019s World<\/em>, is even less than the straight man to the surrounding goofiness, he is often tonally wrong and totally in the way, bringing all his scenes to a halt as if he were in a standard drama. Kilmer, even in sequences designed to set up the story (as MacGruber\u2019s arch nemesis, he wants to blow up\u2026 things and people), relishes lines such as where he asks aloud \u201chave you ever been to D.C.?\u201d His henchman begins to answer and Kilmer impatiently utters, \u201cI<\/span> <\/span>was talking to the missile<\/span><\/a>.\u201d Kilmer saves MacGruber<\/em> from being just another SNL movie with a nasty case of the cheaply shot Canadian film (though it was mostly shot in Kilmer\u2019s home state of New Mexico<\/span><\/a>, regardless MacGruber<\/em> is ugly looking and shoddily photographed) and an unfortunate predilection for obvious gay panic jokes.<\/p>\n

Kilmer\u2019s influence is so important in getting us past the many slow parts of MacGruber<\/em>, that Forte has a sufficient amount of time to convert his haphazardly put together vanity project into an amusing mix of Austin Powers<\/em> nonsense and the \u201cidiot-braggart in over his head and saved by his cohorts\u201d of Big Trouble in Little China<\/em>. By the time the second half of MacGruber<\/em> arrives, Taccone has smoothed out the desperation so that the Eddie Money music doesn\u2019t seems so forced and MacGruber\u2019s Shining<\/em>-like obsession with a profane driver is not just empty and mean-spirited**, but a strange aside to lines like \u201cbe on the lookout for a large brown egg.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"* Exhausted<\/em> is one of the clear influences on Boogie Nights<\/em>, so much so that whole scenes are repeated in Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s film, especially during Amber Waves\u2019 \u201cdocumentary\u201d about Dirk.<\/p>\n

** MacGruber<\/em> still has time for gags about ripping out throats and what happens when your enemy is too injured to take proper revenge on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those of us lucky enough to have seen Exhausted*, the 1981 John Holmes sycophant-umentary, may remember something the now world-weary director Julia St. Vincent, said on the DVD commentary. She described Holmes\u2019 pursed lip expression during his moment of climax as one of his \u201cmonkey faces.\u201d Now as the title character in MacGruber, the adaptation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10],"tags":[5188,6418,6428,1977,6421,2975,913,1104,6426,6420,6423,1528,639,1982,6414,242,6424,5406,2196,700,6422,6416,1540,3665,4600,6336,6057,1206,617,6819,310,6415,5189,6419,5657,2902,262,740,5237,822,1527,1516,6417,4059,6427,146,6425,6413,598,886],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}