Apparently no amount of paper clips, sticks of gum and dental floss (or jokes about those kinds of things) can defeat the bad reputation of Saturday Night Live movies. MacGruber almost fell out of the top ten on its second weekend, not even yet recouping its tiny $10 million budget. I’d been hemming and hawing over whether or not to see it, weighing its box office floppiness against some positive reviews and my nostalgia for MacGyver (scroll down to the previous post), but the desire to escape this blast furnace shaped like an apartment made the decision easy, so I was one of the two dozen folks in the theatre who paid to see MacGruber on Saturday night.

The verdict?

I find in favour of MacGruber and lament the fact that it hasn’t found an audience. It’s a ballsy comedy that crosses the good taste line in some unexpected, laugh-out-loud ways, yet it doesn’t only rely on scatological humour and obvious parody (Austin Powers is guilty of this). It rips on almost every cliché of the action genre, particularly with a gag involving building the perfect team for the mission, and another one centered around taking the hero-haunted-by-his-dead-wife thing to a laugh-out-loud crescendo that winds up with a naked MacGruber in a graveyard.

Will Forte has some great moments as the mulleted titled character, taking him to disturbing levels of desperation, ineptitude and vengefulness. Ryan Phillipe is perfectly cast as the straight man, Lt. Dixon Piper; Val Kilmer and his extra chin gets a few laughs of his own, as evil mastermind Dieter Von Cunth; and the always hilarious Kristen Wiig, as Vicki St. Elmo, gets to play a love interest that actually gets laughs on her own – mainly though her reactions to being forced into dangerous situations.

That said, Mac Gruber isn’t quite a classic. There are a lot of missed opportunities with the impromptu gadgets, weapons and traps thing, it relies too much on the characters being anachronisms (for example, the dated mullet humour is supposed to be funny just ‘cause) and the roles could have been better written. Like almost every SNL movie, MacGruber will go for a gag even if it doesn’t ring true for the character; MacGruber himself is apparently “the best that there is” yet it seems obvious to even the other characters that he’s a cowardly moron, yet, later on, we see that he’s also a total savage who loves to rip throats out.

Those problems aside, the movie is a lot more hit than miss and deserves support if you’re into comedies that aren’t afraid to “take it there.” There wasn’t a big crowd at the screening I attended, but the film had won us over and there was cheering and enthusiastic laughter.

So why is it failing?

I’d say that the main reason is the bad rep of SNL films, but also the MacGyver parody concept is too old to appeal to the Scary Movie crowd, and that boring poster (again, scroll down) is a dud. Definitely not problems you can fix with duct tape, cigarette butts and some gummy bears.

 

-Dave Alexander

I really wanted to write something insightful and timely – a piece on corporate accountability documentaries in the wake of the devastating oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a tribute to Sir Christopher Lee on the occasion of this 88^th birthday, or maybe even a lighthearted a look ‘80s Cold War movies in light of the escalating tensions between the Koreas – but instead, all I can think about is Mac Gruber. D’oh! I blame the relentless sticky heat that’s turned my apartment into something approximating a kiln with a couch and T.V. in it (despite having air conditioning running 24/7 that’s gonna cost roughly the amount of a Fabergé egg in electricity bills).

Whatever it is, I’m having this debate with myself over whether or not to go see MacGruber, the comedy based on the Saturday Night Live skit that’s a parody of ‘90s network action show MacGyver. Most of you are probably saying to yourself, “It’s a SNL movie not called Wayne’s World or The Blues Brothers, of course it’s gonna suck, idiot!” Granted, history is not on my side, but there are reviews saying that, although it’s crass, it’s still hilarious – the funniest SNL film since Wayne’s World.

Rotten Tomatoes isn’t speeding along the decision-making process, though.,as it currently ranks MacGruber at 46% fresh. That’s not high, but not as low as I’d expected, and if you consider that a lot of snobby critics write off low-brow comedy altogether, that’s not too bad at all. Hmmm…

On the other hand, the movie also bombed at the box office after opening last week, making a very, very crummy $5 million thus far. It sinks the popular vote to some extent but financial performance doesn’t always mean much. I recently  took a look at Gentlemen Broncos, which was yanked from theatres before wide release but is actually comedically excellent in a way that’s way too oddball for mainstream tastes. Some film scribes are making a case for MacGruber; it even inspired this article, titled The Best Box Office Bombs of All Time.But dammit, maybe I’m falling for unwarranted cheerleading that’s just gonna leave me disappointed.

Again, I’m curious, so I guess the real question is: Do I satisfy my curiosity now or wait for a rental?

OK, what does the theatrical experience offer here? Is this better as a small screen renter? Should I wait for something with more eye candy to lure me into the multiplex? One of the main reasons I want to see the film is that I watched MacGyver as a kid and I find the parody particularly funny – the unlikely impromptu inventions, the mullet, the ripping on the bomb disposal clichés – so maybe it’ll actually work better on the small screen in that sense?

Although the trailer isn’t always the best way to judge a comedy, because all of the good gags could be blown in it, I did notice something new to the SNL movie canon in the MacGruber trailer. Surprise! The film doesn’t look like a cheaply made SNL flick but a bonafide action movie, complete with big explosions. Should this decision really come down to expl–

 

…

 

ACK! My laptop overheated and shut down while I was trying to finish this post! That settles it – I’m going to see MacGruber, in any theatre with #%$*ing air conditioning.

 

-Dave Alexander

Thanks to the internet, if it was made, sooner or later you’ll find a copy. For example, the film I watched last night: The Last Shark, a 1981 Italian Jaws rip-off that’s so much like Steven Spielberg’s original that Universal sued it right out of theatres shortly after it was released. Luckily, I’ve got a friend dedicated to hunting down filmic rarities online, buying imports, trading DVDs with other cinematic Sherlocks, etc., so I can partake in the joys of such movie mania. And few things trump a killer shark flick.

Jaws has been emulated, ripped off and re-imagined with other animals so many times that it created its own subgenre. Piranha, Grizzly, Orca: The Killer Whale, Great White, Tintorerra, Alligator, Deep Blue Sea, Rogue, Killer Jaws and tons more (see some of the trailers for ‘em here) have a giant animal (or, in the case of Piranha, many water-borne animals) hunting and chowing down on humanity, as the heroes try to protect the public, stop the powers that be from covering up the carnage and eventually discover a creative way to slay the beast.

The Last Shark follows the formula of course (a little too closely, hence the lawsuit), but, like many a ‘70s/’80s-era Italian rip-off of an American genre film, it does it with less budget, more gore, and masculinity to burn. In a combo of the Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) and Matt Hopper (Richard Dreyfus) characters, James Franciscus plays author, shark expert and man of action Peter Benton. He’s aided by Vic Morrow (who not too long after the movie died while making the Hollywood Twilight Zone film when a helicopter stunt went wrong) in the Quint (Robert Shaw) role. This time the hard-bitten, savage-eyed seaman is Greek – though Morrow’s shifting accent places him somewhere between Irish and Mediterranean.. There’s also the group of kids picked off by the shark, a mayhem scene at the beach, a mayor who won’t close it for economic reasons and a grand, explosive finale.

Director Enzo G. Castellari was one of many Italian director of the period cranking out shadier versions of American blockbusters, but he’s one of the best of the bunch, and The Last Shark features some inspired set-ups and camera moves, especially considering the scale of the movie. Castellari, who made the original The Inglorious Bastards (yup, that’s where Tarantino got his title), cult apocalypse film 1990: Bronx Warriors, a great crime movie called The Big Racket, some spaghetti westerns and another Jaws rip-off called Hammerhead, keeps the pace quick and delivers some over-the-top, entertaining sequences.

And that’s why the rip-offs, particularly the Italian ones, are such a blast. The Last Shark doesn’t have the acting talent, the budget or the craftsmanship, on numerous levels, so it just goes for it. Who cares if the not-very-animatronic shark always looks the same coming out of the water, when it explodes underneath its victims with such force that dummies are flung into the air? Yeah, maybe the stock footage of real sharks doesn’t match the plastic one they’re using in the underwater shots, but Jaws never had a scene where the Great White tried to kill divers by causing an underwater avalanche and blocking them in a cave. And perhaps that remote control toy helicopter ain’t foolin’ anyone, but who doesn’t want to see a shark grab it and pull it under! The last sequence is the perfect example of how wild it gets in The Last Shark. Before the beast takes the machine itself, one of the main characters hangs from the chopper and has his legs bitten clean off in full gory glory.

That’s exactly why these crazed carbon copy movies are worth tracking down. It’s not to see how well the filmmakers copy the original, it’s to see how they try to top it with sheer mayhem. It’s like wanting to host a nice car show, realizing you don’t have the resources and throwing a demolition derby instead.

See the pieces fly off here.

 

-Dave Alexander

Yes! Sweet vindication.

There’s so much energy spent in Hollywood convincing the general public that crappy movies aren’t actually crappy, that it’s almost a movie lover’s duty to become jaded. Therefore, few things are sweeter than the people behind a terrible film own up to their stinking artistic failures on those rare occasions. This week, once of those triumphant, if fleeting, little moments came when Shia LaBeouf admitted what every Indiana Jones fan already knows: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a total turdfest. A $787 million-grossing (worldwide) turdfest, but a turdfest nevertheless.

As CNN reported here, the unfortunately-named actor said, “You get to monkey-swinging and things like that and you can blame it on the writer and you can blame it on Steven. But the actor’s job is to make it come alive and make it work, and I couldn’t do it. So that’s my fault.”

And: “I think if you don't acknowledge it, then why do they trust you the next time you're promoting a movie.”

Plus, and this one’s about Steven Spielberg: “[W]hen you drop the ball you drop the ball.”

Damn, you don’t hear the star of a major mainstream movie say that too often, at least while in the spring of their careers and highly employable. However, we also know that LaBeouf’s being overly responsible. Yet, he’s extremely irritating in the film, but somehow between credited screenwriters David Koepp, Jeff Nathanson and George “I Should be Publically Pantsed for Jar-Jar Binks” Lucas, his character was given the terrible name Mutt Williams; a ludicrous plot involving aliens was created; basic logic was stripped out (instant two-lane highway in the middle of the jungle – no problem!); and there were cute little monkeys and groundhogs added. Spielberg deserves the lion’s share of blame as director for allowing such tragedy greenlit, if anyone person should shoulder it all.

Now, I dunno what LaBeouf’s motivations are, and I still firmly believe he should suffer a red eternity on Ballrash Island for being in the Transformers franchise, but thank you kind sir for owning up to your gargantuan fail.

So what does it mean? Well, not much other than smug nerd satisfaction – the movie made a better part of a billion bucks on name alone. But, if another Indiana Jones movie happens, as there’s talk of, there likely will be some accounting for the negative fan reaction of Crystal Skull. After all, Lucas did banish Jar-Jar to bit parts in the second and third Star Wars chapters.

If LaBeouf really wanted to win fan support, he campaign for the next Indiana Jones movie to open with Mutt meeting his end trying to outrun a boulder. That’s the kind of ball-dropping I can get behind.

 

-Dave Alexander

He’s big, he’s green, he’s not very funny. Although audiences eat up DreamWorks’ unstoppable cash cow, and the first film admittedly has a great message of acceptance, I find the series guilty of going for the cheapest humour: lazy, flash-in-the-pan pop-culture jokes, painfully obvious physical gags and cheesy scatological laughs (i.e. fart jokes – only slightly funnier when delivered in a Scottish accent). Sure, they’re for kids, but as Toy Story and Finding Nemo have proven, animated movies can be a lot cleverer than that.

Regardless, over a billion box office dollars and nearly a decade later, part four, Shrek Forever After, is coming out next Friday. To preview the movie, there's a piece in The Star featuring Shrek himself, Toronto’s own Mike Myers. Titled “Mike Myer’s second act,” it kind of politely makes a case for the actor as being very Canadian in that he eschews the Hollywood spotlight, and basically that’s why he’s stuck to mainly doing the Shrek series over the past decade. Well, it might also be that everything else he tried was pretty damn awful.

In fact, I’d say Shrek made him awful. That easy money of doing mega-profitable kiddie movies can be a siren song – just take a look at the career of his Shrek co-star Eddie Murphy, to see another former giant of comedy reduced to rubbish. To be fair, Murphy was already on this creative downslide by the time he signed up to voice the Donkey in Shrek, having suffered a string of flops in the early and mid-‘90s, but the series cemented his reinvention as a Disney hired gun.

Murphy and Myers are shadows of their formerly creatively edgy selves, and to prove my Shrek theory, I took a look at their Rotten Tomatoes scores pre- and post-Shrek (which, by the way, has a 90% fresh score on the site). Both actors currently sit at an average 33% rating for their films. Myers’ highest rated film of all time is Wayne’s World, at 84%, while Murphy’s highest in 48 Hours, at 94% – both pre-Shrek.

On the low side, Myers’ lowest of all time is The Cat in the Hat, at 12%, and Murphy’s is The Adventures of Pluto Nash, at a similarly stinging 6% – both post-Shrek.

Below, I’ve taken Rotten Tomatoes’ five highest rated films from each actor, both pre- and post- Shrek and averaged out the scores. For the sake of accuracy and fairness, I only included the films that fall within the comedy genre, and I excluded any films in which the actors didn’t play one of the leads. So, for example, although Dreamgirls is rated 78% fresh, it’s a drama and Murphy’s character is secondary, so it doesn’t count.

Let the numbers speak for themselves.

 

 

Mike Myers

Pre-Shrek

84% Wayne’s World (1992)

59% Wayne’s World 2 (1993)

50% So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993)

68% Austin Powers (1997)

59% Austin Powers 2 (1999)

 

64% average

 

Post-Shrek

54% Austin Powers 3 (2002)

12% Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat (2003)

88% Shrek 2 (2004)

41% Shrek 3 (2007)

14% The Love Guru (2008)

 

42% average

 

(12% drop)

 

 

Eddie Murphy

 

Pre-Shrek

94% 48 Hours (1982)

89% Trading Places (1983)

83% Beverly Hills Cop (1984)

65% The Nutty Professor (1996)

79% Bowfinger (1999)

 

82% average

 

Post-Shrek

40% Dr. Doolittle 2 (2001)

28% Daddy Daycare (2003)

88% Shrek 2 (2004)

41% Shrek 3 (2007)

38% Imagine That (2009)

 

47% average

 

(35% drop)

 

 

-Dave Alexander

Making fun of Twilight fans is like shooting fish in a barrel – sparkly, emotional little fish with severe spelling impairments, apparently. I’m too indifferent to the series to spend much time bashing it (that’s what these guys are for), but I will point out the importance of developing enough of a command of the English language that you can communicate your passionate opinions. The vitriolic comments about my last post – which mentioned that Twilight is, hilariously, influencing baby names – are distressingly illiterate. No one’s asking for perfection, especially at such a tender age (what’s your excuse, adult Twilight fans?), but spellcheckers are everywhere; there’s a dictionary at the touch of a button; and it’s (or it has) never been easier to learn how to use its/its.

C’mon fang-haranguers, you can do it!

More importantly, your gobsmacked passion reminds me of a famous critic’s reaction to an entirely different film this week. So, with a warning to the weak of stomach and glittery of disposition, I’d like to introduce you to the anti-Twilight, a little indie film called The Human Centipede, which is the opposite of all that sparkles and shines. In his childish, personal attack-filled non-review of it, an expectedly appalled Roger Ebert even describes it as a movie that “occupies a world where the stars don't shine.” He refused to give it a star rating, so if ever there was a reason to see a film, this is it!

The plot: a mad scientist with a background in separating conjoined twins, kidnaps three foreigners vacationing in Germany and surgically attaches them butt-to-mouth so that they share a single digestive tract (let that sink in for a sec…), becoming a – you guessed it – human centipede.

The work of Dutch filmmaker Tom Six, who sees it as a black comedy and is planning a sequel with twelve segments (technically, the title is The Human Centipede: First Sequence), The Human Centipede is a cult film made to test the gag reflex, even though it suggests more than it actually puts up on screen. It’s rough around the edges with some lacklustre performances (hey it’s not like it was easy to cast the thing!), but it works as trash-art in the tradition of, say, John Waters’ still shocking Pink Flamingoes. In this case, instead of a flamboyant, rotund drag queen named Divine, the central personality is the aforementioned mad doctor, played by one Dieter Laser (now that's a name parents should be giving their kids!)), who is kind of a cross between Udo Kier, Christopher Walken and Lance Henriksen, but way creepier. He plays a character who believes in his creation with the kind of steely determination reserved for the operatically insane.

He’s only helped to spread the madness of The Human Centipede. CNN picked up on the film and ran a piece on it this week titled “The most disturbing movie ever made?” The article inspired a whopping (at the time of this writing) near-600 comments from people either damning it or defending it – more of whom have never seen the movie. This is very inspiring.

Why? In a world where movie goers are increasingly detached and ironic about what they watch, it’s reassuring that there are still lighting rod films that can stir passionate debate about the nature of art and art censorship.

It also brings balance to the world, in my opinion. So while you’ve got the utterly bland, mainstream and very polished Twilight franchise – which, despite its appropriation of horror movie monsters, enforces the status quo by teaching young girls that their entire existence should passively revolve around boys – you’ve also got the utterly rebellious, reckless and irresponsible Human Centipede, which refuses to play nice and is gross for the sake of being gross. It reminds us of how exciting and transgressive art can, and sometimes should, be.

The film pushes sparkly, emo vampires into the abyss – with all six arms. Oh, the centipede humanity!

 

-Dave Alexander

Thankfully for hangovers, magazines and laptops mean you don’t have to leave the couch to find fodder for a blog post. And so, with a head full of heavy, a gut full of gross and minimal physical effort, I’ve found some worthwhile movie miscellany. Now back to my previously scheduled Saturday afternoon of sloth and regret for last night’s debauchery…

 

-This one makes the head hurt: according to this Associated Press article, Twilight is inspiring baby names.

Now, you probably just threw up in your mouth, but before you choke, it’s not that bad, as Edward and Isabelle (a.k.a. Bella) are classic names that the film series has pushed further into the spotlight. This means that when the misguided parents with bad taste who later come to their senses can easily deny the Twilight connection and save their children much ridicule and therapy later in life. It’s not as easy, though, for the ones who pick the more distinct Cullen, however. According to the article, “Cullen was the biggest riser among boys’ names, moving up 297 spots, to No. 485.”

That said, there are worse vampiric names you could get stuck with, like Lestat, Nosferatu or Chockula.

Of course, there could be an absolute disaster for kids whose parents are Avatar freaks. Imagine the first day of school when the teacher asks if “Neytiri Smith” is in class.

 

-The April issue of Wired (U.K. edition – I don’t know if it was on the North American one, as well) has an article on two new movie clips sites. First up, movieclips.com has over 12,000 clips that you can search through using the fields: movie, actor, genre, location, action, mood, character, theme, setting and prop. For example, if you click on “prop” and scroll through the menu to “bowling ball,” you find clips from The Big Lebowski, Teen Wolf, There Will be Blood, Kingpin, Goonies, Men at Work and Mystery Men. It’s handy for settling bets, reliving classic lines and using your vague memories of a movie to figure out what title you’re trying to recall.

Then there’s anyclip.com, which is similar, but has a different method of searching. (For example, you enter in info in fields such as “I’m looking for when X actor said Y quote.”). And, according to the Wired piece, it has a “crowdsourced video-editing option that lets users cut clips themselves or add additional search tags.”

 

-The May 10 edition of Time is a double issue featuring The 100 Most Influential People in the World. The conceit is that notable people write about currently notable people. So, for example, in the Artists section, Oliver Stone pays tribute to Kathryn Bigelow, Betty White writes about Sandra Bullock and Sigourney Weaver pens a piece about James Cameron. It’s a cool idea but there’s not a lot of insight. For example, The Twilight Saga: New Moon director Chris Weitz tells us that Twilight star Robert Pattinson is pretty much a regular guy who’d like to have a beer at the pub with his friends – who cares?

 

-Lastly, if you just can’t get enough of Freddy, give my interview with Jackie Earle Haley a read, check out the latest Popcorn Panel on the National Post site, where I join some other film-types to talk about the new Elm Street, or snag this issue of Rue Morgue, which features an interview with both Haley and original Krueger Robert Englund talking about the iconic baddie.

 

-Dave Alexander

Sometimes you get to be timely by accident. Case in point: the night before the New York City bomb scare, I watched Deadly Impact, a new straight-to-DVD film about a lone mad bomber who specializes in taking out large groups of people via hidden, remote control-detonated explosives. Thankfully, only the ones in the movie actually went off. Too bad for the film (newly released from Fox) that it also turned out to be a dud.

And as far as “bombs” go, this one was a strong contender for failure before I even slapped its no-special-features-having-ass into the DVD player. The laughably cliché cover art, presence straight-to-DVD star Sean Patrick Flannery and an innocuously bad title that seems like fell off of Stephen Seagal’s resume – all high-level warning signs of an impeding suck storm. The most interesting thing about it seemed to be that it’s directed by Robert Kurtzman, a veteran Hollywood effects master (one of the guys who started the famed KNB company) who has credits on, well… just about everything – see for yourself on his IMDb page.

That and it co-stars Joe Pantoliano. A.k.a. “Joey Pants,” he was one of the most in-demand character actors after The Matrix, Memento and The Sopranos and here he plays another memorable bad guy, in the form of criminal mastermind “The Lion.” Taking a cue from Jigsaw in the Saw series, The Lion likes to set traps for the police, often involving loved ones. The film begins with him taking revenge on Tom Armstrong (Flannery), a cop who ruined one of his criminal endeavours and therefore finds his wife strapped to a bomb on Christmas. Armstrong must chose between killing her personally and saving his men or letting them all die in an explosion. Bad scene.

Eight years later, Armstrong is enticed out of his drunken stupor in Mexico by F.B.I. agent Isabel Ordonez (Carmen Serano), who tells him that The Lion has resurfaced and the agency needs his help to catch him in Albuquerque. What ensues is a cat-and-mouse game with plenty of bad CGI explosions, plot twists where Pantoliano’s character is one step ahead of the feds in increasingly ridiculous ways (including taking an entire F.B.I. building under siege with an inexplicable cadre of snipers), a perfunctory awkward love connection and large number of people getting killed.

Deadly Impact is purely the kinda thing you’d watch with your dad on cable while over at your folks’ place for dinner and options are limited. The plot is way ridiculous, yet just tense enough to keep you watching, especially when someone gets shot, stabbed or something gets blown up every five minutes.

I actually liked Flannery as the lead, though. He’s got more character to his look as he ages and has a weathered quality that reminds me of Hugh Dillon. (In fact this could’ve been a T.V. movie plot for Dillon’s cop show Flashpoint.)

But the real reason to maybe give this one a dad-enticed look is Joey “Pants,” who seems to have had his friggin’ career pantsed as of late. He reminds us how fun a great bad guy can be, as he concocts his Master Plan, dons Pink Panther-type disguises and takes obsessive delight in making things personal with our hero. Hopefully he’ll be back on the big screen soon, rather than acting in another straight-to-DVD… well, you know…

Tick-tick-tick…

Lastly: stay safe, New York. Seriously.

 

-Dave Alexander