MacGruber

Saturday is traditionally the night for "Saturday Night Live" and...."Take Out the Trash" Day

"Making Something of Spit and Bailing Wire, and Getting...Spit-Covered Bailing Wire"

The track record for any movie coming out of the sketch-comedy of "Saturday Night Live" is pretty abysmal. The Blues Brothers and Wayne's World did fine, but their sequels didn't. We won't bring up A Night at the Roxbury, The Coneheads, The Ladies Man, It's Pat!, Stuart Saves His Family, ad infinitude. The reason is as obvious as a Mike Myers first-draft (are there any others?)—a concept that can, at most, sustain itself for under 10 minutes has chances of "slim" and "none" of being any good stretched to 90 minutes, let alone two hours. Thank God we've never seen "Subliminal Man" made into a movie...or "The Continental."

As a 5-minute sketch idea, MacGruber fits the bill for an "SNL" skit, although it's concept is the same week after week, the minutest of details being the only things changing. Will Forte plays a dorky McGyver-type, who has mere moments to defuse a bomb by creating something...bomb-defusing...using icky stuff that no one wants to touch let alone re-configure. And, of course, there are complications while Kristen Wiig does a panicked clock-check. The sketch ends with a building blowing up. Cue the Band. Christine Aguilera comes up after the break.

Same joke, every week. If something works once on "Saturday Night Live," they'll keep doing the sketch until that comedian quits or is canned. Somewhere along the way, some exec thought it a good idea to turn that well-tread idea into a feature.

It's sporadically funny in a "I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I" kind of lameness. And it boasts Ryan Phillippe (in slow-burn mode), the usually drop-dead-funny Wiig, and such good actors slumming as Powers Boothe (good to see him) and Val Kilmer, trying to re-capture his youth with a goofy comedy role (I'm suddenly waxing nostalgic for Real Genius and Top Secret!--the name of Kilmer's character is Dieter von Cunth, which shows you the level of humor, but doesn't clue you in that they will use it over...and over...and over...and over...for a rapidly declining chance of a laugh).

In this, MacGruber is coerced out of retirement ("I thought you were dead, MacGruber.." "So did I") in a remote native village (where he can find peace), when it's learned that von Cunth may be up to something no good.* Stuck in the 80's with his mullet, his plaid shirt, tan utility vest, and his Blaupunkt removable in-dash tape-player (he takes it everywhere). One wishes there were more entertainment value in seeing the usual action cliche's—the ones that turn up routinely (and straight) in Michael Bay films—played for laughs: the slow motion team walk, the fiery mega-explosions that have no hearing loss attached to them, the smug banter that passes for dialog, but the laughs are few and far between. You'd think given the time and budget they'd have come up with a grander concept—maybe even come up with a clever gadget or two—but there's nothing like that here. The best idea MacGruber (and the movie) can come up with is creating a distraction by going commando and parading around with a celery stalk up his ass.

No. Really. And they do it twice.

They couldn't even think up a "gadget." For pity's sake.

Save yourself. The clock is ticking. Don't go anywhere near this bomb, and watch these "MacGruber" video's instead.

* ...Like the rest of the movie.

Milius

Milius (Zak Knutson, Joey Figueroa, 2013) The title would be referring to John Milius of the notorious USC Brat-pack, pal of Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese, Zemeckis, and writer/director/producer of some good films—like Dillinger, The Wind and the Lion, Big Wednesday, Conan the Barbarian, Red Dawn, Farewell to the King—those he directed. He wrote (or co-wrote) 1941, Jeremiah Johnson, Dirty Harry and Magnum Force, Apocalypse Now, and contributed to little projects like Jaws (the U.S.S. Indianapolis speech) and The Hunt for Red October (Sean Connery liked him, which makes me suspect he worked on The Rock, too). One suspects he was the model for Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski—even this documentary does—but, that might just be speculation.

 

I was recording a commercial once with a football player and he said he'd just come back from making a movie. "Which one?" I asked. "Conan The Barbarian," he replied. "Oh, I want to see that one," I said. "Oh, good," he smiled. "You a Conan fan?" "Not particularly," I said. "But I really like John Milius' movies." His smile tightened. "Man," he said. "That guy's nuts."

 

Maybe. He is certainly a maverick in every sense of the word. A burly, gun-loving raconteur who talked big and loud and often preposterously, but with a twinkle in his eye. He is a romantic who hates love scenes, a historian of the John Ford school ("If the legend becomes fact, print the legend"), and has a fine sense of the absurd. 

He doesn't make little movies. The ones he makes are about brio and talking big and having big dreams. His movies swagger, but his characters don't, and they have an old-fashioned movie-showman sense to them that bring a smile to the face, even if you're shaking your head at the loutishness of it. He wanted to do Apocalypse Now because Orson Welles had tried (and failed) to make a movie of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." As a script-doctor, he was more of a script-puncher, pushing movies places that they'd might not intended to go. But, one could ignore the theatricality...or avoid the temptation.

The movie takes a look at Milius' career—the tag-line "Man/Myth/Legend" is appropriate—with his film-making compatriots, all of whom have obvious affection for him, even if it's a rueful "That's John" smile. At the time of the film—2013—Milius was battling back from a debilitating stroke that had interfered with his speaking—the brain was functioning but he was having difficulty speaking and writing—which leaves you on a tragic note. Spielberg almost breaks down: "That's the worst thing I could imagine happening to a story-teller."

 

One wishes him well. One does not want the story to end.