Embrace the bitter and post your own reviews!

After years of teasing and ruining some movies (see “Iron Man 2”) “The Avengers” is finally upon us! Typically Bitter Balcony has some opinions that don’t quite jive with the current thoughts on a film, but this time we can’t even pretend we aren’t really happy with the results. The inclusion of Joss Whedon in this project is what we attribute to the main factor for its success.

Loki, brother of Thor, is a bitter god intent on using an alien army to destroy Earth, which is under Thor’s protection. The only way Nick Fury sees Earth having a good chance to survive is to restart the Avenger protocol (or whatever they called it – and when was it shut down?) and get a cast of heroes to band together against this new foe. The mixed cast of characters causes some friction amongst themselves that could stop them from defeating Loki and the question is raised, “Will they rise to the occasion?”

A new step has been added to the Saturday Night Live dung ladder with the unfunny “MacGruber.” Will Forte plays the title character, an idiotic explosives expect whose fashion sense and social awareness are stuck in the 1980’s. In “MacGruber,” Forte’s fool with a high ego is tolerable for the minute or less the SNL segment lasts, which always ends with the bomb detonating. Here, we get ninety minutes of Forte’s mediocre physical comedy, and we are just hoping a real bomb would blow him to smithereens. For the exception of a couple of chuckles here and there, and the casting of Val Kilmer and Powers Boothe in a “where have you been” curiosity, “MacGruber” joins Forte with a group of fellow SNL alums like Jim Breuer and Tim Meadows that were not ready for primetime, indeed.