MacGruber(2010)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.
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The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans(2009)The sequel/re-imagination bug has appears to have bitten the artsy world of indie cinema with 2009’s “The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-New Orleans,” a new take on 1992’s underappreciated “Bad Lieutenant.” The original film, directed by veteran filmmaker Abel Ferrara with a blitz performance by Harvey Keitel, was a sublime study of an authority figure’s fall into the very vices he’s swore to prevent. Ferrara’s brutally earnest tragedy hardly seems apt to spawn a sequel. In the hands of German auteur Werner Herzog, “The Bad Lieutenant” series is reborn as an eccentric dark comedy about the extremes of an officer left unchecked.
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Déjà Vu Is this “Déjà Vu” or am I seeing the same crappy film over again? Yup, I am. A ferry with the crewmen of the USS Nimitz is blown to bits along with their family members. Doug Carlin is sent in to investigate. During his investigation he is attached to an experimental FBI surveillance unit that uses a machine which can see slightly more than four days into the past - but the time is constant, no Go-Backsies. Doug is obsessed with the victim of a crime that was set up to look like it was part of the explosion. He focuses so much on the murder of a good-looking chick that it’s surprising he can solve a thing. But, since Doug is played by Denzel, he must be smart. |
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You all know director D.J Caruso for making Shia LaBeouf into a star with his Goosebumps-like re-imagination of Rear Window, Disturbia. It was a steady, simple and fast paced little thriller that didn't insult the intelligence of its audience(the duo would leave that for last year's absurd Eagle Eye). For Caruso it was a modest improvement to a string of films that were awful(Taking Lives) and forgettable(Two For The Money). It is upsetting to see a commercial director with flashes of greatness in each of these films to put out such mediocrity, but I still think that he has a great movie in him somehow. |
