Ms. Spenser was out of town for the weekend, so I figured I'd have a video orgy. She enjoy watching a movie on an evening, but her interest flags after one or two. She doesn't have my stamina. Let me run down what I watched Saturday:
I started off with The Scribbler (2014). Technically a comic book movie (based on a comic by Daniel Schaffer), and involving superpowers, this is more of an indie horror. It stars Katie Cassidy as a young woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder. She has been released from the mental hospital to a halfway house, a huge, rundown apartment building called Juniper Towers. It is also known as Jumper Towers, because of the suicides.
She is being treated with a machine the burns alternate personalities, and one day she comes to and discovers that someone, possibly an alternate called the Scribbler. has modified the machine into a monstrous contraption. The Scribbler writes backwards all over everything, with "Killer" being the main motif. She shows up in dream sequence walking on walls and performing other feats (but only in a few short scenes). Her dilemma: Is she as the Scribbler throwing her fellow inmates off the building? And if she burns out her last alternate, will she be the one left, or will it be the Scribbler?
This wasn't a bad horror/thriller, but not much of a superpowers movie. The atmosphere is suitably horrific, there's some humor, and an interesting take on madness. There are even a few name actors (Eliza Dushku, Billy Campbell, Gina Gershon). But not exactly what I was hoping for.
I picked up MacGruber (2010) because Paul Scheer thinks it's funny. I suspected that it wasn't. Guess who is right? Will Forte is MacGruber, his take on MacGyver. This take is more or less limited to the vest and the mullet. His penchant for improvising gadgets from random objects is sometimes referenced, but rarely in a funny way. The joke is mostly MacGruber is obnoxiously overconfident, then abjectly begging when thwarted. The biggest gag is tearfully offering to suck someone's cock to get his way.
I refer to this kind of humor as "joke-shaped objects" - they seem like jokes, but aren't actually funny. Steve Martin was an expert at this type of anti-humor, but he uses it for good, instead of evil.
But this left me wanting a real action movie, and I had Boss Level (2021) in my watchlist. It's a Frank Grillo time loop story by Joe Carnahan. The set-up: Every morning, Grillo is woken up by assassins. But when he is killed, the day resets, so after getting killed a few times. he figures out the routine and how to defeat them. We see him avoid the assassins while making coffee - just another day. Soon, a helicopter gunship will shoot up the apartment, and then it's out the window and onto a passing truck. But he never manages to live past 12:47.
We learn a lot about Grillo as he runs through the same day over and over. He had a wife (Naomi Watts), who left him over the drinking and womanizing. The woman in bed with him when the assassins come is a dental technician on a one-night stand. He has a son who doesn't know he is his father. And he is a certified bad ass.
There is a cute scene where he can't get past a sword woman named Guan Yin (Selina Lo). Her kill-phrase is "I am Guan Yin and Guan Yin has done this." So he finds the world's greatest sword's woman (Michelle Yeoh, of course) and takes lessons. Like Bill Murray learning piano, he takes a lesson for every repeat day, and becomes good enough to beat Guan Yin.
He also spends some time getting drunk in Ken Jeong's diner (since he's going to get killed anyway) and later, bonding with his son, who decided to skip school that day. But he finally gets to confront the head of the evil corp - the Boss - Mel Gibson. In the end, he figures it all out - he just has to execute without getting killed. But he if he is, he gets to try again.
This was fun - not the greatest thing I've ever seen, but it was a big step up from MacGruber.
No comments:
Post a Comment