MACGRUBER!

By Blake Townsley

Howdy folks, and welcome to the Friday pop culture roundup. This week, I’m here to talk about my favorite movie of 2010. Or at least, I’m assuming it will be once I actually see it. You see, I’ve totally bought in to the MacGruber hype. For the first time in my life, I believe everything being said by people who are handsomely rewarded when the movie does well: writers, producers, actors, and Jimmy Fallon. I read the marketing blurbs and I totally abandon my normal, overly critical take on marketing blurbs. Roger Ebert vaguely complains on Twitter that critics aren’t being allowed to see the movie until the night before it releases, and I don’t stop to wonder why. 

Until I recently stopped to wonder why.  

I was having lunch with a friend earlier this week, one with whom I’ve seen possibly hundreds of movies with in the past six years. I excitedly asked her if she wanted to see MacGruber with me this weekend, expecting her enthusiasm to not quite match mine, but to exist in detectable amounts.  

“Nope, not interested.”

Umm, what? This was the woman who forced me to pay to see Saw, the most laughably-acted movie of the decade, infamous for being the film that caused us to enact a movie-going quid pro quo. The deal allows each of us to pick one or two movies a year that the other one has to go see, no questions asked. That’s how I ended up seeing It’s Complicated in the theater, and she ended up seeing A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. 

So in that moment at lunch, I thought about cashing in my first Saw card of 2010. But before I did, I got mad that she wasn’t into seeing it. I mean, it looks hilarious right?

“I don’t know, it’s a Saturday Night Live movie. It doesn’t look funny. At all.”

I gotta tell you, it really took the wind out of my sails. I mean, sure, MacGruber wasn’t the most intellectual sketch of all-time, but neither was Wayne’s World. I don’t know how popular it really is among the masses, but the fake theme song (MACGRUBER!!!) and writing always made me laugh, especially when they brought in the inspiration, Richard Dean Anderson, to play MacGruber’s dad on an episode of Saturday Night Live earlier this season. 

But a couple things have started to make me nervous. First, the dreaded tag of “Saturday Night Live Movie.” For every Wayne’s World or Blues Brothers, there’s ten movies like Superstar, Blues Brothers 2000, A Night At The Roxbury, The Ladies’ Man, etc. The good people over at SNL aren’t knocking ‘em out of the ballpark. Secondly, the fact that professional reviewers haven’t exactly been granted full access to the movie ahead of time scares me just a bit. It reeks just a tiny bit of desperation for a big opening weekend before anyone finds out how bad the movie really is. It’s one thing to hear that Roger Ebert likes the movie, quite another to find out that some random blogger on the Internet was amused by it. I know for a fact those guys and gals are mostly unreliable consumers of pop culture with weird, nerdy taste in movies, music and tv shows. 

So what’s the plan here, you ask? Like Winston Churchill would have wanted, I’m going to press ahead despite my uncertainty. I may be going alone to the theater, but that just means I get to tell all my friends about what an awesome movie they’ve missed. And it means I get to use the first Saw card of the year on Tron: Legacy. 

Until next week, y’all, have a great weekend!

(Credits: Image by Focal Intent)