William Wegman | Through the Shattered Lens

A nuclear warhead has been stolen and Captain Jim Faith (Powers Boothe) knows just who to recruit to track it down. Former CIA agent MacGruber (Will Forte) agrees to come out of retirement, so he can save the world from Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), the man who blew up MacGruber’s fiancée (Maya Rudolph) on the day of their wedding.

MacGruber re-assembles his old team. Sure, Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig) no longer wants to be a part of the adventure and MacGruber refuses work with Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe) but he still brings together a collection of men who look like they eat carburetors for breakfast. And then he accidentally blows them up. MacGruber’s assembling a new team! While mentoring Dixon and falling in love with Vicki, MacGruber seeks his revenge on Cunth. He also makes peace with his past by having sex with his fiancée’s ghost on her tombstone.

Based on the SNL skit that was itself based on a one-joke premise, MacGruber is a surprisingly entertaining action comedy, mixing frequently crude humor with heartfelt pathos. MacGruber works because, even while it makes fun of action movies, it still respects the rules of the genre. The jokes and the bullets fly with equal power. MacGruber is an idiot but he’s also the only man who can save Washington from Cunth’s plot and Will Forte does an admirable job of delivering every bizarre line of dialogue with a fully committed straight face.. Val Kilmer plays Cunth as being a classic action villain, right down to his dismissive attitude and his long-winded speeches. Kristen Wiig is both sexy and adorably awkward as the love interest. And Ryan Phillippe does a surprisingly good job as the the one person who seems to understand how crazy MacGruber really is. Every good comedy needs a good straight man and Ryan Phillippe proves himself to be more than up to the task.

MacGruber is full of quotable lines and scenes that are so out-there that you might need to rewind and confirm that you actually saw what you just did. There have been a lot of bad Saturday Night Live movies. MacGruber is one of the good ones.

I turned on this video in order to write about it for Monday, but became so hypnotized by its imagery that I couldn’t write till today.

I felt it was critically important to watch several forgotten early-90s thrillers in order to write about this video.

I felt it was better that Lisa do it because of Tobe Hooper’s passing.

Or I’ve been having difficulty eating and sleeping, which really caught up with me on Sunday afternoon.

Unfortunately, it’s the fourth one, and it’s still going on as I write this, so I may be in and out for awhile. We shall see.

Anyways, Lisa jumped in yesterday and spotlighted the one music video I’m aware of that was directed by Tobe Hooper–Dancing With Myself by Billy Idol.

If I had to wager a guess as to how he ended up directing that video, then I figure it probably went one of two ways:

He was a fan of Generation X (Idol’s band prior to going solo), and ended up getting in contact with Idol to film the video. Then he brought on the cinematographer who shot The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and did uncredited camerawork on The Funhouse (1981)–Daniel Pearl.
Or it went the other way, and prolific music-video cinematographer Daniel Pearl suggested they hire Tobe Hooper.

No matter what the reason, I’m sure Hooper and Pearl having collaborated before had something to do with it.

How they ended up shooting it on a set from a production of Ann Jellicoe’s punk rock-themed play The Sport Of Mad Mad Mother is a mystery to me.

Something else that’s a mystery to me, is how and why there are at least four different music videos for Blue Monday made in 1983, 1984, 1988, and 1995. Not versions of the song. Actual videos made for those different versions. No, I am not going to try and track them all down right now.

I could embed an okay-at-best cover version of this song that was done by HEALTH for the movie Atomic Blonde (2017) to try and tie it to something recent, but I’d prefer to embed the video of Orkestra Obsolete playing Blue Monday using nothing but instruments from the 1930s. I find that much more interesting, and by doing so, I won’t be lying by implying that movie is the reason I’m doing this video.

For me, the dog is the biggest selling point of this video.

I’m not sure if I want to know how it got so good at balancing.

The dog’s name is Fay Ray. Not only can this dog balance on a chair that is balanced on another chair, but she was able to catch the tennis ball her mouth.

Lead-singer Bernard Sumner couldn’t do it.

Yes, I’m sure they pulled it away at the last second. Nevertheless, it did appear to nearly hit Gilbert, so there seems to have been a fair amount of randomness to that part of the video. I’m kinda disappointed that he didn’t snatch it out of the air with his mouth.

Director and photographer William Wegman owned Fay Ray along with three other dogs named Batty, Chundo, and Crooky. They would all go on to teach kids the alphabet in 1995’s Alphabet Soup.

Wegman did sketches for the video, and the other director, Robert Breer, is the one who did the hand-drawn animation.

While I’m not sure I want to know about the training Fay Ray went through, I am curious as to what Gillian Gilbert is looking at in this shot.

The only other thing I have to say about this video is that I am completely perplexed as to why it appears to be comparing the dogs ability to balance with her ability to balance.