Penelope Spheeris
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“MacGruber” puts the “sort of” in “sort of funny,” which, on a spectrum populated with both “Wayne’s World” and “It’s Pat,” registers as both a relief and a disappointment.
There isn't much competition in this category, admittedly, but "MacGruber" is the funniest "Saturday Night Live"-based film since "Wayne's World."
And as for that accursed "SNL"-movie connection that follows this comedy like a long slimy tail: It's deserved, since those movies were almost uniformly awful, with the exception of "The Blues Brothers" and " Wayne's World " - the first because it was on a bigger canvas than anyone expected, and the second because it was on a smaller one.
"MacGruber," like 1992's "Wayne's World" and 1998's "A Night at the Roxbury" before it, takes vaguely drawn, one-joke characters and proceeds to not only expand their worlds, but also place them in something approaching a cohesive narrative.
(Mike Myers, whose “Wayne’s World” character re-popularized our love for Queen’s camp-rock in the 1990s, has a brief and funny turn as a clueless label executive.)
Mike Myers (the SNL comedian not the Halloween serial killer) famously used the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” to good effect in Wayne’s World, where he and co-star Dana Carvey are shown head-bobbing and lip-synching to the music.
There’s even a Wayne’s World reference.
The music executive is played by comic Mike Myers, whose 1992 film Wayne’s World revived “Bohemian Rhapsody” as a theme honoring nerd arrogance — the wrong-taste rebellion that defined unhip working-class fantasy and pleasure.
It’s a pretty ominous sign when your film promises to be remembered mainly for an eye rolling, bizarre meta-joke involving a walk on by Mike Myers who is obviously cast only for his background with Queen and “Wayne’s World.”
“No one is going to be head-banging in the car to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’!” he thunders, a declaration of wink-wink dumbness — that’s exactly what Myers’ Wayne Campbell and his slacker friends do in Wayne’s World.
The Florida Project (2017)
Directed by Sean Baker
influenced by The Little Rascals (1994)
Visuals Themes
But Baker, blending The Little Rascals with his own brand of indie neo-realism, cuts a direct path to the heart.
Baker pays tribute in the end credits to “The Little Rascals” shorts from the 1920s and ’30s, and I suppose one could mistake “The Florida Project” for a transcendent episode from that series.
Baker pulls it off by drawing on an unlikely inspiration: The Little Rascals.
Of course, Sean Baker ("Tangerine") was crediting the creators of the classic "Our Gang" comedies (better known to most of us as "The Little Rascals") and with good reason.
Sean Baker had hoped to make The Florida Project as the modern rejoinder to Hal Roach’s The Little Rascals, a series of early 20th century short films depicting the adventures of a dastardly group of ragtag young children.
“The Florida Project” has many antecedents: Francois Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” for one, and literary exposes of poverty like Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” but also classics of comic kid anarchy like “The Little Rascals” series, Jean Vigo’s “Zero for Conduct,” and Louis Malle’s “Zazie dans la Metro.”
Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)
Directed by Dean Parisot
influenced by Wayne's World (1992)
Themes Characters
Before Seth Rogen, Wayne’s World and even Bart Simpson, these two underachievers just wanted to have fun.
And as it happens, the night after the first movie’s premiere in February 1989, Saturday Night Live introduced a new pair of similarly dimwitted characters: Dana Carvey and Mike Myers as Wayne and Garth, hosts of the vapid public access show Wayne’s World .
The original Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, from 1989, was a key part of the sort of dude humor that was prevalent at the time, along with the "Wayne's World" SNL sketches that were later adapted into their own movies.
I was never a huge fan of either of the films and preferred the somewhat similar shenanigans of Mike Myers and Dana Carvey in the "Wayne's World" flicks.
El filme incluye una serie de referencias a las travesuras y rutinas de los niños de The Little Rascals (1994) –principalmente aquellas situaciones en donde la estatura de los más pequeños es ridiculizada porque se les considera incapaces de realizar tareas que sólo las personas altas pueden ejecutar–, y los directores, Pierre Coffin (Despicable Me, 2010) y Kyle Balda (The Lorax, 2012), intentan reproducir el aspecto retro de la época en que sitúa la mayor parte del filme: los sesenta en Estados Unidos e Inglaterra.
Most of the laughs come from Hae-mi’s idiosyncratic air of quiet fearlessness (she’s a student of mime who’s always happy to show off her skills in front of people she barely knows) or from Ben’s ridiculousness pretentiousness (as an archetype, he’s not unlike Rob Lowe’s character in Wayne’s World ).
Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021)
Directed by Josh Greenbaum
influenced by Wayne's World (1992)
Themes
Few of the most talented SNL ladies have launched a Mike Myers-style big-screen showcase; there's no Blues Brothers or Wayne's World equivalent for Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, or even Wiig's contemporaries, like Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph.
And yet despite reverberating on a similar comedic frequency to SNL flicks like Wayne’s World and MacGruber — with a string of freewheeling comedy antics hanging loosely on a truly unhinged narrative — Barb And Star didn’t originate in a skit.
(This movie does for culottes what “Wayne’s World” did for Queen.)
These things are almost always ill-advised—the shelves at Netflix distribution centers are bulging with unwanted copies of The Little Rascals (1994).
After all, the whole notion of hiring contemporary actors to try to revive an act that succeeded as much as a result of the original performers and the comedic timing and rapport that they developed through years on the stage and in front of the movie cameras just seemed weird at best and potentially disastrous at worst, as anyone who saw the 1994 revival of "The Little Rascals" or that ersatz Laurel & Hardy feature featuring Bronson Pinchot as Laurel and someone else as Hardy, a creation so bizarre and unsettling to behold that when I stumbled upon it on cable one bleak morning completely unawares as to its existence, I thought I was genuinely cracking up for good.
This sort of feel-good/formulaic progress narrative already seemed quaint by the time that “Wayne’s World” director Penelope Spheeris revived the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club for her Amblin-produced “Little Rascals” revival.
The film’s heavy metal angle is somewhat novel—but it certainly owes a lot to Wayne’s World, Airheads and, of course, School of Rock.
The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun (2021)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by The Beverly Hillbillies (1993)
It seems an unlikely reference, but could Anderson be riffing on The Beverly Hillbillies with that name?
Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie (2014)
Directed by Kevin Finn
influenced by Wayne's World (1992)
Plot
So a movie chronicling his attempts to garner a copy makes sense and is fodder for an entertaining adventure film in the vein of “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” and “Wayne’s World.”
Between Two Ferns: The Movie (2019)
Directed by Scott Aukerman
influenced by Wayne's World (1992)
Themes
The movie covers territory tread with more big laughs per minute in Wayne’s World and with a more persuasive layer of pathos in the Comedy Central TV series Review (one of the greatest shows you’ve probably never seen).
From “The Larry Sanders Show” to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” to “Wayne’s World” to “Episodes” to “Crashing,” the scripted (but often improv-friendly) showbiz satire has been a rich source of comedic material, with centerpiece stars such as Garry Shandling and Larry David and Matt LeBlanc playing heightened, unflattering versions of themselves, and dozens of guest-star celebrities demonstrating they’re good sports by joining in on the fun.
It can’t most of the time ( Wayne’s World , similarly based on a low-budget TV program, is probably the most notable exception).
After this, the film leaps off to become a broad lampoon of corny late night TV; think Wayne’s World without the smarts.
It’s a half-assed premise, given a half-assed treatment that makes Wayne’s World look like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
So James is stuck in routines echoing other movies: replaying the Ben-Hur chariot scene as a bike race in Boston traffic; doing a car singalong, � la Wayne's World's "Bohemian Rhapsody," but to Flo Rida's "Low" and with a gorilla named Bernie.
There Will Be Blood (2007)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by The Beverly Hillbillies (1993)
Music
One shot starts oil coming out of the ground and somewhere deep in my soul the theme from The Beverly Hillbillies started playing.
Rob Lowe in Wayne’s World looks like the height of characterization and drama in comparison to whatever Curtis has McKinnon doing here.
Girls, which gets funnier as it goes, is his best since 1992's Wayne's World and a sparky follow-up for Lohan and director Mark Waters to last year's PG-rated Freaky Friday.
Props are due to Tina Fey for being the first cast member since Mike Myers in "Wayne's World" to survive her movie being produced by "Saturday Night Live" boss Lorne Michaels -- and not also have her movie completely suck.
Just as in "Wayne's World," a film that is clearly a constant point of reference here, the core of the story has less to do with the loosely connected scenes at hand than with the undying friendship that motivates these two wide-eyed characters.
But the mad excesses and gleeful tastelessness of a genre that calls to what remains of the dirty-minded brat in all of us, are largely missing from this cheery post-"Wayne's World" stew of teenage buddy jokes and low-rent sci-fi nonsense.
Hader goes full Stefon just twice: in blond-wig drag at a Halloween parade and when trying to cheer Maggie up with a duo lip-synching to Jefferson Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” (Karaokeing to an old pop hit is a corny film trope, but it worked for Jon Cryer in Pretty in Pink and Mike Myers in Wayne’s World, and it’s effective here as well.)
Audience members with long memories will remember a sketch in Wayne’s World, in which corporate stooges Carvey and Mike Myers, pretended to send up intrusive advertising, while simultaneously giving Pepsi and Pizza Hut cameos.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced by Wayne's World (1992)
Dialogue
It's officially the most historically accurate film about the war ever made, because it shows how Adolf Hilter actually died in a movie theater, Mike Myers spent his pre-"Wayne's World" career a mugging British officer and everything anybody ever said sounded as zippy as though it had been written by Tarantino.