MGK’S BROTHER JEFF: Hey, did you watch Saturday Night Live last night?
MGK: No, I was out.
JEFF: I meant “did you watch it later, like Sunday afternoon or something.”
MGK: Oh. No.
JEFF: I wouldn’t want to suggest you aren’t a social dervish.
MGK: Of course not.
JEFF: Out at the clubs. Working the lines. Making connections.
MGK: You can stop now.
JEFF: Hitting the dance floor. Getting digits. Exploding the pass.
MGK: I’m pretty sure that last expression is just something you made up.
JEFF: I’m ten years younger than you. I know all the hip new things you don’t. I bet you don’t even know about flanging.
MGK: Now I’m sure you’re making stuff up.
JEFF: Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, it will be something you wonder about, late at night. You know, when you think about death.
MGK: What does all of this have to do with Saturday Night Live, anyway?
JEFF: Oh. Jeremy Renner hosted.
MGK: And?
JEFF: He sucked.
MGK: That’s too bad.
JEFF: No, I mean he really sucked. Like, Lindsay Lohan levels of sucked.
MGK: That’s surprising. I mean, I like him in action movies well enough. He does a good sort of quip.
JEFF: I think nerds just like him because he looks like a young Nathan Fillion before Nathan Fillion got all fat.
MGK: Well, he does fight people really nicely too.
JEFF: But getting back to my point. He sucked.
MGK: Well, not everybody is Anne Hathaway.
JEFF: …no, but I don’t see your point.
MGK: Anne Hathway is like a switch-hitter –
JEFF: – maybe in your fantasies.
MGK: Nice, but let me finish. She is like an acting switch-hitter – do you want that one?
JEFF: Nah. Not in the mood to expand on a theme.
MGK: Okay. So she is like an acting switch-hitter in that she can go all “actual acting” and be good at it, or alternately switch into wacky sketch comedienne mode and not miss a beat. Not everybody can do this. Hugh Jackman can do it. James Franco, not so much.
JEFF: I get your point. But this was not just a failure to be Anne Hathaway. Jeremy Renner was bad. Like, during his monologue, it was like he actively did not want to be there. I felt bad for him. But also I felt scorn, because he was being paid a lot of money to be there.
MGK: Well, maybe he was totally hyped to do it and then got there and started work and was all “wait, I am not meant to be doing this at all.” That happens. And then he can’t just bail out.
JEFF: Sure he could. They’d call up Alec Baldwin or John Goodman and be all “save us” and they would do it because they are SNL gods.
MGK: True dat.
JEFF: Anyway. For the first time in my life, I appreciated Matt Damon. Because the more I see Jeremy Renner, the less I like him. I mean, I saw one Bourne movie with Renner in it and it made Avengers, like, retroactively worse. Matt Damon never did that.
MGK: Wait, you don’t appreciate Matt Damon?
JEFF: Come on. He’s just sort of there.
MGK: But he’s always good. At everything. I mean, at worst, your argument against Matt Damon is that he’s not flashy in how he’s good at everything.
JEFF: Name three movies that Matt Damon made that are not Bourne movies, which he didn’t really make anyway because he was just sort of there.
MGK: Rounders.
JEFF: Just sort of there. Just because he’s the lead doesn’t make him not just sort of there, you know.
MGK: Good Will Hunting.
JEFF: It sucking was totally his fault. It was his fault. It was his fault.
MGK: Saving Private Ryan.
JEFF: Tom Hanks’ movie. Adam Goldberg and Barry Pepper and Jeremy Davies were all more memorable than Damon. And don’t even bother saying Ocean’s Eleven.
MGK: The Adjustment Bureau. The Informant! The Departed. Contagion.
JEFF: See, I didn’t see any of those, so your argument is irrelevant.
MGK: That’s not terribly fair.
JEFF: Matt Damon has a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I think he can handle it.
MGK: Fair enough.
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Two things:
1. Worse than Lindsay Lohan was Taylor Lautner. Is that how bad Jeremy Renner was?
2. Matt Damon totally made “Eurotrip”.
A: Renner was not that bad on SNL. Definitely not groundbreaking, but adequate. And he’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for The Unusuals, a fantastic and short-lived cop show where was Amber Tamblyn’s partner. Netflix it, totally solid.
B: Matt Damon’s peak was always and will always be the “Who’s house? RUN’S HOUSE” goof from Dogma. And I even like him in most things he does. He’ll just always be chasing that dragon.
i) THE UNUSUALS!!!!!
ii) I also thought Renner wasn’t SO bad. He seemed more like someone who’s not used to doing live on-air stuff. But the filmed part (“The Standoff”) was very funny I thought, and I liked him in the dead-body sketch.
iii) It also hurt Renner that the writers couldn’t think of an original Avengers joke to save their damn lives. “Hawkeye shoots arrows, har har, he’s useless, har har”
iv) The Talented Mr. Ripley.
I must be the only nerd who liked that Hawkeye sketch.
Hawkeye, much like Green Arrow, sort of suffers because the arrow thing is fundamentally ridiculous.
Archery is pretty cool. Trick shots and trick arrows are pretty cool. That inherent coolness just about lets you ignore the ridiculousness when archery-themed heroes are operating by themselves. And archery villains work okay, because you can get a lot of mileage out of the fact that they don’t use guns is letting them get around modern security measures.
But when you put them on a superteam, their flaws become REALLY apparent. Hawkeye on the Avengers has always been… REALLY awkward.
DC manages to hide this better, because it’s a more ridiculous universe to begin with. I mean, Connor Hawke and Ray Palmer once killed Darkseid with an arrow to the face, and that managed to work. (Connor went downhill after this because nothing else they could do with the character would ever be that awesome.)
But still. Arrows? I mean… arrows. Kinda cool when you’re being a Batman knockoff. Not so cool when fighting an alien invasion.
@Murc
If you are a 5 year old kid, Hawkeye and Green Arrow are both incredibly awesome. I have been informed this by 5 year olds.
I think it has to do with the fact that pretending to shoot arrows on the playground is more awesome than holding out your hands to blast people with repulsor rays like Iron Man. And the teachers don’t let you tackle other people or jump on them from off the slide, so being Hulk isn’t as much fun either.
Or so I think I’ve been told. Interpreting 5-year-old is a skill that many can dabble in but few can master.
Flanging? Is that an Oglaf reference?
Urban Dictionary seems rather divided on the definition of flanging. Interesting.
I think Marvel Studios have handled Hawkeye pretty well. Obviously he’s outclassed by the Big Four, so he doesn’t get his own movie in acknowledgment of that.
Then in the Avengers final fight, they have to deal with SO MANY ENEMIES that simply having another set of hands (and eagle-sharp eyes) on the team is valuable. I never felt the movies asked me to accept that Hawkeye is somehow on the same level as Thor.
The Informant! is absolutely an ironclad argument for Matt Damon’s usefulness. So is The Talented Mr. Ripley. And The Departed. Jeff is wrong.
Jer: I know Jim Shooter is a lightning rod, but I love that in the 1960s, he understood that whole “Kids want to do more when they play than just hold out their hands” thing, and thus when he started writing the Legion of Super-Heroes, Karate Kid was born. (And does Karate Kid belong on the same team as Superboy, Mon-El and Ultra Boy? HELLS YES.)
You’re brother needs to see Contagion right the f*** now.
I don;t know if it’s original but if someone want to do a Hawkeye or Green Arrow they ought to play the trick arrows up and have them go off wrong.
“I’ll just notch this sleeping gas arrow in and…” gas squirts out side of arrow into Black Widow’s face.
Things like that
Hawkeye does suffer somewhat from having his only superpower be pure insanity, but his long history with the Avengers is basically a series of cycles where every few big stories, he realizes what he’s doing is nuts, that he doesn’t really belong on the same team as Thor and Iron Man, etc… and then he tends to do something even CRAZIER that keeps him around anyway.
“Hawkeye, your lack of powers makes you a liability fighting these two alien invasions”
“SCREW YOU, I’m stealing Pym Juice!”
“Hawkeye, here’s your monthly Stark Industries stipend, because you don’t have a job because your only skills are circus related.”
“Screw you! I quit. I got a job as a security guard and there’s no way it’ll end with me deaf and married”
“Hawkeye, there’s a bunch of idiots calling themselves Avengers in Wisconsin”
“Screw you! I’m training them to be semi-competent!”
yeah, Renner was pretty bad, definitely not an improve genius. And yeah, he looks like a squashed Nathan Fillion, and they’re the same age by the way. Renner even couple of months older (imdb)
… No, Hawkeye doesn’t suck. Neither does Green Arrow.
The current Hawkeye title negates that viewpoint.
As the old saying goes, acting’s easy, it’s comedy that’s hard. Daniel Craig stumbled a bit in his episode too.
WHAT NATHAN FILLION GOT FAT? *googles* OH GOD ITS TRUE NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
1. The Unusuals was completely awesome.
2. I like Renner because he was on season 1 of Angel and I am morally obligated to adore anyone who was ever on a Whedon show. Meaning I liked him before I ever knew who Fillion was. Who I also adore, and who is not fat he’s just a little puffy. In a ruggedly handsome way.
3. Renner’s Bourne was great!
4. Renner was perfectly acceptable on SNL, but then I have always felt that SNL was never the same after Chevy chase left.
5. I’m not now nor have I ever been a 4 year old boy, and arrows are still awesome. Hawkeye is awesome. Arrow is extremely awesome. Green Arrow was always the cooler half of the Green Arrow/Green Lantern comic. Robin Hood? Also awesome. (OTOH boxing glove arrows will be forever lame)
6. While I appreciate Matt Damon in many movies I have always felt that Outbreak far outclassed Contagion.
7. I never not once thought that Hawkeye and Black Widow did not belong on the Avengers.
7. Your brother is wrong on many points.
Whoops. I forgot to renumber than last point after I added the second to last. Peyton needs sleep badly. Peyton is about to die.
on another note, Fillion would be a hit on SNL. why hasn’t it happened yet? he’s a god of live comedy as evidenced by his Comicon appearances. get on it, internet!
I don’t want to touch the current Hawkeye series with a ten-foot boxing glove arrow, but that’s mostly because I get the sense that it’s really about how the creators would have done a “realistic” Green Arrow. Screw that.
Also, it was lame when Arsenal suddenly developed a Bullseye-like ability to throw stuff at people and it was really lame to do it again with Hawkeye.
Hawkeye is the guy with the trick arrows that halfway make sense. He has a bunch of different capsules that look like they’re about the size of shotgun shells and they do cool things. Instead of doing something more sensible like using a shotgun or grenade launcher to shoot them at people, he sticks them on arrows.
I don’t know why the creators don’t just run with that instead of acting like Hawkeye was as goofy as Silver Age Green Arrow and they need to Vertigo him up in order to get people to take him seriously.
I always liked Hawkeye more than Green Arrow. He was obnoxious in a more lovable way, he was genuinely cool in a lot of great Avengers stories and he never did stupid crap like putting boxing gloves, handcuffs or deer antlers on his arrows.
Archers are perfectly viable characters as long as they use trick arrows. One of the problems with Connor Hawke is that there are only so many things you can do with the regular pointy kind unless you want him killing henchmen. And then you get the whole medieval weapon vs. submachine gun thing happening that made a couple episodes of “Arrow” harder to swallow…
I can’t accept Renner as Hawkeye, because I basically want Hawkeye to be like he was back in the Eighties and not just “some guy with a compound bow who would be better off using an MP5 with a silencer.”
Renner can be good, but he always seems like he’s playing the same guy to me. And that guy isn’t Hawkeye.
I hope that your brother has other qualities that make up for something that I can only think of as acting-blindness. Damon is brilliant. I caught part of Courage Under Fire, aka Meg Ryan Wants An Oscar So Fucking Bad, and he steals the scenes that he’s in.
Also, I really don’t fault people who aren’t the funniest damn thing ever when they host SNL, as for some of them (if they don’t have serious stage and/or comedy cred) it’s probably nigh-pants-shittingly terrifying just to take a crack at it. It’s more of a pleasant surprise and even something of a shock when you come across a guest host that you’d never have guessed would be excellent, such as Patrick Swayze.
brian: hawkeye #3 is trick arrow galore.
Brian, the current Hawkeye book is absolutely genius stuff. You really should read it.