MacGruber

Letterboxd has an ingenious concept baked into its rating system. You can rate a film on a scale of zero to four stars, and you can also adorn a film with a heart. These two things are completely separate systems. The films you love and the films you thought were great are by default a decoupled set. This is one of many decisions that makes Letterboxd a fascinating and well-designed piece of software, because I have no idea how to rate MacGruber, which strains the conceit of a single numerical score. And I don't mean this only in the same way it can be said of all comedic films. Obviously it is harder to discuss the positive and negative qualities of comedy as opposed to drama, because subjective tastes become even more subjective. But very specifically, my reaction upon watching MacGruber — a film during which I laughed out loud more than any other film this year — was some combination of "that was a piece of shit" and "I wonder if these five people have seen this, because I bet…