Danny Bouncing
(1) Martin McClendon as Danny, feebly attempting to win back his girlfriend by standing outside her apartment and serenading her with a karaoke version of the Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker” while his friend Hector–a Camel billboard model turned criminal–looks on.
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(6) Another Hollywood-movie parody in which an actress prepares to audition for the part of a hooker in a new Bruce Willis-Walter Matthau vehicle about a bomb expert and the ghost of Frank Lloyd Wright.
Danny’s plight is completely plausible, but it’s often dwarfed by what’s going on around him: he’s forced to play straight man to his own ridiculous life. McClendon is a talented performer with a gift for witty underplaying, but when Danny consults the New Age therapist, Underwood steals every scene from him. Cleveland’s shots at New Age gurus might be too easy, but Underwood’s excellent comic performance makes one wonder what he might have come up with if the play had been about her. Ditto for Populorum as the solipsistic actor whose career has been one long downward plunge ever since he appeared in a William Friedkin movie about killer trees. Mary Griswold’s clever minimalistic set and Curt Columbus’s razor-sharp production both have more vitality than Danny’s story.
