Saturday Night Jive
Not ready, period
When I first heard someone was making a feature film set in real time during the 90 minutes before the premiere of Saturday Night Live in 1975, instantly I saw the whole movie in my head. Bad fashions, bad hairstyles, bad dialogue, everything.
A little over one year later, the result has finally landed on Netflix: Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night. And I gotta say, I nailed it.
SPOILERS, I GUESS, IF YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE IS
The movie Saturday Night is what might have happened if Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip had been a big hit for NBC 20 years ago, and they gave Aaron Sorkin carte blanche to do another earnest, self-righteous, bizarrely worshipful drama about the real-life comedy/variety show behind the scenes.
In other words, it’s fraudulent, exhausting, and only funny when it’s not trying to be.
Don’t blame the actors. They did their best. In particular, Lamorne Morris does an uncanny impression of Garrett Morris (no relation), but he only shows up from time to time to complain he’s not in the show enough. Which is really weird, considering it hadn’t even aired yet. And Dylan O’Brien absolutely channels Dan Aykroyd, but all he does is hit on every woman in sight with his “Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute” bit. Why is he doing a sketch character that wouldn’t be created until years later? Because it’s that kind of movie, that’s why.
It’s Member Berries: “Hey, ‘member that? Okay, it makes absolutely no sense in this context, but you ‘member it, right?”
I’m glad I didn’t see this movie in the theater, because I would’ve walked out during Gilda Radner’s wistful monologue to John Belushi about how happy they’ll be when they look back on that magical night 20 years later. The audience is supposed to be sad that neither one of those enormously talented performers would live that long, but I was too busy cringing at the unutterable tone-deafness.
Most of the drama, if you want to call it that, comes from Willem Dafoe as a demonically meddling network executive. He keeps popping up and threatening to scuttle the show before it even airs and replace it with a Tonight Show rerun. When he waits until the last second to decide whether to allow TV history to proceed, apparently we’re supposed to feel suspense. Maybe it would’ve worked if we didn’t know SNL has been on the air for almost 50 years.
The same goes for all the other attempts to mine drama from the concept. Will John Belushi finally sign his contract? Will George Carlin come down from his cocaine binge? Will Lorne find a new lighting director in time? Well, yeah, obviously, or else there wouldn’t have been a show.
Reitman could’ve kept it light and trusted the actors to charm us with their renditions of all those SNL icons, and maybe it could’ve been fun. It is definitely not that.
If you want to be entertained, this is not the movie to watch. If you want to study how not to do a historical biopic, it’s worth studying. And I suppose it’s no worse than an average episode of today’s SNL.
Apparently the American moviegoing public agreed, because Saturday Night bombed hard in theaters. Guess we’ll never get a gripping behind-the-scenes drama about the first episode of Fridays!
Okay, okay, one nice thing I’ll say about this movie: Evil genius Michael O’Donoghue, head writer on SNL for the first few years, gets a surprising amount of screen time. He even gets a few almost-funny lines. Not bad for a guy who’s been dead for 30 years and is now all but forgotten. Respect.
Suddenly, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has started arresting hundreds of illegal aliens a day. Five years ago, Joe Biden told the entire world to surge to our borders, but now those days are over.
As are the days of not calling them illegal aliens. Poof! The stigma around that term vanished the second the Democrats lost power. No more “undocumented immigrants” or “unauthorized citizens” or “differently legal beings” or whichever distancing euphemism they concoct next. If you’re in another country illegally, by definition you’re an illegal alien.
Sorry if it’s no fun. Sing it, Phil!
I criticize Trump when he’s wrong, so I gotta give him props when he’s right. Enforcing our immigration laws isn’t fascist. It’s the least we can expect from our leaders, and for once, that expectation is being met. Well done.
I seem to recall ABC(?) has a Howard Cosell show called Saturday Night Live, and so NBC had to call their show NBC Saturday Night for the first season or two. As well-known as Cosell was, he couldn't beat NBC's ratings, and soon it was NBC and SNL only.
Nice "Fridays!" reference there, Jimbo. I remember Fridays! were when I first saw Michael Richards. I think the skit had him playing with toys in the dirt or something like that. And, as a 12-year-old who would play with toys in the dirt, I saw him as a highly relatable adult. I thought "Man, when I grow up, I am so gonna keep playing with these damn toys in the damn dirt!" Or something like that.
(I had to check YouTube; yes, I was right. Here's the skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIUxoytpcxE)
About immigration: I hear peeps saying "You just can't deport 10M people! How is that even possible!?!"
Funny thing, I don't recall a single person, absolutely not one single individual ever, asking for permission to import 10M people. Or did I miss something because that was happening during football season and I'm a massive Oregon Duck fan who has been known to put his life on hold during that time?