Tag: Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night (2024) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: The world is not ready for the debut episode of Saturday Night Live, but then again, neither are the cast.

I need to start with what will be the core premise of this review: Saturday Night Live is a huge deal, despite fluctuations in quality over the years (and people who say the modern series are the worst have obviously never watched season 6), it’s still a big deal culturally and commercially.

In America. Outside? It only really gets mentioned when a guest is particularly noteworthy or controversial, and even then it never breaks through the cultural barrier past “people who are already aware of American pop culture”. The only time I have seen it mentioned lately my main thoughts aren’t “That’s funny”, it’s “FFS can someone tell these performers to keep a straight face for five minutes?” Americans reading this may feel a bit smug, thinking “knowledge of culture isn’t needed to see a film, just go see it”, and then refuse to watch the Robbie Williams monkey film because they don’t know who he is.

I have seen the first season of SNL, so I’m aware of who most of the characters in this are. That’s a good thing, as Saturday Night assumes you know them, and makes almost no effort to let you know who everybody is. Saturday Night is made for people who already know about the making of the show, and want to see it onscreen. There’s nothing to bring in the casuals. It never escapes the shadow of reality or does much to escape the incredibly specific fan service. The fan service is an issue because it creates a weirdness. We see things happen, like wondering what can happen when you mix Jim Belushi and a bee costume. That only works if you’re aware of what happened in the show, but if you’re aware of what happened, then you already know the first episode of SNL worked, so there’s no drama. At times it needs you to be unaware of reality, and at others, it depends on it for the jokes to work.

The performances are f*cking fantastic though. Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase is funnier than anything the real Chevy Chase has done in years (with the exception of the time that bitter old fuck fell over). Dylan O’Brien is surprisingly unrecognisable as Dan Aykroyd, disappearing completely into the role. I wish Emily Fairn (Laraine Newman) and Ella Hunt (Gilda Radnor) were given more to do as they seem pretty good in those roles (and I hella miss Gilda Radnor and love to see more of her, even if it is just a representation of her). In terms of “most like the performer they’re portraying”, Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris is probably the best.

Saturday Night does contain some very funny moments. I particularly liked it when the writers clashed with Joan Carbunkle, who demanded they censor some of their more risque moments. The profane reaction to her demands are damn hilarious, and I want more of that. It’s one of the few times the movie stands still and lets you observe what’s happening, rather than quickly whipping around to the next historical moment.

I’d have absolutely loved it if this was a TV show instead, where we were given more time to know the characters, where the three-act structure of each episode was based around things we didn’t know, rather than the only thing we did.

Reitman has pulled off a FANTASTIC job of recreating NBC in the mid 70’s, but what he’s not done is given a reason to care about it. We’re not an audience, we’re voyeurs being taken for a ride through a world we’re not given a grounding in. It did make me watch SNL again, so yay that I guess?

Barb And Star Go To Vista Del Mar (2021)

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: Barb (Annie Mumolo) and Star (Kristen Wiig), two middle aged women, go on holiday. Can’t remember where, if only they mentioned it in the title or something

This was a strange film. I expected something standard but warm. Not standard in terms of quality, but in terms of style, I thought it would be something fairly straight forward. I based this solely on the title. I went into this almost blind, I read a quick synopsis and it said “the plot follows two best friends from Nebraska who travel to Florida on vacation only to become caught up in a villain’s plot”. See, completely normal based on that. Maybe if I saw a trailer I probably would have had a better idea of what the film is, and what it is, is pretty fucking weird. It’s a film entirely made up of “what the actual fuck?” moments (Like a talking crab doing a Morgan Freeman impression, or a piano singer who makes every song a song about how much he loves tits). Crucially, it never breaks the universe the film is set in, even when it doesn’t make sense. Because so much weird stuff happens that doesn’t make sense, that it actually makes sense. That’s one thing a lot of lesser films don’t do properly, they just put weird moments in that break the flow and feel like they don’t fit the universe.

But it works in this, it’s very much Black Books in that weird shit happens, but it’s amongst grounded stuff, so the weird stuff becomes the new reality. It’s very clever in how it manages that. It’s kind of standard for the SNL films (Wayne’s World, Macgruber), of which this actually isn’t one, but it really seems like one. Not just because of the style, but also because of the presence of Wiig. She plays both one of the leads, and the villain. I get why she did that but I don’t think it works here. Now, I love Wiig, but I think the villain needed to be someone a bit more dramatic. It feels throughout like the villain is aware she’s in a comedy film and it just feels a bit bland. If you had someone who usually played this roles anyway it would have been better. Cate Blanchett would have been perfect.

Mentioned a lot about the weirdness of it, but the film it reminds me of most? Shirley Valentine. Very weird as I don’t think I’ve actually seen that film. But that kind of sunshine holiday feel to it. Visually it reminds me of Palm Springs in terms of the colour scheme.

It’s not just the colours that give this that delightful feel. The dynamic between the two leads is perfect, the real life friendship really shines through the screen. The dialogue flows naturally between the two friends and it’s so lovely to see such a pure and honest friendship between two characters on screen. The two are friends in real life and it really shows in the way they interact.

I really enjoyed this film. It set the tone very early on by having a child lip-sync to a Bee Gees/Streisand song while delivering newspapers, then it turns out he’s actually helping a supervillain by planting a bomb. Yeah it’s a very strange movie, sometimes unintentionally (like when it has a dance scene using the same song as Paddington 2 did, that film owns that song now, no films can use it without reminding me of that).

So in summary, not a perfect film, and it’s not a film that will be for everybody’s tastes. But if you like this kind of thing, you will like this. Incredibly funny, unique, and has a great look to it.

Why We Love….In The Loop

On By troubledproductionsIn Why we loveLeave a comment

It’s election season! Which, just like the football season, is something where the losing team get to claim it’s a close result if they lost by 40 points, and the winners get to claim “nobody can question us” when they win by 4. They both run far too long, consist of people straddling the poverty line claiming “they’re just like us” about millionaires who wouldn’t spit on them if they were on fire, and are likely to dominate the news for months on end. Unless you’re The Sun of course, who decided, in the middle of election season, that THIS was the most important bit of news in the world:

DAN9qGzUMAAHNUb
Hold the front page: women have bums!

Due to the standard of political reporting by newspapers these days (which basically consists of “insult the party that our owner doesn’t support) is it any surprise that people are disengaged with politics? Almost every election now, no matter who wins the results are the same; the largest section of the results belong to non-voters. This is particularly weird when you look at some of the most dominant TV shows of this millennium; The Thick Of It, Veep, The Daily Show are some of the most well-regarded comedies ever made. It’s the same with drama too, particularly in America where The West Wing and House Of Cards are so well liked that if you say you don’t like them you’re likely to get thrown out of whatever room/building/spaceship you’re in. This shows that it’s not politics that people don’t like, it’s the state of politics. It’s like how if you refuse to eat rancid food, it’s not because you don’t like food, you just hate the option offered.

52749879c604ca0a8508f8ae563fc77f

So, this film in particular. A spin-off from the aforementioned The Thick Of It, featuring just four of the same characters, yet most of the same cast. This film gives a wonderful yet bleak view of what it actually means to be a modern politician; often thrown out of your depth, being put into no-win situations by other people, going from debating going to war whilst in Washington one week, to discussing someone’s garden wall falling down the next. This isn’t glamorous, it’s not sexy, it’s certainly not aspirational.

d48bd8dee0838828982ff2f5094474db

Adapting a TV series to a feature length film is never easy, the path to successes like The Naked Gun and 21 Jump Street is littered with the corpses of Guest House Paradiso, Magic Roundabout, and countless Saturday Night Live films. This film works though, and I think part of that is because it uses different characters but the same actors. So you have actors who know the best way to play their roles, but new viewers don’t have episodes worth of character development and history that they need to know to enjoy the film, everyone starts on equal footing. The returning cast are in an odd position, people like Chris Addison now have to act alongside established acting behemoths like James Gandolfini, and the British cast more than hold their own. It also helps that it’s REALLY well done, the plot of this is extremely intricate and well developed. I spoke a short while ago about how you can have Friends on in the background and still get the gist of what’s going on, you definitely cannot do that with this. In fact, to be honest I’d recommend not even sneezing lest you risk missing someone’s facial reaction which then sets up the next plot development. If you don’t pay attention to this, you will be confused, actually even if you are paying attention it could still confuse you, but in a good way. Not in a “the screenwriters have no idea what they’re doing” way, in a “there is so much subtext in every line that I think I misread someone’s intentions”. It’s also REALLY funny, endlessly quotable, not just the political lines, there’s one line in particular I’ve always loved and will probably adapt to a facebook status at one point:

“Have you ever seen a film where the hero is a builder? No, because they never fucking turn up in the nick of time.”

The political stuff also works really well; where you have American and British politicians deciding whether to go to war based on dubious intelligence (good thing THAT’s not still an issue right? Right?). This film is actually quite rare in that it doesn’t present politicians either as evil, or as crusaders against evil. They’re just people who are put into situations they don’t understand by their bosses, which is something everyone can sympathise with. This somehow does the impossible, it makes politicians human. For that alone it deserves accolades, and for everything else, it deserves adoration.

8pk4kgC

Oh yeah, it’s also kind of sweary, but never in a way that comes off as crass and infantile, which is a really fucking hard thing to pull off.