Movie Review: How did we Ever get through a Weekend without “Saturday Night” Live?

Posted on October 11, 2024 by Roger Moore

As history, “Saturday Night” is the ultimate exercise in “OK, Boomer” nostalgia for “the first generation to grow up on TV.”

As entertainment, Jason Reitman’s putting-on-a-show comedy about the chaotic 1975 opening night of “Saturday Night Live” is a breathless 109 minute sprint through the names and familiar (ish) faces scrambling to make something funny and “new” and get it on the air — live.

If you want to know who’s who, you kind of had to be there, or at least remember those “Not Ready for Prime Time Players.” The show just started its 50th season, after all. Sorry, Millennials.

But for those on its wavelength, the generations who saw it live or caught its landmark sketches and parody commericials via decades of reruns or streaming samples, it’s an immersive, memory-teasing delight.

Because there’s nothing quite like chaos roiling towards a make-or-break deadline for creating comic suspense, nothing like seeing the unruly mess that went on behind the scenes to make you appreciate just what it took to get this show on the air, at least some of which those making “Saturday Night Live” now still endure on a weekly basis.

The cast of the film is played by game but mostly under-heralded look-alikes. Cory Michael Smith is the young and already insufferably arrogant Chevy Chase. Ella Hunt captures Gilda Radner at her most winsome. Emily Fairn is coquettish, out-of-her-depth trouper Laraine Newman. Kim Matula is the damned funny “hot one,” Jane Curtin, Matt Wood is the volatile, impulsive and explosively funny John Belushi and Dylan O’Brien plays that Arctic blast of manic Canadian patter, Dan Aykroyd, the MVP of that original series.

The first clever stroke of the script (by Gil Kenan and Reitman) is to have Lamorne Morris, playing the lone Black cast member Garrett Morris (they’re not related) — older, an operatic tenor, R & B singer, actor and playwright — wryly stand apart from the cast. He smokes and asks everybody within earshot, but especially the short tyro in charge, Lorne Michaels (Gabriel Labelle), variations of that one existential question eating at him on this opening night.

“What am I doing here?”

The film sets Morris up as the “token Black guy,” a casting issue the series has wrestled with since its inception, and then gives the underrated Garrett the spotlight as one of the heroes of that opening night.

Labelle’s Lorne is overwhelmed with sketches, musical guests, parody commercials and stand-up comics, practically a whole season’s worth packed onto the lineup. He is storming around 30 Rock putting out fires, soothing egos and avoiding making the MANY necessary cuts as sets are being finished, rehearsals are going badly and “suits” are closing in.

An NBC “talent” excec (Willem Dafoe) is alternately bucking Michaels up and threatening his future, as it’s his business to ensure that Johnny Carson’s latest contract negotiations end happily and this series pilot is merely a ploy in that “Tonight Show” reruns scheme.

Michaels’ not-quite-ex-wife (Rachel Sennott, perfect) is sleeping with Aykroyd — her latest conquest — keeping Belushi mollified (he hasn’t signed his contract) and making the backstage trains run on time. But what last name will she be billed under in the credits?

Producer Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) is whining about advertisers fearing the “parody” commericals, and trying to jam live Polaroid camera ads into the cast’s hands the way they did them on “The Tonight Show.”

Host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys, ferocious) is already close to a stand-up “legend,” with the raging ego to match.

And writers (Al) Franken and Davis, Michael O’Donahue (Tommy Dewey) and stand-ups Billy Crystal and Valri Bromfield are begging for Michaels’ ear, trying to get something on the show as long-suffering director Dave Wilson (Robert Wuhl) and a Greatest Generation union crew copes with crashing light rigs, set and costume changes that have to happen in an instant and impertinant “punks” taking over Studio 8H and the National Broadcasting Company for the night.

Children’s television muppet creator Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) is very out of place here, protesting every indignity the writers and cast members put his puppets through before rehearsal.

So many pieces of this story pass by at a blur that, like Michaels way back when, Reitman and Kenan struggle to thin this “piece of SNL lore” down to something easier to follow.

Did we really need to see insufferable TV legend and future “SNL” host Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) and his infamous penis, whipped out to shut up Chevy Chase? Well, yes we do. It emphasizes the “old guard” that “SNL” would displace, once and for all.

And over-populating this maelstrom is kind of the point. Inventing this new thing meant throwing a lot of ideas from Lorne’s roundup of “orphaned comics” at the wall, on and off camera, and seeing what might stick.

“We can’t expect people to recognize something they’ve never seen before,” Michaels complains, extolling the “post-modern Warhol” absurdist nature of what they were trying. But some folks had seen “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” on PBS stations the previous year, so maybe we were ready after all.

The villains include a network censor as well as “Uncle Miltie” and network brass.

What will give fans of this first iteration of the long-running “SNL” their biggest thrills are the “heroes” set up here.

The wildly eccentric comic Andy Kaufman (Braun again) keeps wandering in and out of the building, in character. But when the chips are down, Andy serves up his Mighty Mouse lip-sync bit — “Here I come to save the DAAaaay!”

Chase’s ballooning ego may be stroked and stoked as network brass gives him “the tap on the shoulder” about there being a bright future for a funny “handsome Gentile” in this business. But he knows how to comically work a room full of (old white male) network affliliate managers, and when Lorne realizes he’ll never be the “on camera” guy and gives up “Weekend Update,” Chase steps in and makes it an instant institution.

Drug abuse aside, Belushi rises to the occasion, Aykroyd stops grabbing every woman in sight long enough to stand out as a star, and as a team player, wearing those short shorts for the ladies of the cast to harass in a famous “women construction workers” sketch.

Anarchic Mister Mike (O’Donahue) insults all the people who make the decisions, but the “Prince of Darkness” is humbled just before making that first-ever “live open” a memorable one.

And musical guest Billy Preston (an infectiously joyous Jean Batiste) and his band serenade in that first live audience, giving the crowd in-studio and at home that last piece of the goal here, to give viewers a taste of “a New York all-nighter” — a rock concert, lots of comedy and city-wise sex-and-drugs edge every Saturday night.

“Saturday Night” won’t be to every generation’s taste. The look-alike cast is generally good, if hardly substitutes for “the real thing” in some cases. But if you were “there,” or at least caught the show in those birthing years, it’s still cool  and it’s a lot of fun, with or without the stimulants.

Rating: R, fisticuffs, drug abuse, nudity, profanity and “sexual references”

Cast: Gabriel Labelle, Rachel Sennott, Lamorne Morris, Cory Michael Smith, Ella Hunt, Emily Fairn, Kim Matula, Dylan O’Brien, Willem Dafoe, Brad Garrett and J.K. Simmons.

Credits: Directed by Jason Reitman, scripted by Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:49

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Movie Review: Pharrell Williams tells his story in Legos — “Piece by Piece”

Posted on October 11, 2024 by Roger Moore

I’m not sure the world asked for a documentary on the rise of one-hat/one-big-hit wonder Pharrell Williams, much less one turned into a Lego animated spectacle.

But darned if it isn’t the most adorable, upbeat rendering of an Up-from-the-Projects musical biography one can imagine.

Virginia Beach native producer, musician, “beat” builder and R&B and pop star Williams is best known the world over for his smash hit “Happy.” “Piece by Piece” more or less builds towards that Biggest Break from his childhood fascination with Stevie Wonder, his grandmother finding the indifferent student’s true passion, buying him a snare drum as he repeated the seventh grade, through his first and only band — The Neptunes — and their rise to hip hop prominence while creating novel sounds for Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar and No Doubt.

He’s still working with his childhood collaborators, a family man captured playing with his kid in the bathtub and apparently a very nice guy.

“How do I serve this thing called life?” he wonders, repeating the message drilled into him by the music-encouraging granny.

That relatively drama-free narrative is elevated by its conversion to Lego animation, which renders everything in bubbly images and color tones that fit the exquisitely arranged and produced music that pours out of the score.

Using animation, we can get an idea of the synesthesia that impacts how Williams experiences music. He’s literally seeing colors while the rest of us just fall into the groove or grin at the playful lyrics and quirky way of using unusual sounds — a singer saying “What what what,” Pharrell doing mouth pops and clucks — that become the rhythm track to giant hits.

The “beats” Williams and his Neptunes partner Chad Hugo cooked-up for sale to other artists, then used in their own productions, are visualized as pieced-together Lego light cubes. Some are used right away. Others stored, their lights glimmering through the plastic boxes they’re stashed in.

Jetski rides to private jet flights and flyovers by the Norfolk-based Blue Angels Naval aviation team (a regular feature of the skies over Va. Beach) are rendered into Legos.

The inspiration for that novel approach apparently came from an early conversation Williams had with Neville (“40 Feet from Stardom”). In life and music, Williams opines, there’s “nothing new.” We’re all just rearranging the Lego blocks, trying to create something magical and different.

Sure, it’s a gimmick. But it’s playful, it works and suits this material to a T.

As our biography subject got his biggest break writing and singing a worldwide smash hit slapped onto the soundtrack of “Despicable Me 2,” it’s hard to imagine any other way of telling the life story of this much-more-than-one-hat-and-one-hit wonder.

Rating: As PG as any movie with Snoop Dogg in it gets.

Cast: The voices of Pharrell Williams, Morgan Neville, Snoop Dogg, N.O.R.E., Gwen Stefani, Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and Kendrick Lamar.

Credits: Directed by Morgan Neville, scripted by Morgan Neville, Oscar Vazquez, Aaron Wickendon and Jason Zeldes. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:33

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Movie Review: “Rumours” of a G-7…zombie assault?

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Roger Moore

When the zombie apocalypse comes, the political animals leading the Western democracies will be powerless to stop it.

That’s the big message of “Rumours,” a dry, fitfully amusing horror satire of the ineffectual, word-parsing diplomat-speech of G-7 leadership in the face of the “present crisis.”

Three directors from the Canadian avante garde — Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson (who also scripted) and Galen Johnson — who previously joined forces for “The Green Fog,” team up for this uneven “festival darling” of a comedy about national archetypes, useless talk and the perils of AI and masturbating “Bog People” (bodies buried in peat) come back to life.

Zombies aren’t what gather the leaders of France (Denis Ménochet), Britain (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Japan (Takehiro Hira), Canada (Roy Dupuis), Italy (Rolando Ravello and the United States (Charles Dance) to a summit hosted by the German PM (Cate Blanchett) in a remote German castle resort.

Their endless posing for photographs and the distractions of aides and the press aren’t helping them grapple with the “crisis,” which we gather is the real world dilemma of climate-change fueled mass migration.

The pedantic Frenchman, the officious German and Brit and the just-glad-to-be-here Japanese leader fret over getting started on the “Provisional Statement on the Present Crisis,” a “group of seven” pre-agreement agreement supporting “rules based multi-lateral order human rights” and demoaning “procrastination pitstops.”

Say again?

As the Italian’s a ditz, the American’s a sleepy, ancient patrician and the Canadian a depressed, horny moon-eyed romantic, we do wonder if anything at all will get done, not that their bland platitudes mean anything or drive change in the middle of an emergency.

An anthropoligist is digging up an emasculated and executed bog body nearby, and that’s our cue that something is about to distract these seven very human people from their gossip over who is going through a marriage crisis, who is about to step down, who slept with whom and what’s in the swag bags that these affairs always deliver.

Their phone service ends and the servants vanish and the coddled and cosseted leaders of the Free World Western democracies are forced to fend for themselves and organize their escape.

They’ve been attacked? “Protesters!” Well, “dark shadowy figures”

And they “attacked,” you say? “Well, loomed menacingly!”

All the brooding about which PM rejected which PM’s hopes of resuming their affair, of writing something that rivals the “perfect,” unifying language of the Maastrict Treaty, German tone-deafness over race and immigration will have to wait.

Only it doesn’t. Our Frenchman obsesses over words and phrases, and takes on know-it-all tones when he launches into discourges on anthropology.

An EU leader (Alicia Vikander) shows up, frantic and chattering away.

Might this be ancient Dargin, Circassian, Lezgian, etc, the French polymath and the Japanese linguist ponder?

“It’s SWEDISH. She’s speaking Swedish.”

There’s humor and even pathos in the aged American leader of the “world’s oldest democracy” as President Edison Walcott drops offhanded reference to the indiginities of aged manhood, now and among the bog people. No, Dance’s accent isn’t American, not even John Kerry patrician.

The Frenchman’s a tad cowardly and quick to lay stake to enfeebled, and becomes the dead weight the others haul around in a wheel barrow. A bit on the nose.

The French Canadian may have slept with every woman there, or perhaps he’ll just get around to them all eventually.

And the monsters? They’re a string of dick jokes and masturbation gags that are anything but “rock’n roll.”

The fiddling-while-Earth-burns nature of global “leadership” and their parade of useless and vacuous “statements” joke lands, and is then pounded repeatedly as almost all of these leaders, scrambling through a foggy forest at night, fearing bog zombies and a planet about to go up in flames, struggle to stay on task and come up with that “statement.”

As does the movie. It makes its one point, and everything else is — well — masturbation.

Rating: R, sexual situations, violence

Cast: Cate Blanchett, Nikki Amuka-Bird,
Denis Ménochet, Takehiro Hira, Roy Dupuis, Rolando Ravello, Charles Dance and Alicia Vikander.

Credits: Directed by Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson and Guy Maddin, scripted by Evan Johnson. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 1:44

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Netflixable? Indian influencer cedes “CTRL” of her online life at her own peril

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Roger Moore

“CTRL” is a slick and melodramatic Indian variation of the “runaway computer/evil AI” formula, a tale that begins jaunty and jokey and staggers into sinister in the most heavy-handed ways.

Ananya Panday stars as Nella, a pretty young woman who has made a good living and by making herself Internet famous via her coupling with doting, tech-savvy boyfriend Joe (Vihaan Samat).

They’ve made their name and their lifestyle brand NJoy, offering glimpses into their polished, upbeat-for-the-camera personal lives financed by a product-endorsing lifetstyle.

“Manifest your dream, girls, MANIFEST it!”

But living life online has its pitfalls, as Ms. Makeup, Style and Relationship advice shows up to “surprise” Joe at a restaurant business meeting on their fifth anniversary. She, her camera operator and their online audience see him cheating.

It all comes apart as it turns out our foul-mouthed Internet icon knows little about how to make the only “living” she knows. Her editor and effects guru and biz manager was Joe. While we can assume, from camera placement, that she’s been bringing a videographer along on their exploits, we’re apparently meant to believe she’s at least doing the filming for their live-streaming lives.

Enter CTRL, a new AI assistant you can customize to your liking, a gadget that can run your social media business, edit, add effects and music and produce your many videos and even field offers from brands that covet the newly-single, jilted Nella, who makes victimhood part of her new brand thanks to #CheaterJoe.

She selects the flirty, corny “Bro” version of the AI and names him “Allen” (voiced by Aparshakti Khurana in the Hindi version of the film, which is in Hindi — with subtitles, or dubbed).

“I have to say I’m jealous of your eyelids,” he smirks and winks, “because they get to spend the whole night with you.”

Allen can take on all the tasks of running her biz and her life. He can even “erase” Joe from every image and video from her vast online life, at her request. So he does, and we see Joe reduced to pixels and vanish from shot after shot.

But Joe’s trying to make contact, even if Nella won’t have it. And when he disappears, she will be the last to know who’s behind it. But we do. We’ve seen “2001,” “MEgan,” and every evil AI film in between.

The film’s early acts are bubbly as we follow Nella’s rise and quick fall and chuckle at her obvious/doofus AI “boyfriend” who sets out to tidy up her life.

But the second half is more convoluted and more obvious, with endless explanations of the sinister forces in play behind that AI, and Joe’s connection to them. Multiple characters give long online “explanations” of what’s going on.

They stop “CTRL” dead in its tracks.

The better approach is always to underexplain, make the mystery part of the suspense. The genre and the plot here pretty much ordains that there’s little of either in “CTRL.” An engaging lead performance loses its urgency and its agency as Nella is practically a bystander in her own (unemotional, underplayed) tragedy.

To say nothing of Joe’s, which his shallow, narcissistic lover barely notes.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Ananya Panday, Vihaan Samat and Aparshakti Khurana

Credits: Directed by Vikramaditya Motwane, scripted by Vipin Agnihotri, Vikramaditya Motwane, Avinash Sampath and Sumukhi Suresh. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

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Movie Preview: Pierce Brosnan is an Ancient Irishman trying to get to a D-Day anniversary — “The Last Rifleman”

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Roger Moore

White haired, stooped by age and as Irish as he ever lets himself be, we’ve not seen the ex-James Bond like this before.

The late John Amos is in this one, with Jürgen Prochnow.

It looks and feels exceptionally sentimental, as any movie about that now almost-all-gone generation is sure to be.

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Movie Preview: Liz Hurley’s a Mum who might have to pay the Pied “Piper”

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Roger Moore

Candyman movies, Slenderman thrillers, “It!” again and again.

Why not a modern day horrific Pied Piper? Stop giggling.

Why not, indeed? Puts Elizabeth Hurley on the scary screen roughly at the same as her ex, Hugh Grant, starring as The Devil in “Heretic.”

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Movie Preview: Great Grandpa Stallone still taking on action, this time in “Armor”

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Roger Moore

A Heist picture co-starring Jason Patric and a lot of lesser knowns, this one hits theaters and streaming Nov. 22.

“Tulsa” kind of hints at it, but this trailer alone reminds us that “Rocky” came out almost 50 years ago. We all get old, HGH and steroids etc be damned. He was short to start with. Has AARP Sly shrunk, too?

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Series Preview: HBO interviews, recreates and reenacts and verifies a stereotype — “It’s Florida, Man”

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Roger Moore

Yes, you can find versions of “Florida Man” is every state, especially in your more anti-social rural and MAGA precincts.

Sure, most are white. But not all.

This series, premiering Oct. 18, is part doc, part “Drunk History” as we hear the state’s weirdness chronicler and Grand Inquisitor, Carl Hiaasen, weigh in on the sheer dipshittery of Sunshine State “types,” and see Anna Faris play a molested mermaid, along with Jake Johnson, Randall Park et al.

I may review it if HBO pitches it. But being HBO…

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Movie Review: Cryptic horror heist with thieves sure “Things Will Be Different”

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Roger Moore

For “Things Will Be Different,” his debut feature, writer-director (and editor) Michael Felker tries and tries to find ways to strip predictability out of his supernatural thriller. But when you’re working in a genre with fixed expectations, that often means throwing logic out the window and stumbling towards nonsensical as you struggle to go where no “Twilight Zone” episode has gone before.

Two armed siblings (Riley Dandy and Adam David Thompson) meet in a remote diner. They’re all alone. He’s already ordered so that they can discuss their next move as they sit, rifles slung over their shoulders, bags of money at their feet.

We don’t see the heist, don’t know who they robbed. We hear the sirens. The law is on their trail.

And where on Earth would these two armed goons not stand out in a public setting like this? Idaho?

“Joe” has a plan, and apparently Sydney or “Syd” is comfortable with it. They head off into the woods, cross a cornfield, chase off some target-shooting yahoos and duck into a well-kept but empty two story early 20th century farmhouse.

They hear the sirens again, but Joe’s confidence in their “safe house” is based on what he knows, what he’s told Syd and what she — agreeing to this robbery to get out of debt — believed is that it’s a “magical safe house.”

Fiddle with the time on the magical grandfather clocks therein, utter a few words in what sounds like Latin (Joe has a notebook full of “instructions), get that magic locked upstairs door to open, and they will step through time into some safer past for a couple of weeks, and return to their time afterwards once the coast is clear.

Sure, ANY of us would buy in if our sibling told us this “stay out of jail” tale as his pitch to sign us up for armed robbery. That, or we’d just Baker Act the loon and be done with him.

They drunkenly pass their two weeks of solitude in the wintry past with vintage CDs and vhs tapes, but danged if there isn’t a catch when they try to finish off their “laying low.”

A magical safe will have to be opened (per instructions). A magical cassette recorder that communicates with the overlords of this “Vise Grip”oasis must be consulted. A magical board covering the door, where messages, warnings and threats are carved, must be contended with.

As they freak out, they must “investigate” and contend with their pasts (barely), the history of this house (for a moment) and face off with whoever or whatever opens and closes this “Vise Grip” on time, because “they” are not letting them go.

Here’s my favorite line of dialogue, delivered by Thompson as Joe.

“It’s impossibly impossible, and it’s crazy to even consider this possibly possible.”

Sure, NOW you say that.

And here’s my least favorite line, delivered by the disembodied voice on the cassette tape.

“Go inside and await for our instructions.”

What community college D-student piffle is this?

The viewer is both miles ahead of the characters in guessing where this is going, and befuddled at the clumsy ways it gets there, or avoids letting us think we know how it’s getting there.

The performances aren’t bad, or particularly affecting either.

And as much as I hate thrillers that over-explain the unexplainable, plainly Joe, Sydney or “Luuuucyyyy” have got some ‘splainin’ to do. Without that, the headsnapping leaps this “plot” takes and the absurd situations and oft-broken “rules” this world requires which this script serves up don’t add up to a coherent movie.

“Things Will Be Different” when our writer-director (and editor) figures that out. And that “await our intructions” doesn’t require the clunky preposition “for.”

Rating: Unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Riley Dandy and Adam David Thompson

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Felker. A Magnet release.

Running time: 1:41

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Movie Preview:  An animated biography of a great French filmmaker — “The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol”

Posted on October 9, 2024 by Roger Moore

The French animator Sylvain Chomet of “The Triplets of Belleville” brings this influential French playwright and filmmaker’s upbringing and career to the screen in colorful, sentimental strokes.

Let’s keep an eye out for this Song Classics release.

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