Movie Review

Saturday Night captures the chaos and creativity behind SNL’s origins

Saturday Night recreates the hours leading up to the debut episode of Saturday Night Live.

Photo by Hopper Stone

Saturday Night Live is a comedy institution that just started its historic 50th season, a show that is ingrained into American pop culture in a way that few things have ever been. Of course, it wasn’t always that way, especially at the beginning. The tumultuous time leading up to its 1975 debut is the focus of the new film, Saturday Night.

The frenetic film mostly follows Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as he tries to herd a bunch of disparate pieces into the semblance of a TV show. Not only must he deal with the varying personalities of the show’s stars — Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation), and Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) — but also a constant barrage of questions from writers, producers, studio executives, and more.

The camera is in almost constant motion as Michaels moves from one part of Studio 8H in New York City’s 30 Rockefeller Plaza to another, putting out fires (sometimes literally), approving changes (up to literally the last second), and trying to display confidence in a product that had never been tested before.

Directed by Jason Reitman and written by Reitman and Gil Kenan, the film is best viewed as what it is, a dramatization of events on that first fateful night. Although there have been various accounts of what the early days of SNL were like (most notably Live From New York by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales), only those who were there in person know what it was truly like to launch the show.

The film definitely fudges and conflates certain things, but it’s the general feeling that it gives off that matters the most. The pace is such that it’s nearly impossible to catch everything put on screen or understand the importance of every character. But what is readily apparent is the passionate-if-slapdash way Michaels and his crew are trying to organize the show, as well as the seemingly never-ending well of humor possessed by everyone on its staff.

Still, it’s fair to wonder for whom exactly the film is being made. While many of the people in the film are iconic and well-known, just as many are not, and only SNL superfans will know everyone who makes their way on screen. The speed of the film’s storytelling is great for the atmosphere it creates, but it doesn’t stop to explain who anyone is, so viewers who don’t have a good grasp of mid-’70s pop culture may find themselves a little lost.

The film is so packed full of people that you can’t give everyone their just due. LaBelle, who was a great stand-in for a young Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans, proves just as adept in his portrayal of Michaels, save for the distinctive voice. Among the multiple other notable performances are Smith, Morris, Rachel Sennot as Michaels’ then-wife Rosie Shuster, and Nicholas Braun as both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson.

Saturday Night is a loving tribute to a show with which most Americans have at least a passing familiarity, even if it sometimes feels like it was made just for the show’s most ardent viewers. The level of detail spent recreating the look and feel of SNL’s early days makes it a fun and compelling film, no matter if what it shows is completely true or not.

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Saturday Night opens in theaters on October 11.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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