Movie Details
| Title: | Saturday Night | |
| Director: | Jason Reitman | |
| Year: | 2024 | |
| Genre: | Drama | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 02.07.25 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (5)
- Juno
- Men, Women & Children
- Thank You for Smoking
- Up in the Air
- Young Adult
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 02.07.25 | Internet | Saturday Night Live turns 50 this year. They're doing a concert and a live special next weekend but have been releasing various television documentaries leading up to the event. I don't think (?) this movie about the hour and a half leading up to the first episode broadcast was part of a master plan to come out just in time for the 50th anniversary but it made for good timing for me to watch it so I can mostly talk about the tv docs. This movie is some long steadicam shots mostly parading a bunch of actors for you to judge against their real-life counterparts as probably-exaggerated chaos reigns leading up to the moment the cameras roll. I don't think it was bad but... it's kind of a very expensive, well made special feature for some theoretical SNL box set. Yes, it's cool to feel the kinetic excitement that must have been in the air that night but as well all know the show does go on so... it feels more like a fun exercise than a dramatic narrative. It's fun to see some familiar faces pop up and to try and connect the dots on who all these people are supposed to be but.... I don't know, maybe my reaction is because I'm already pretty familiar with those early SNL times thanks to an oral history I read... probably before this journal started that really dished out the details. Maybe if I was younger and didn't know much about how SNL started and was curious then this would be a fun way to learn, and it's not like this movie could benefit from some romance or hero's journey nonsense. It's about a particular hour and a half and conveys that hour and a half well. Job done. But also Questlove put together a two-hour doc on the music of SNL that was pretty good. There's a very showy intro where he basically mixed performance tracks from, I don't know, thirty performances? fifty? making mashups using music or beats from one performance over vocals from others and the video matches with these sliding split screens explaining what you're hearing. I thought that was really impressive and kinda sorta wanted the whole special to be like a mixtape; one big SNL version of Mouth Sounds. Of course that would've been crazy so there's only like 7 minutes of that before settling into a more typical documentary style, but even then they have nice acts about the history of hip hop groups, the eras of musical guests reflecting the show's underground status through the 80s, talking about how Adele's performance shot her up in the charts overnight, Sinead O Connor ripping up that picture of the pope, finally a really good coverage of FEAR's performance. All the good stuff. For an SNL fan or really even a music fan that is aware of SNL it was good. I always thought the musical performances on SNL were skips, even if I liked the band, but this doc pointed out that actual live music on television was a novel concept back in the mid-70s. Nowadays I take it for granted and much prefer a filmed show format (I guess Jimmy Kimmel gets closest to that) vs. having them on the set with typical multi-camera editing bouncing around the performers. But if you add all 50 years' worth of performances up, the show becomes a crazy time capsule of decades and decades of culture, which is cool. There's also a series of 4 somewhat disparate docs called "Beyond Saturday Night" which I also thought were good. One showcases audition tapes and talks about what it's like to go through that process and get hired or passed up, one episode talks about the show's writers and details what a week as an SNL writer is like, then another episode focuses on Will Ferrell's "More Cowbell" sketch, giving it an hour of love, and finally there's an episode about season 11 - the one where Lorne Michaels came back after the Dick Ebersol years after the year of Billy Crystal and Martin Short and Christopher Guest where they hired Robert Downey Jr. and Michael Anthony Hall - and how much that season did NOT work. At a glance the subjects seemed random, more like a 30 for 30 format where each episode stands alone, but I read someone's comment that I liked, which is the episodes are more like "this show is magic, here's how they make the magic, here's an example of the magic, the magic doesn't always work" and in that sense the series flows more smoothly. All this material was good and I liked it, probably more than watching the actual show. Thanks to certain podcasts and late night show hosts there's kind of a cottage industry of SNL vets talking about back when they were on SNL and I find much of it interesting. I've never been a die-hard fan but I certainly went through stints of watching it somewhat regularly, starting in the 90s with that "an golden era" of people like Phil Hartman, Adam Sandler, Dana Carvey, Chris Farley, David Spade, Tim Meadows, Chris Rock, Jon Lovitz, Mike Meyers, et al. It certainly is an institution at this point, part of the cultural landscape and maybe one of the few things that most everyone has at least heard of. It's cool that they are throwing some time and effort into celebrating the legacy of the show like this. |
