SATURDAY NIGHT. Although I have drifted through long, possibly significant eras of the show without giving it so much as a look, Saturday Night Live has been an influence and a cultural barometer, even before I got brave or dumb enough to sneak out of my room to watch it. Now in its fifth decade, the program is obviously an institution, a lofty, grubby, sometimes misguided comedic ideal and proving ground that has produced myths, legends and apocrypha to vastly outnumber its sketches and episodes. Because SNL is so entrenched, so firmly linked to a certain set of political opinions and bound up in conventional corporate media, its modern relevance, its connection to an audience for and by which it was ostensibly created, seems to have become ossified and brittle. The show remains vital (or so I’m told), but will it retain a place in the cultural consciousness? What is its future?
One of the many great accomplishments of Saturday Night, written by Gil Kanin and Jason Reitman, directed by Reitman, is in the framing of the show’s future and very existence as anything but secure, even before the first episode aired. Set in the literal minutes before the show debuted, Saturday Night vividly depicts the goings-on inside Studio 8H as unmitigated chaos, with a young, untested cast of luminaries-to-be chewing on the scenery, each other and whatever chemicals are within reach. The writers, hardline jokesters at play in an airless fiefdom and at war with the standards department, stalk the halls with disproportionate elan and gravitas. The old-school studio hands, protecting their backs by sitting around and mocking the kids, take bets on how soon the network will pull the plug. And at the center of the maelstrom, hardly the implacable father of modern comedy he would become, stands Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), pulled and twisted in every direction except toward resolution, navigating his own complex relationship with his wife and indispensable coworker Rosie Schuster (Rachel Sennott), and very much looking into the void of utter professional collapse on the eve of his greatest accomplishment.
Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun), a whimsical hippie at the mercy of comedy proto-punks, pleads with Michaels to protect his Muppets from the sexual violence all around them, while Andy Kaufman (Braun again, in a bold and brilliant bit of casting) wanders the halls, seemingly completely lost. Host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), pissed off and over-coked, doesn’t know how he got tricked into this gig. Michaels has three hours of sketches and puppeteering and short films and musical performances to fit into a 90-minute time slot and much of the writing isn’t finished. Some of the cast members are perilously close to physical combat and the network, with all 50 of its national affiliates in attendance, highballs in hand, threatens to go to a tape of The Tonight Show.
Even for those of us who have studied some of the history of SNL, there is (or was) an implicit assumption that, because it has survived and predates us, the show was somehow inevitable. By the time many of us became aware of it, the original cast and writers had almost all become household names and/or died before their time; the legend was already written. But Reitman and Kanin, with a combination of lightning-quick writing and gloriously anachronistic technique, capture the uncertainty and potential of the show’s birth with immersive, deceptive ease. The exterior shots, accompanied by an almost-Herrmann score, suggest the New York City of Taxi Driver (1976) which, no spoiler, is the self-same, much-beloved hellscape that birthed the show. And inside the studio, every element is constantly in motion; there is no way to know what will be behind any given door, who might resign summarily, when Milton Berle (J.K. Simmons) might start swinging his schwanz around or where the bloodshed is going to start. R. 109M. BROADWAY.
THE APPRENTICE. It being mid-October, I figured we ought to have a monster movie in the mix. Of course, most don’t care to have their monsters humanized, so this might be pitched at a different audience than some might want.
Which is not to say it recasts our pro/antagonist Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) as a sympathetic figure; I don’t think any honest examination could actually arrive at that characterization. But the movie, written by Gabriel Sherman and directed by Ali Abbasi, successfully removes the character from the rarefied air of his own (often ridiculous) mythmaking, presenting him as the vain, striving son of tyrannical, racist slumlord from Queens, who, seeking the most direct path to notoriety, learns from the best/worst in the business, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).
Hurtling through the ’70s and ’80s, with cleverly deployed camera techniques and media to accompany the temporal shift, The Apprentice gives us a look inside the ostensibly apolitical business of greed and graft; the odious and immoral combination that gets marketed as The American Dream. It’s an origin story for a modern American super-villain, and all the more chilling for its apparent honesty. But it’s also a thoroughly entertaining movie-as-movie, a surprising achievement of technique, behind and in front of the camera, and as transgressive a major release as we’ve had in decades. R. 120M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
NOW PLAYING
BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE. Jenna Ortega joins Winona Ryder, Catherine O›Hara and Michael Keaton in the resurrection of the creepy comedy classic. PG13. 104M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.
GOODRICH. A father (Michael Keaton) and grown daughter’s (Mila Kunis) relationship changes when he’s left to care for is young children. R. 111M. BROADWAY.
HOCUS POCUS (1993). Bad witches, rise up. PG. 96M. BROADWAY.
JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX. Joaquin Phoenix’s anti-hero meets Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga) in the sequel. R. 138M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.
MY HERO ACADEMIA: YOU’RE NEXT. The superhero anime, dubbed. PG13. 110M. BROADWAY.
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993). The creepy stop-motion season straddler. PG. 76M. BROADWAY (3D), MILL CREEK.
PIECE BY PIECE. Lego biopic of Pharrell Williams to cleanse your spirit. PG. 93M. BROADWAY.
SMILE 2. A pop star (Naomi Scott) is plagued by scary faces and suicides in the horror sequel. R. 127M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
TERRIFIER 3. The scary clown with bad brows returns for Christmas. NR. 125M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.
TRANSFORMERS ONE. Bros-to-enemies origin story for the robo-cars. PG. 104M. BROADWAY.
THE WILD ROBOT. A robot makes friends in the forest in this animated adventure. PG. 102M. BROADWAY (3D), MILL CREEK (3D), MINOR.
For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.
This article appears in Ballot Measure Soup – A look at all those local revenue proposals coming before voters.