Saturday Night captures seismic moment in SNL history
Saturday Night reveals the first steps leading to the giant strides of sketch show SNL, while the uneven Venom: Last Dance asks whether we needed a Venom saga at all. writes Leigh Paatsch.
Leigh Paatsch
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With a stranger-than-fiction account of a magic moment in comedy to a World War II
drama with ALL the feels, there’s plenty to like at the movies this week.
SATURDAY NIGHT (M)
Director: Jason Reitman (Up in the Air)
Starring: Gabriel LaBelle, Cory Michael Smith, Dylan O’Brien, Nicholas Braun
Rating:★★★½
A laughing matter where the laughing mattered
It is often said that comedy is all about timing.
So what do we make of the timing displayed by a movie about comedy like Saturday Night?
What we encounter here is the 90 minutes leading up to the most important 90 minutes in the history of comedy: the first broadcast of the mega-influential TV sketch show Saturday Night Live.
Once it found its footing, SNL took giant strides across a new frontier of humour where the jokes came thicker, faster and funnier than ever before.
Not every gag was a winner. But even at its most hit-and-miss, the arrival of SNL teemed with an reckless irreverence and raw energy that definitively changed both the face and tone of comedy.
No matter where you went to be amused after this – via a stand-up club, the movie screen or the TV screen – the act of laughing was somehow different than before.
As Saturday Night begins, it is 10pm in the evening in October 1975, with just over an hour to go before launch time. The vibe inside the NBC studios at the network’s famous 30 Rock HQ in New York is an intoxicating blend of expectation, chaos, excitement and panic.
In fact, with the clock ticking down so ominously, there is still every chance NBC will pull the plug at the last minute.
Only one person is capable of extinguishing some (but not all) of the many spot fires breaking out everywhere.
His name is Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle), and he is the 29-year-old rookie producer who both devised the anything-goes format of the program, and gathered together the couldn’t-care-less cast of complete unknowns to execute it.
What follows amounts to a true state of nirvana for those who love their comedy history, as the maverick spirit coursing through this one seismic moment in time is conjured once more.
A colourful collection of soon-to-be-familiar faces – such as Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), John Belushi (Matt Wood), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien) and others too numerous to mention – are tagged and released throughout the movie. Sometimes a touch too quickly, but always vividly.
Even the minor players here have a major contribution to make, with special kudos going to Succession star Nicholas Braun (in dual roles as the late, great Andy Kaufman and the legendary Muppet man Jim Henson) and J.K. Simmons as the gruff veteran comic Milton Berle.
Saturday Night is in cinemas now
THERE’S STILL TOMORROW (M)
Rating:★★★★½
General release
There is a very telling reason why this Italian production is enjoying a relatively wide release in Australia: it delivers the most enjoyable, captivating, provocative and truly original cinema experiences to happen along in quite some time. Filmed in stark, yet beguiling black-and-white, the movie embeds us within a poor neighbourhood of Rome in 1946. The aftermath of WWII is there for all to see, but people are moving on with their lives.
Except Delia (Paolo Cortellisi). She is stuck in the same place she found herself before the war, working myriad jobs during the day to keep her family going. At night she returns home to be greeted by three needy kids and a needless husband whose mood swings can veer from manipulative to violent in a flash.
If this sounds like a rather miserable premise, be assured in this particular case, it is certainly not. Courtesy of a spellbinding performance from Cortellisi (who also writes and directs here), the movie magically spans many genres with ease, finding comedy, music, dancing and astonishing moments of uplift where they otherwise should not exist. And to cap it all off, there is the added reward of an ending few will see coming, but no-one will forget.
Calling this merely a feel-good movie doesn’t quite cut it. This is a feel-everything movie.
VENOM: THE LAST DANCE (M)
Rating:★★
General release
The third and final episode in the Venom saga issues a third and final reminder that the world never really needed a Venom saga in the first place. Once again, an incongruously excitable Tom Hardy stars as Eddie Brock, the longtime loser who’s been something of a winner ever since a smart-aleck alien symbiote named Venom (also voiced by Hardy) started living rent-free inside his body.
The same uneven entertainment equation that blighted the first two Venom movies remains firmly fixed in place: for every occasional minute of great stuff, you must sit through six minutes of grating stuff. You’ll find the great stuff on the far fringes of Hardy’s hyperactive performance style, where he clearly ignores the script and starts going off on tangents of his own making. As for the grating stuff, much of that occurs when the filmmakers pay too much attention to the script, and dual fogs of confusion and boredom descend on the viewer.
Not the worst movie you’ll ever see, but hardly the most necessary. Co-stars Juno Temple, Chiwetel Ejiofor.
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