SKETCHER ON THE RISE

Opening here in the Valley today; wide October 11:

Saturday Night--The evening in question is October 11, 1975, and we're at 30 Rock in Manhattan, watching the final rehearsal for the very first episode of Saturday Night Live. Out on the sidewalk an NBC page (Finn Wolfhard) is trying to scare up an audience for the show, but passersby aren't interested in free tickets for this moment in broadcast and cultural history. Up in the studio, the camera darts and weaves through the chaos backstage and onstage as the minutes tick down to 11:30 p.m. in something approximating real time.

Through most of the movie, director Jason Reitman follows the frantic pipsqueak Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as he scurries from one absurd crisis to another. These range from getting a live llama up from the loading dock to getting bricks laid on the stage while union stagehands refuse to help to getting John Belushi (Matt Wood) to sign his contract.

Belushi is immobilized by anger at having to wear the silly bee costume, until he's taunted by his cocksure castmate and rival Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), at which point Michaels must keep the two men from pummeling each other. There are also executives and affiliates for Michaels to schmooze, with the diplomatic help of his long-suffering, appeasing Programming Executive Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), and technical difficulties to solve, and sketches and musical numbers to be cut; the earlier rehearsal ran three hours. And Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) would like somebody to write a script for his Muppets to perform. 

And so on. At heart this is an old-school "hey kids, let's put on a show" movie, with Michaels in the Mickey Rooney part. But like it or not, this isn't just any show. Even in its formidable best vintages, Saturday Night Live has never been the finest sketch comedy show on TV. But it has almost certainly been the most directly and widely influential, and Reitman's movie makes the case that its very existence was a tenuous fluke, borne of a squabble between the network and Johnny Carson over weekend airings of reruns of The Tonight Show.

The script, which Reitman co-wrote with Gil Kenan, feels romanticized, but it also ingeniously finds ways to incorporate references to classic bits that came on later episodes, like Julia Child's kitchen accident or Garrett Morris singing "Gonna Get Me a Shotgun." When these and countless other iconic gags are spun past us in such a concentrated way, we realize the degree to which SNL has inhabited our generational psyches.

Not everything works, but like the show it's celebrating, Saturday Night barrels along even when jokes fall flat, largely through remarkable acting. LaBelle, from Spielberg's The Fabelmans, is willing to play Michaels as a bit of a pretentious, self-important young ass, which goes a long way toward holding sentimentality at bay. It helps you buy into the hero's determination to get the show on, both because he believes his vision could be great and because he knows this night might be his only chance to take over the asylum.

Rachel Sennott strikes a strategically seductive tone as writer Rosie Shuster, the insufficiently-recognized wife of Michaels. The huge supporting cast includes impressive work by Dylan O'Brien as a handsy Dan Aykroyd, Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal, Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman, Kim Matula as an alluring Jane Curtin, Lamorne Morris nailing the voice and body language of Garrett Morris (no relation!) and Ella Hunt coming about as close as a mortal could to capturing some of the enchantment of Gilda Radner. Some of these work better than others, but none are embarrassments.

Amusing in smaller turns are Matthew Rhys as George Carlin, J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle, Jon Batiste (who also wrote the score) as Billy Preston, Tracy Letts as Herb Sargent, Willem DaFoe as forbidding NBC exec David Tebet and Robert Wuhl as director Dave Wilson. There's also a startlingly chameleon-esque double role; see if you can spot it.

With Batiste's insistent jazz pushing Michaels along through the halls and dressing rooms, the film often recalls Inarritu's Birdman, from 2014. But I found Saturday Night much more enjoyable than Birdman; it's Birdman with a heart, and without the sour, unearned cynicism.

I'm predisposed to like show-biz stories, and I well remember watching, at 13, that baffling but entertaining first "cold open," between Belushi and headwriter Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey). So Saturday Night admittedly had an advantage with me. But it wouldn't have held me without Reitman and his cast's skillful execution of Hawksian overlapping dialogue and manic ensemble hum. SNL has turned many of its performers into stars, and this film could do the same.

APOCALYPSE; MEOW

Opening:

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga--In the unlikely event that I'm ever asked to take the "Colbert Questionert" on Late Night, my answer to the question "Favorite Action Movie?" will be George Miller's 1981 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. It would probably be on the list of my twenty or thirty favorite movies, all-time. So any later chapter in George Miller's postapocalyptic Down Under car chase franchise has a lot to live up to.

This fifth entry is a prequel, offering backstory on the one-armed warrior played by Charlize Theron in 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road. Turns out that Furiosa was abducted, as a child, from a "place of abundance" into the Wasteland, a vast desert region inhabited by gnarly motorcycle-borne pirates shuttling between three horribly symbiotic fiefdoms: The Citadel, Gas Town and The Bullet Farm.

The Citadel, a water source, is presided over by the masked warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme) and filled with his bald, pale, mindlessly loyal followers the War Boys, who recall the acolytes of Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian. Gas Town refines the fuel that the Wasteland's countless motor vehicles burn; The Bullet Farm provides the munitions.

Furiosa is dragged into this miserable world as a girl (Alyla Browne) and ends up in the clutches of the gabby nomadic biker chieftain Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), who more than earns her grudge against him. Over the more than two-hour run of the movie, the grown-up version of Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) is carried along through Miller's lengthy showcase chases and battle scenes, which have the feel of movements in a symphony.

I saw this film in IMAX, with a large screening audience, and what I noticed is that every time one of Miller's mad, headlong, thundering action sequences wound down, the crowd was left quiet, mesmerized. The term "gripping" gets thrown out a lot in describing movies, but Furiosa truly grips. I liked but didn't love Fury Road; this one still falls shy of Road Warrior for me, but it's a majestic piece of filmmaking nonetheless.

There's no director quite like Miller. His action scenes are staged with an epic sweep but also with a macabre slapstick intricacy. His view of humanity seems deeply jaundiced; he's forever showing us people taking cruelty and indifference to their fellow humans to horrifying extremes, yet he does it with a casual humor, as if to say, of course we're capable of this.

Yet somehow this bleak outlook doesn't come across like cheap, sophomoric cynicism, and it isn't depressing. Partly this is because he always shows us decent human values struggling to hold on in this world, but it's also because the generous-hearted Miller imbues his characters, even the deplorable ones, with so much personality and grotesque glamour.

Taylor-Joy, with the jolting anger that takes over her almost inhumanly urchin face, fits the role perfectly. As her love interest, driver Praetorian Jack, handsome Tom Burke has a valiant and sympathetic appeal. But it's Hemsworth, his eyes wounded and his tone aggrieved every time somebody has the temerity to resist him, who really engages with the audience. The final clash between Dementus and Furiosa, featuring some of the best dialogue from the script (by Miller and Nico Lathouris), gets at the impulse to avenge with a subtlety that few action movies attempt. 

There can be little doubt that Miller's films have contributed to the dangerous illusion that many people, especially young men, seem to hold: that the collapse of civilization would be cool and liberating and fun. He should probably be censured for this, but it sure makes his movies exhilarating.

The Garfield Movie--Another origin story; this computer-animated yarn starts by tracing the humble beginnings of the indolent, lasagna-loving housecat from the calculatingly marketed comic strip by Jim Davis. Turns out that as a kitten, Garfield, voiced here by Chris Pratt, was left in an alley by his feral father, Vic (Samuel L. Jackson) and met his devoted human Jon (Nicholas Hoult) when he saw him through the window of an Italian restaurant. His overeating is a psychological overcompensation for early want.

The rest of The Garfield Movie concerns our hero and his exuberant canine pal Odie getting abducted by the cronies of the Persian cat Jinx (Hannah Waddingham), who has a grudge against Vic. Somehow it all leads to an attempt to steal milk from a commercial dairy, and an alliance with a glowering, lovelorn bull (Ving Rhames, who's pretty funny).

Admirable as Pratt is as an easygoing onscreen star, his voice struck me as a bit generic for this character, after being performed in earlier iterations by such distinctive voices as Bill Murray and Lorenzo Music. But he's not bad, and the movie has imagination and a snappy, propulsive comic precision, not to mention a catchy theme song by Jon Batiste. It's inconsequential but slickly-made fun, and when it was over, I'll admit I went out for lasagna.