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.

GHOSTS AND DEMONS AND EVEN WILDER YET

Opening this weekend:

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire--This fifth feature in the franchise begins with a nice macabre episode set in 1904, like something from a creepier version of Disney's Haunted Mansion. This is followed by an extended chase through the streets of Manhattan, as the current Ghostbusters pursue, in the "Ectomobile," an eel-like flying dragon spirit up from the sewers.

It's a reasonably diverting start, and the movie goes on to deploy, in addition to Paul Rudd and Carrie Coon and the kids from 2021's Ghostbusters: Afterlife, most of the available stars from the 1984 original. Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, Williams Atherton and Bill Murray show up--no Sigourney Weaver or Rick Moranis, alas--and not just in cameos but with fairly substantive screen time. I was disappointed that the all-woman crew from the much-maligned and underrated 2016 version wasn't invited to this party, but apparently fans are still traumatized.

Anyway, the old vets here are good company--Murray with his peerless sardonic line readings, Akyroyd with his gee-whiz delivery of expository gibberish. A couple of new adds, like Patton Oswalt as an authority on the occult and Kumail Nanjiani as a clod who sells Aykroyd the spherical ancient artifact that serves as the McGuffin, also get into the proper, uhm, spirit of things.

On the whole the movie, directed by Gil Kenan from a script by Kenan and Jason Reitman, is an enjoyable lavish no-brainer. The closest it gets to any emotional weight is an intriguing plot strand in which the teenage heroine (Mckenna Grace) bonds, seemingly romantically, with a teen ghost (Emily Alyn Lind) after she's forbidden to go 'busting until she turns 18; the actors manage a touching rapport even through the special effects prism.

But if Frozen Empire--which concerns a horned demon with freezing superpowers imprisoned inside the McGuffin--doesn't feel like a home run, it may be the result of too much wholesomeness. The teen romance and bickering family dynamic didn't quite feel like Ghostbusters to me, somehow. What made the '84 film seem new was its mix of extravagant, big-budget special effects spectacle with the snarky, irreverent slacker sketch-comedy of Murray and the other stars. Only when Frozen Empire taps into this sensibility does it truly thaw out.

The movie is dedicated to Ivan Reitman, director of the original, and this film, like several of the others, includes a nod to Cannibal Girls, Rietman's 1973 shocker starring the impossibly young and adorable Andrea Martin and Eugene Levy. I hope it makes fans seek out that amusing low-budget creepshow; there's a movie that doesn't suffer from too much wholesomeness. 

Late Night With the Devil--Here's another wry paranormal chiller set in New York, although it was conceived by the Australian brothers Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes and filmed in Melbourne. The premise is that we're watching the 1976 Halloween episode of a syndicated talk show, a perennial also-ran in the ratings to Johnny Carson. Desperate for a sweeps win, the recently widowed host (David Dastmalchian) stacks the guest list with a hokey stage psychic (Fayssal Bazzi), an Amazing Randi-type skeptic (Ian Bliss), and a psychiatrist (Laura Gordon) and her patient, an angelically smiling teenage girl (Ingrid Torelli). This girl was rescued from a cult and just might be possessed.

From the set to the music to the "More to Come" break cards, the Cairnes Brothers truly capture the look and feel of anything-goes '70s talk shows to a degree that will be nostalgic to those of us who remember them. The movie also evokes sources of the period from The Exorcist to Network (Michael Ironside provides stentorian narration in the manner of Network's Lee Richardson), and the soundtrack includes the likes of Flo & Eddie's "Keep It Warm."

The "found footage" conceit is quickly strained; the supposed "behind the scenes" sequences are pretty cinematic and helpfully narrative. But after a while you accept it, largely because the acting, especially the haunted yet game showmanship of the excellent Dastmalchian, keeps us involved.

It's a little scary, but mostly Late Night With the Devil is, like Network, a tongue-in-cheek satire of TV business culture, with ripe lines like "Ladies and gentlemen, a live television first, as we attempt to communicate with...the Devil. But not before a word from our sponsors." I also loved the implication that no amount of supernatural power could overtake Carson in the ratings in those days. Apparently even the Devil couldn't do that.

At Harkins Shea...

Remembering Gene Wilder--This documentary, directed by Ron Frank, does indeed fondly remember the late comedy great. Frank makes Wilder himself the narrator, using audiobook excerpts from his noirishly-titled 2005 memoir Kiss Me Like a Stranger.

Born Jerry Silberman in Milwaukee, he grew up trying to make his mother laugh, and later drew inspiration from the mental patients he worked with while serving in the U.S. Army. He wanted, he says, something a bit "wilder" for his stage name when he started acting in New York. Cast in Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children at the Martin Beck Theatre in the early '60s, he met leading lady Anne Bancroft's future husband Mel Brooks, who later cast him in The Producers.

From there, we get a chronicle of some of the highlights of Wilder's movie career--not all of them; Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx and Start the Revolution Without Me, for instance, are passed over. But there's terrific material on Bonnie and Clyde, The Producers, Willy Wonka, Young Frankenstein, his relationship with Richard Pryor, his scenes with the sheep in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (he says that Allen told him that he wanted to do a version of Sister Carrie with a sheep instead of Jennifer Jones), and more. My own favorite of Wilder's characters, Jim aka The Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles, is very well represented here.

Talking heads include Brooks, Carol Kane, Mike Medavoy, Alan Alda, Ben Mankiewicz, Rain Pryor, Harry Connick, Jr., Eric McCormack, and Willy Wonka's Charlie Bucket himself, Peter Ostrum, as well as Wilder's widow Karen Wilder, all speaking with unmistakable love. They tell good stories, but the real joy is simply the big dose of Wilder's utterly sui generis blend of innocent sweetness and strangled volatility. If the clips in this movie don't make you smile, you may need to see a doctor.

HART, BROKEN

This one’s been out for a couple of weeks, but I just caught up with it:

The Front Runner—It’s hard to say at what audience this movie has been aimed. Younger people may well have no idea who Gary Hart is, and for his supporters back in 1988, the episode that ended his campaign for the Democratic nomination for President may seem painful and embarrassing and best forgotten. Shadenfreude–seeking opponents of Hart or of his party are unlikely to form a very large audience bloc either.

But the movie, directed by Jason Reitman from a script he wrote with Matt Bai and Jay Carson (from Bai’s 2014 book All the Truth Is Out), is a solid, absorbing piece of cinema craft, and shouldn’t be allowed to fall through the cracks of the season. It depicts, arguably, the end of an era in the relationship between the media and politicians and candidates, and the beginning of another.

For those who don’t know or have let it slip their minds: The Kansas-born Hart, an intelligent, handsome, commandingly no-nonsense senator from Colorado, found himself in the title position for the Democratic nomination in 1988. He looked like a cinch to be the candidate and to have a real shot against George H.W. Bush for the presidency.

Hart’s marriage had been troubled in ways that would seem quite routine to most of us today, but which were still a little less publicly acceptable—though probably no less privately common—for a politician thirty years ago, and there were rumors that he was a womanizer. The Miami Herald got wind of Hart’s connection with a young woman named Donna Rice. Partly on the strength of Hart’s defiant challenge to the Washington Post to tail him if they suspected hanky-panky—he assured them they’d be bored—the Herald broke the long journalistic tradition of discretion on such matters and went with the story.

Hart tried to stonewall the media after the story broke, insisting that it was nobody’s business. The rest is…well, you know.

Reitman spins the yarn in a brisk manner, with Altmanesque overheard and overlapping dialogue, and some near-Wellesian camera flourishes that bring order to the chaos of the campaign trail or the newsroom. There’s a large cast of characters, of which we get to know, more than in passing, only a few, but all of which have the feel of authenticity.

The Front Runner gains its integrity, however, from Hugh Jackman, who has the courage to make Hart an unlikable man. Had he played the title character as a martyr, the movie might come across disingenuous; because he plays him as an obtuse, defensive cold fish it becomes possible, paradoxically, to have some sympathy for him. It’s certainly possibly to have sympathy for Hart’s campaign manager Bill Dixon (J.K. Simmons, wry as ever), his wearily illusion-free wife, Lee Hart, superbly played by Vera Farmiga, and for the other women in the story, including Sarah Paxton as Rice.

The movie’s pace and comic edge should make it exhilarating, but there’s a sad, even ominous tone that hangs over The Front Runner, because whether or not Hart deserved what he got, the story marks the beginning of a turn for the worse in American mainstream media. I was living in D.C. at the time of this scandal, and I well remember what people said: They agreed that a candidate’s personal life ought to be private, but that this didn’t excuse Hart’s dishonesty and phony indignation.

Hart might have made an excellent president, and obviously he was hardly the only politician, on ether side of the aisle, with this sort of baggage. He got clobbered, probably, by a combination of his own demeanor and the beginning of a new style of anything-goes reporting, under which by now his story would seem quaint.

MOM CYCLONE

Opening today:

Tully--The latest from screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman, the team that brought us 2007's Juno, is another brightly-written comedy about pregnancy and motherhood. But the mother in question isn't a teen this time, she's a full-fledged adult. This may, indeed, be what's bugging her.

When we first meet Marlo (Charlize Theron), a suburban mother of two, she's massively on the verge of becoming a mother of three. Her husband (Ron Livingston) is an OK guy, but travels a lot for work, and spends a lot of time playing video games when he is home. Her sweet-natured but socially odd little son (he's euphemistically described as "quirky") creates difficulties at the private school he can only attend through the good graces of Marlo's irksomely rich and successful brother (Mark Duplass).

This same brother offers Marlo the gift of a "night nanny" for the new baby so that she can get some sleep. Marlo's repulsed by the idea at first, but soon after the baby is born, utterly overwhelmed and exhausted by her workload, she capitulates. The nanny, a lissome young hipster called Tully (Mackenzie Davis) swoops in like Marlo's own private Mary Poppins, not only minding the baby but cleaning the house overnight, making cupcakes and seeing to other domestic duties. Perhaps more importantly, she gets Marlo back in touch with her own identity.

The first quarter or so of this movie impressively dramatizes the daunting challenges of navigating motherhood, especially with multiple kids, especially if you aren't rich. It gets to you like a lot of movie depictions of harried parenting don't--it's almost frightening at times. This is partly due to Cody's snarky but emotionally plugged-in, glibness-free dialogue, and partly to Reitman's deft montages.

But it's also due in large part to Theron, who has a mature openness here, and a wild, harrowing beauty that makes even her own conventionally glamorous earlier roles seem tame. There's poignancy to Marlo, even a hint of the tragic, at the same time that she's a deeply sympathetic comic figure. As the breezy yet direct Tully, Davis is a fine foil for Theron; the two actresses slip into a startlingly relaxed and intimate rhythm from their first scene together.

As the story progresses, however, it slowly becomes clear that Marlo's conflict isn't just about the logistics of parenting, it's also about the perceived implications of the role. Marlo, we learn, was once an English Lit major and downtown NYC type, and, as with Jason Bateman's character in Juno, she's shaken by the prospect of permanently trading in the hip boho cred which Tully reminds her of for domesticity. Diablo Cody seems to regard this loss of pose as an adult rite of passage: For Cody, becoming a fully committed parent means giving up your dreams of being cool.