An uneven look at SNL’s first show

 

  Who among us doesn't know what the letters SNL stand for? OK, it's Saturday Night Live, the show that recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. That's half a century of sketches, new comic faces, weekend updates, and cold opens. The show has hooked successive generations of younger viewers and created long-time loyalists.

    Perhaps understanding the place SNL has earned in American culture, director Jason Reitman, working from a script he co-wrote with Gil Kenan, has made Saturday Night, an energized look at the 90 minutes preceding the first time Chevy Chase uttered the keynote words, "Live from New York. It's Saturday Night."

    If you're a committed SNL fan, you may find amusement in Reitman's brisk examination of how producer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) survived turmoil that included the use of drugs on set, personality clashes, and what sometimes looks like a show-threatening helping of amateurism.

   Difficulties seem to compound as air time approaches: John Belushi (Matt Wood) hadn't yet signed his contract, and an NBC executive (Willem Dafoe) threatened to pull the plug in favor of a Johnny Carson Tonight Show rerun.

     If there's a larger point to any of this, it involves Reitman's recognition of a cultural shift. Gone were the days of the jokey brashness of Milton Berle, played here by J.K. Simmons, once known as Mr. Television. SNL pulled off a neat trick: It turned a parodic mindset against the mainstream while becoming part of it.

      The cast is mostly game with a variety of standouts, notably Cory Michael Smith as a self-impressed Chevy Chase. Dylan O'Brian scores as the comically intense Dan Aykroyd; and Tommy Dewey proves mordantly funny as writer Michael O'Donoghue. 

      Kim Matula portrays Jane Curtin with come-what-may ease, and Lamorne Morris appears as Garrett Morris, SNL's first Black cast member. Morris spends most of his time wondering what he's doing on a show no one seems to have a handle on.

       So, is Saturday Night anything more than a big-screen reconstruction of some fabled and some fictionalized moments? Not really.

          For some, the movie will provide a healthy dose of nostalgic pleasure. For me, Saturday Night didn’t generate enough laughs. I didn't buy Wood's scowling John Belushi, and in the end, the movie became a mixed bag: a blur of dizzying camera work and hit-and-miss portrayals of the original SNL cast. 

       Saturday Night aside, my idea of SNL nostalgia has less to do with the show than with watching Belushi in Animal House, Aykroyd in Doctor Detroit, and Chevy Chase in Caddyshack. Those were the days.

        

He's very tough but who really cares?

Mitch Rapp, the hero of American Assassin, battles bad guys and a muddled script.

Loads of people are familiar with author Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp, a disaffected loner recruited into the CIA after a terrorist murders his girlfriend on a beach right after the two have become engaged. It may take every fan of Flynn’s 16-book series to turn American Assassin — the first Mitch Rapp movie — into a hit.

Muddled by a scattered screenplay and hampered by Dylan O’Brien’s notably unremarkable performance as Rapp, American Assassin does a fair share of globe hopping but manages to go nowhere.

After his fiancee’s death, Rapp trains himself to become a killing machine, staging a one-man Libyan mission to kill the leader of the terrorist group responsible for his fiancee's death. When American troops disrupt his work, Rapp finds himself in the hands of the CIA, where the head of counter-intelligence (Sanaa Lathan) turns him over to Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton), a former Navy SEAL who trains his charges to be merciless killers.

At first, it seems as if swarthy complexions constitute the movie's only requirement for villainy, but we soon learn that a disaffected American (Taylor Kitsch) is trying to arrange a plutonium deal in Poland. Kitsch's character plans to sell Russian plutonium to Iranians — or some such.

That’s only the beginning of global hopscotching that takes Rapp to Turkey, Italy and other places, moving too quickly even to offer travelogue diversions.

In my view, only three reasons justify seeing American Assassin: a reasonably imaginative virtual reality training sequence, Keaton's crazed handling of a wince-inducing scene in which Stan is tortured and a late-picture explosion that can’t be described without giving away the movie’s climax.

Most of the time, American Assassin -- which was directed by Michael Cuesta (Kill the Messenger) -- fails to distinguish itself, looking like a low-rent version of the Jason Bourne movies with a little Jack Ryan thrown in.

For all its fights and action, American Assassin fails to generate the excitement we associate with the discovery of a new hero. The movie pauses for occasional chunks of listless exposition before leaping ahead to the next scene or country.

The net effect: Watching American Assassin made me feel as I if were skimming a second-rate novel, leafing from one chapter to the next, vainly hoping to stumble on something good.

Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson go Google

Google may be a high-tech mecca, but The Internship downloads few laughs.
Just what we needed, another fish-out-of-water comedy, this one starring motor mouth Vince Vaughn and reliable goofball Owen Wilson. Make that two fish out of water.

The new comedy, The Internship, focuses on a couple of displaced salesmen who attempt a leap into the digital age.

Absent any other opportunities, this duo of former watch salesmen applies for an internship at Google's California headquarters, the high-tech playground where some of the movie was filmed.

The comedy mostly centers on the way two relics of the old economy try to blend with bright, young hotshots. These youthful techies also face an uncertain economic future, but they're totally prepared for the information-oriented economy that's beginning to attain near-imperial stature.

Overly long and not especially funny, The Internship -- which was directed by Shawn Levy (Date Night) -- misses a chance to bring a sharp satirical edge to material that seems ripe for it. Vaughn plays Billy, a character so mired in the '80s, he uses Flashdance as a source of inspiration. It's not a great joke to begin with, but then the movie acts as if it actually believes that Flashdance really did have something useful to say.

Working from a script by Vaughn and Jared Stern, Levy keeps the humor on obvious levels, but it's not easy to believe that two guys in their 40s could be this deficient in "technical" knowledge, particularly Vaughn's character, who's made to seem dumber than he needs to be.

An example: Instead of talking about going on-line, Billy talks about going "on the line." If that's your idea of wit, have it, but that (and much else about The Internship) struck me as strained and slightly pathetic.

Levy seems to be trying to freshen an old formula by setting his comedy in the middle of a high-tech mecca where the two older guys become part of a team that's competing with other teams for permanent jobs at Google, which the movie seems to regard as the equivalent of ascension into heaven.

The competition makes it possible to add characters who presumably are meant to woo a younger demographic. Dylan O'Brien plays the bright but jaded young teammate; Tobit Raphael portrays a home-schooled Asian mama's boy, and Tiya Sircar appears as the girl in the group who pretends to be more street smart than she really is. Josh Brener plays the team leader, the Google employee who's supposed to whip his charges into fighting shape.

In addition to designing apps and learning how to work Google's help line, the teams even square off in a Quiddich match.
I doubt that we needed more evidence that Google is a nesting place for the kind of young people who are fluent in Harry Potter-speak. At times, the movie makes Google look like summer camp for nerds with Type-A personalities.

Aasif Mandvi provides additional support as the stern Google manager who oversees the competition, and Max Minghella plays an overly competitive and eminently dislikable rival of our sometimes feckless heroes.

Being a red-blooded adult, Wilson's character falls for an older Googler played by Rose Byrne about whom, in this instance, there's little worth saying.

Cameo appearances from Will Ferrell and John Goodman are funnier than some of the more extended roles, although Goodman's playing a variation on the kind of supposedly savvy hustler he's played many times before.

You won't be surprised to know that Vaughn and Wilson, reprising their previous teaming in Wedding Crashers (2005), wind up helping their younger charges, cementing an otherwise uneasy relationship. A night of club-hopping in San Francisco helps build a bridge between generations.

Vaughn does his talk-fast, say-little shtick, as someone in the movie points out; Wilson relies on his oddball sincerity, and the whole thing passes without downloading enough laughs to make it a summer stand-out.

Put another way: Google top funny comedies, and The Internship isn't likely to show up -- unless of course Google -- which, among other things, comes off looking like a beehive of busy creativity -- compiles the list.