Author: BRWC

Saturday Night: The BRWC Review. By Daniel Rester.

Many comedic legends have gained fame through Saturday Night Live, the American sketch comedy show that began as NBC’s Saturday Night in 1975 and is still airing today. It is now 50 seasons and 970 episodes in. But its legacy wasn’t always a guarantee as creator Lorne Michaels first had to establish his cutting-edge vision for the TV show. 

Jason Reitman’s film Saturday Night plays out in nearly real time as it presents the 90 minutes leading up to the first live episode of the show on October 11th, 1975. Gabriel LaBelle plays Michaels as he rushes between rooms and the studio as he tries to establish some order to the chaos of the creative process. A million things come at him at once as he wrangles the cast and crew to be able to go live and prove their talent. 

Saturday Night plays out in a manic fashion, with frequent dialogue overlaps, plenty of whip pans and tracking shots, and snappy editing. Reitman takes a cue from Birdman (2014) in displaying a lead-up to a performance in a stylish and anxiety-inducing way, though Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan’s script lacks that film’s thematic depth and complex characters. That’s not to say the Saturday Night screenplay is bad. It’s just more on the surface as it juggles the many characters and situations. Reitman and Kenan still manage to make it entertaining and believable though. 

The cast here is huge, led by LaBelle, who manages to center the film with his likable performance even as the screen threatens to unravel around him at times. Cory Michael Smith is brilliant as Chevy Chase, perfectly delivering Chase’s wit and arrogance. Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Tommy Dewey as Michael O’Donoghue, and Matthew Rhys as George Carlin are also standouts. 

The female cast members, including Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster and Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, unfortunately get less moments that pop. Matt Wood feels like he is trying too hard as John Belushi at times, especially during his bursts of anger. Willem Dafoe and J.K. Simmons show up as David Tebet and Milton Berle, respectively, but I always just saw Dafoe and Simmons while their younger co-stars were disappearing into characters around them. 

I could spend ten more paragraphs listing all of the players that show up here. Most aren’t worth mentioning though as many of them have little to do. That comes with the territory of the real-time structure and focus on Michaels though. Everyone does fine, but Reitman and Kenan should have beefed up the script to play out longer so that we could get to know the myriad characters better. 

Thankfully the film does slow down for a few key moments in order to flesh out a couple of the relationships – and for the audience to catch its breath. One of the film’s best scenes is a simple argument in a stairwell between Michaels and his boss Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman). It offers an emotional punch to it that comes just at the right time. 

Reitman occasionally stumbles on his feet here (why is that random drug trip scene even included?), but for the most part he skillfully handles the staging of the fast pace and chaotic drama. He is aided by cinematographer Eric Steelberg, who’s 16 mm photography helps give texture to the project. Editors Nathan Orloff and Shane Reid’s meticulous cutting and Jon Batiste’s jazzy music score add to the film’s propulsive rhythm too. 

Saturday Night can be enjoyable for both diehard SNL fans and those less familiar with the show. Parts of it are exhausting and even annoying, but it’s mostly thrilling and funny. It makes for a fine showcase of a young and talented cast paying tribute to comedic legends. 

Rating: 8/10

The Outrun: Review. By Sarah Manvel.

During the days of the Hays Code, mainstream American movies were not allowed to depict certain human choices because these were seen as corrupting and/or evil by certain powerful people. This was infuriating to filmmakers of course, but clever subversion of the rules became par for the course. That was possible because contemporary audiences knew how to read between the lines. The trouble is that times move on, and younger audiences watching older movies didn’t realise the elisions were there. They either thought that older movies didn’t depict sex and drugs because the sex and drugs weren’t happening, or that sensitive subjects were avoided because of old-fashioned sensibilities instead of enforced censorship. 

Times have continued to change, and right now we are living in a world of puritanism and literalism. People raised under the constant surveillance supplied by smartphones fear nothing more than the loss of control, and thereby censor their own choices in order to provide themselves with the illusion of safety. The easiest example of this is in how alcoholic consumption has lessened in different age groups. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that anyone now who slides even a little out of line is judged as harshly as anyone was in Salem, Massachusetts. Thanks to social media, that judgement comes from a world of witch-hunters. This means stories of addiction must dial down the dark side and dial up the recovery angle; it’s no longer possible to be truly honest. The Outrun is a fictional adaptation of a memoir by Amy Liptrot and reveals bleakness and horror better than anyone expected it to. It’s just the nihilism on display is not that of alcoholism but of our current moment. 

The plot is presented non-chronologically, which cuts Rona’s (Saoirse Ronan, who also produced) downward spiral into easily digested little pieces. Her public misbehaviours involve overenthusiastic clubbing and irritating behaviour in the pub. Privately there’s a lot of falling down as well as screaming and crying at her nice boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu). The inciting incident that leads to rehab and a commitment to sobriety is a physical attack that, reading between the lines, includes a rape, but it is all so tastefully filmed, with major elisions both in time and in action, that even a big black eye doesn’t have an impact. 

After rehab Rona leaves east London for Orkney, the Scottish island where she was raised by loving English parents, her deeply religious mother (Saskia Reeves) and her mentally unbalanced father (Stephen Dillane), both of whom are only named in the credits. She gets a job protecting some endangered birds and spends a lot of time in the windy outdoors listening to pulsing club music. Metaphors about the importance of nature and the vividness of life on Orkney (in contrast with London, where Rona was a grad student, or something – money is never once mentioned) are ladled on thanks to a voiceover. And as Rona tries to pull herself together there’s a lot of time to ponder why this movie was made.

There are three reasons. Firstly, this is Oscar bait in a big way for Ms Ronan, who here is openly taking a page from the Kate Winslet playbook. Ms Winslet’s performance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was clearly used as a reference, not least in how both movies use the heroine’s brightly dyed hair to keep the timeframes clear. That movie also underplayed the heroine’s bad behaviour in ways that are easy for prize committees to appreciate. In a part designed to show off Ms Ronan’s range, the scenery does a surprising amount of the heavy lifting.

Secondly, as in our society, movies find it almost impossible to hold men accountable for their behaviour. There is no such issue with women. Remember Tár? That movie stands alone in recent years as a fictional movie about a sexual predator. But what was the last movie from the point of view of a fictional male sexual predator? (Not a biopic, a purely fictional movie about a man that’s as sympathetic as Tár is to Lydia.) The reason you probably can’t think of one is because male audience members cannot stand to watch movies about men behaving badly. Not to generalise, but generally speaking they would strike too close to home. (The ugliest online argument I’ve ever gotten into was about Tár with several male film critics who said I was a deviant, among other things, for wanting movies from the point of view of a rapist. I still think their inability to engage with my point only proves it.) So a movie about an attractive young woman being a bad girlfriend and trying to clean up a sloppy personal life is more watchable than a young man doing the same. We can stand to watch a woman being held responsible for her mistakes. For a man we can hardly imagine the same.

But that is because of the final reason The Outrun was made: there is no better way for a society to reinforce its standards of behaviour than by punishing people who deviate from them. Reading between the lines, the trauma of having a mentally ill dad is what prompted Rona’s slide into alcoholism. At no point is a reason explicitly given. There’s nothing about the stress of being a permanent outsider in an isolated and remote community. Nothing about the culture shock of moving to London or how a coping mechanism might go too far. Nothing about Rona’s choice of a career path in science and whether that famously misogynistic area might have damaged her mental health. Instead, as the party goes sour, we have a woman to blame. We’re supposed to be horrified when Rona tries to steal from the bartender or falls over in her kitchen or trusts the wrong man. There’s no concept at all that her choices could be good and rational ones just taken too far. And we’re not supposed to wonder why things have gotten so far out of hand.

The earliest days of rehab and withdrawal aren’t shown; at least the wildly successful play People, Places and Things, which has a similarly exhausting portrayal of female addiction, got that right. Rona barely has relationships with anyone except with Daynin and her parents; in Wild, as Reese Witherspoon hiked the Pacific Northwest, she had the other hikers to talk to. Even when older male addicts occasionally offer wise advise, the overall impression is that Rona is alone now. When she sits by herself in the dark on the remote corners of Orkney listening for an endangered and possibly absent species, this is framed as a healthy reconnection to the natural world, instead of denial and running away. The one time Rona connects with someone her own age on Orkney, cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer filmed the nameless man touching her foot before editor Stephan Bechinger cut to a shot of a departing ferryboat. This is self-censorship of the most puritanical kind. The only surprise is that director Nora Fingscheidt, who co-wrote the script with Ms Liptrot, never puts Rona on bread and water, too. The journey here is not healing, but penance.

Of course, in the current climate, if you stray from the proper path, penance is all anybody wants. The worst thing about The Outrun is that it agrees with that assertion. Rona’s father doesn’t always look after his health and this is depicted as inconsiderate to her, instead of something awful for him. Rona’s mother does wild swimming with a club of women from her church, and it’s taken as a sign of good health and recovery when Rona, who formerly sneered at the group, begins to do the same. 

Watching The Outrun feels worse than seeing a wild colt being forced to take the bit. Here the heroine must break herself because our puritanical moment demands it. Conform, or else. Weakness of any kind is a personal failing and bad judgement is unforgiveable. If The Outrun understood it was an infinite scream passing through nature it would have been a much better film. Instead it’s only a childish tantrum that has been memed to death. 

The Rubber-Keyed Wonder: Review. By Christopher Patterson.

A Vibrant and Quite Hooking Documentary

The Rubber-Keyed Wonder really surprised me. Honestly, going in, my only hope was to not be bored. Documentaries never usually hook me since they can meander, be poorly produced, and just be boring to sit through. But I was shocked from start to finish. I was actually mostly hooked. Yeah, it can be a bit too much in regards to its spilling of constant information, and yes, it can feel like a docu that expects you to know at least some information regarding Clive and the ZX Spectrum that might make it more of a chore to sit through, but it’s worth it. It really is.

Firstly, to know if this docu is your vibe, I recommend going through the first three or so minutes. The intro of this documentary sets up the vibe of this documentary. It has the information about the person in question, Clive Sinclair, but also makes sure not to bore you with all the details, and you see that with the cut to these kids looking at devices.It has this cozy vibe to it all that makes for a nice watch on a chill afternoon. 

Also, this documentary does this little thing that makes it superior to most documentaries. It doesn’t stay on one shot forever. The docu never stays five minutes on someone talking about something. In other words, it juggles the hard task of keeping your attention, always followed with awesome use of sources. Though, it can be a bit too quick in its cutting from shot to shot. 

One failure of many documentaries is the lack of data. I can count a dozen that barely give a source or a photo to support anything said. But here the docu succeeds. While we hear multiple people discuss Clive, for instance, it is always cutting to shots of Clive and dozens of sources that help not just to keep the viewers attention but make it fun to pause and try to look for a while at the photo or information presented. 

As someone who knows, to be frank, absolutely nothing about electronics, like at all, I feel like I learned something from this documentary. But, at the same time, I felt like there was more I could’ve learned if the documentary leaned more into more conversational dialogue. Much of the dialogue here never gives the casual viewer a chance to really sit back and digest all that is thrown out. While I gained some knowledge, I feel like a chance of truly slowing down the narrative and discussing things deeper was lost. While I found out more about Clive, for instance, I felt honestly extremely disappointed; the documentary never really gave you an introduction to him. He just appears, and hopefully you know him or you will be kind of thrown into his documentary.

And, if I had to think about it, that is kind of an issue with this documentary. Simply put, there are simply parts of this documentary that go from a to b at a point that makes me, someone who loves fast films, still have to rewatch parts at least four times to make sure I didn’t miss anything. 

VERDICT

The Rubber-Keyed Wonder is worth a watch, but a notebook feels required when viewing it unless you’re a tech expert. For myself, while I enjoyed it and have a lot to say about it, I can’t help but want to write about what could’ve been this documentary if it either took its time or was less too much information at once and even too many shots at once. With that, it’s an almost exhausting, but nonetheless excellent watch. 

3.5/5