Saturday Night

It's a wildly entertaining love letter to a night of television that marked a cultural watershed.

At its best, the film demonstrates a showbiz truism: It takes a lot of hard work to make something look easy.

With so many potential crises underfoot, Saturday Night manages to pass the Apollo 13 sniff-test of historical dramas: we know everything’s going to come out all right, but the film nonetheless generates enough suspense to make us think that it might not.

The nostalgia is so thick in Saturday Night, Jason Reitman’s furiously busy paean to the nascent days of SNL, so unrelenting and potent, that eventually it unmoors from the film and begins swallowing its characters whole, like the titular alien in Steve McQueen’s The Blob.

Jason Reitman energetically tracks the lead-up to the first episode of SNL in 1975, but the result is only fitfully funny, leaving the cast struggling to register. Best in show are Dylan O'Brien as Dan Aykroyd, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase and Nicholas Braun in a surprise dual role.

The issue is that the mania never builds: a few crashing stage lights and the personalities surrounding Lorne never are convincingly erratic enough. There’s no real tension, and certainly nothing in the way of feature-justifying stakes.

There’s never the satisfying pleasure of problems being solved – just people frantically raising them and things magically coming together, a film that should be about process that doesn’t seem particularly interested in it.

Much better than I expected based on critic reviews. Great performances, frenetic energy executed deftly by Reitman, well paced. The whole movie is a crescendo until theseminallas

Saturday Night is a magnifying chaos filled with insanely great portrayal of these iconic real life comedian, Jason Reitman's energetic fun filmmaking style and Jon Batiste's electrifying score pumping and grooving in the background was truly one of the great addition to Saturday Night, while it might be tiring for some people, it brilliantly captures the essence of what an actual great chaos is, what's fascinating is that, if you're unfamiliar with the real-life people portrayed, you might assume they're exaggerated caricatures, when in reality, that's exactly how they act, again, thanks to the stellar performance by all the cast, the film biggest flaw, however, is that its high energy can be overwhelming and that it could have a chance to be a tiring movie to follow for other people, i felt it in the first 30 minutes, it's a movie that demands the right mood and mindset to fully enjoy, but once you find its rhythm, it becomes an entertaining and exhilarating ride from start to finish.

I have to admit that I liked it more than I've liked SNL for a while now. Most of that is directed towards Gabriel LaBelle, Cory Michael Smith, and Emily Fairn (I'm completely infatuated with her and they didn't show her enough for me). LaBelle did an amazing job carrying this for most of the movie and the tension built at a steady pace until the very end. I was expecting something more self-serving, but it really wasn't. HOWEVER! I did not like the portrayal of George Carlin. Even if it's true, I'm such a huge fan of his, I can't forgive that hey totally overlooked his genius just to **** on him here. The guy who played Belushi was terrible. We saw none of the wit and charm of the actual John Belushi. And for the cherry on top of that turd, they did this weird, touchy-feelie homage to both him and Gilda Radner, making them seem like some freewheeling hippies instead of edgy, funny, smart actors/comics. That was disappointing and the main reason for my rating of 6.

'Saturday Night,' which depicts the chaos leading up to Saturday Night Live's first episode broadcast, is an ineffective collection of disconnected vignettes with so many characters that it feels borderline random. While the performances are more than decent, writer/director Jason Reitman seems more interested in constructing a story focused on "and then this comedian showed up, and then this one." Ultimately, it feels more like a cosplay convention about legendary comedians. A curious film in terms of its anecdotal content, but too scattered to aspire to anything more.

Peeling back the curtain of SNL’s chaotic first-ever broadcast, Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night captures the high-pressure, all-encompassing anxiety of organizing a live network TV special on a hard deadline. Centering its attention on the show’s point man, a young Lorne Michaels, the film dashes from one fire to the next, shouldering past schmoozing executives, crisis-laden performers, unfinished sets, unhappy techs and the occasional stray llama en route to television history. In this setting, Michaels seems like the student who forgot a whole semester’s worth of homework and must now pay the piper. Under the eye of a ticking clock (and a wary studio watchdog who would be perfectly happy running a Johnny Carson repeat instead), Lorne struggles to prioritize, or even just think for a moment, amidst the crush of competing distractions. Get ready to hyperventilate. Gabriel LaBelle is appropriately goggle-eyed and overwhelmed in that primary role, and Willem Dafoe is smooth and sinister as his well-dressed corporate tormentor, but Saturday Night’s main lure is its cast of impersonators; the stars we might not know playing the ones we certainly do. These, unfortunately, aren’t so great. I’m not sure if it’s because the actors were unsuited to their roles or because the script didn’t put them in a position to succeed, but a majority of these quick-hit cameos and one-note impressions reminded me of Robert Downey’s famous line from Tropic Thunder. “I’m just a dude, playing a dude, disguised as another dude.” Few of the new faces look right, and besides their fleeting opportunities to revisit an old sketch from the golden days, they don’t feel right either. I had the same reaction to Jim Carrey’s rendition of Andy Kaufman during a recent re-watch of Man on the Moon: rather than a fresh take on a familiar figure, he gives us reheated coffee. Ghost racing is a lose-lose scenario because it’s impossible to outperform your audience’s rose-tinted memories. Cory Michael Smith’s turn as Chevy Chase is the one exception here, working through a mean but meaningful character arc amidst all the tumult. We can see he’s an egotistical jerk from the start, but over the course of a few hours, he eats enough **** from the higher-ups to learn what it REALLY takes be an upper-tier ****. Near the middle of the film, there’s a scene where he’s big-timed by Milton Berle (a nearly unrecognizable JK Simmons) and it catches Chase completely flat footed. As he stammers and flubs, we can see the mental gears turn, like he’s realizing his pompous **** game needs to gain a few levels before he’s ready to compete on the national stage. Even if it is highly fictionalized, that little segment explains a lot. When it has time to slow down and do its own thing, Saturday Night is duly reverent and darkly funny. The swarming frat house atmosphere backstage is fitting, a raging party of noise and harassment that very nearly stamps the life out of its own meek MC. Too often, though, it’s overcome by the urge to fit everybody in the frame even when there’s nowhere for them to go. The show runner we see on-screen does a better job of pulling everything together than the one hidden behind the camera.