Watched a couple movies on a flight, and they were both exactly what I look for on a flight: just passably amusing enough to distract me from the fact that our air safety is being increasingly compromised by my self-destructive countrymen but not so good that I regret having watched it on a tiny screen on the back of someone's head:
Saturday Night
The recent movie about the first episode of Saturday Night Live. I figured it would be a love letter to itself since the main character, Lorne Michaels, is still the producer of SNL so yes indeed it does portray him, his writers and the cast as visionary comedic bad-boys. However, the movie worked well enough due to its intense pacing, brevity, and the remarkable job most of the cast did of channeling the publicly held perceptions of the people involved.
I did not recognize any of the actors playing the cast except one- the black guy from New Girl- and I don't know how accurate they were to their real counterparts but if you ever did watch any of the original SNL you can imagine it being true. The guy playing Dan Ackroyd for example mimicked his tone and cadence perfectly and captured the spirit of his motor-mouth verbally dense approach to comedy. The guy playing Chevy Chase did a good job playing an asshole and this is all he had to do since the real Chase has really worked hard to earn that reputation. The women and the one black guy got short shrift in terms of focus and responsibility which is either ironic or too clever by half because they even talked about that happening to them in the movie!
There were some more well-known folks in smaller roles- Willem Defoe as a Evil Corporate Man, Matthey Rhys as host George Carlin, and J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle. They all chewed their scenery and it was all very surreal and kind of stupid to watch anyone try to impersonate these legends.
My least favorite part was everything with John Belushi. They really portrayed him as some sort of horrible monstrous man-child and I don't know what would be worse- that he really was like that or that the movie just did him really dirty. Other wise, the rest of this movie could have been a lot worse.
Free Guy
Ryan Reynolds plays... well, look, you know his deal, and either you can be amused by it for a shy 80 minutes or you can't. I actually can- I'll take a handsome goofball, why not. This movie is about video games actually and it's as silly as that sounds. It's... ok. Some very good visual gags. Also has the girl from Killing Eve (not Eve, the one that's killing Eve), The skinny guy with nice hair from Stranger Things, and Taik Watiti. It was very stupid but the action sequences, ironic-by-half musical drops, and quipity quips helped drown out ~40% of the brat in row 12 that would not stop shrieking for the whole f'n flight.
Saturday Night
The recent movie about the first episode of Saturday Night Live. I figured it would be a love letter to itself since the main character, Lorne Michaels, is still the producer of SNL so yes indeed it does portray him, his writers and the cast as visionary comedic bad-boys. However, the movie worked well enough due to its intense pacing, brevity, and the remarkable job most of the cast did of channeling the publicly held perceptions of the people involved.
I did not recognize any of the actors playing the cast except one- the black guy from New Girl- and I don't know how accurate they were to their real counterparts but if you ever did watch any of the original SNL you can imagine it being true. The guy playing Dan Ackroyd for example mimicked his tone and cadence perfectly and captured the spirit of his motor-mouth verbally dense approach to comedy. The guy playing Chevy Chase did a good job playing an asshole and this is all he had to do since the real Chase has really worked hard to earn that reputation. The women and the one black guy got short shrift in terms of focus and responsibility which is either ironic or too clever by half because they even talked about that happening to them in the movie!
There were some more well-known folks in smaller roles- Willem Defoe as a Evil Corporate Man, Matthey Rhys as host George Carlin, and J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle. They all chewed their scenery and it was all very surreal and kind of stupid to watch anyone try to impersonate these legends.
My least favorite part was everything with John Belushi. They really portrayed him as some sort of horrible monstrous man-child and I don't know what would be worse- that he really was like that or that the movie just did him really dirty. Other wise, the rest of this movie could have been a lot worse.
Free Guy
Ryan Reynolds plays... well, look, you know his deal, and either you can be amused by it for a shy 80 minutes or you can't. I actually can- I'll take a handsome goofball, why not. This movie is about video games actually and it's as silly as that sounds. It's... ok. Some very good visual gags. Also has the girl from Killing Eve (not Eve, the one that's killing Eve), The skinny guy with nice hair from Stranger Things, and Taik Watiti. It was very stupid but the action sequences, ironic-by-half musical drops, and quipity quips helped drown out ~40% of the brat in row 12 that would not stop shrieking for the whole f'n flight.
