SATURDAY NIGHT (2024)

A more fitting title of this novelty biopic would be ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE BEGINNING OF SATURDAY NIGHT with all the seemingly deliberate fiction added... And the original working title was SNL 1975 except that Howard Cossell owned the name SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE for his failed prime time comedy/variety show...

Which is how Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtain, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner and Garrett Morris became the NOT ready for prime time players.... which the cast members are STILL called, and all because a sportscaster made a bad comedy show on prime time... As everyone knows, the original cast are the best... or at least the most classic and endearing... and what this movie does is take PT Anderson's multi-layered Magnolia route funneled through that movie's muse in Robert Altman's quirky ensembles Nashville and Short Cuts... And a maddened running-around it is, in real time no less, of the cast and crew preparing for the first episode of the series... Meanwhile, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase and John Belushi look fantastic, and their acting is pretty good, going just a step beyond imitation... After all, it's not easy portraying a semi-modern actor (or actress) who would also star in classic movies... So basically, you have to imagine the Chevy Chase actor in Fletch, the Dan actor in Ghostbusters, the John Belushi actor in... Anyway, you get the point: but the main problem here are some of the hangups that either didn't exist or are overly exaggerated...

Garrett Morris had a problem with how he was stereotyped AFTER the show went of the air... It's doubtful he would have the same gripes BEFORE becoming famous... Also, Morris was one of the few actual actors when the show began, appearing in CAR WASH and COOLEY HIGH before the rest of them were given their own vehicles... Basically, Morris was the genuine character-actor of the show, and sadly, they turn him into an anachronism of modern politically-correct sensibilities... But he's not in the movie much, and either are the women (replaced with Lorne Michael's writer wife, who no one really knows or cares about)... And unlike some of the guys, the girls don't look anything like the originals (Jane Curtain was NOT a sexy bombshell while Newman and Radner are practically nonexistent)...

And back to the rudimentary ONCE UPON A TIME example: director Jason Reitman does to Jim Henson what Quentin Tarantino did to Bruce Lee: making him look like a dimwitted fool when he was actually very helpful and downright brilliant... Okay, so his Muppets didn't fit a late night show that was basically a grungy American barroom's version of Monty Python... more weird in its origins than outright hilarious... but that doesn't mean he would act like a total buffoon...

Andy Kaufman, meanwhile, was an offbeat guy but it's doubtful he acted like Latka Gravis from Taxi, three years before the show came out... Yes, he created the Foreign guy before, but it's doubtful he spoke that way backstage... But since the actor looks nothing like him, they probably just wanted people familiar with Taxi to know who he was in the first place... And why on earth would Milton Berle be in this movie? Just to get the otherwise great actor JK Simmons a chance to chew scenery and waste precious time? And by the third act, too much time's wasted on all the wrong characters... Berle hosted a later infamous episode that even the all-around-nice-guy and show creator Lorne Michaels has destroyed from the archives... and Michaels is one of the better characters/adaptions here...

Through Lorne we have an effective pawn to channel all the madness through... It's just too bad that that madness is so overwhelmingly hit and miss... There are some involving energetic scenes one minute, and dark dramatic brooding scenes that follow, killing any kind of character-developed momentum that would make SATURDAY NIGHT more than a smug biopic geared for mega-fan baby boomers or generation Xers... Which, thankfully, unlike the National Lampoon cable biopic A Futile and Stupid Gesture (and particularly when Michael O'Donoghue tries too hard to be condescending towards any non-hippies), this NIGHT isn't as smug as it could have been... And sometimes there's some real heart beating in here, it just needed to be a lot more steady (and meaningful) throughout. Rates: **1/2

GIA (1998)

Angelina Jolie playing Gia Carangi would be like, musically, if Jeff Beck played a concert celebrating Eric Clapton... while both Jolie and Carangi are knockouts, they're completely different kind of knockouts: Gia was subtle, more cute-gorgeous while Angelia's... well... Angelina Jolie and, acting-wise, is quite good here, wielding the kind of energy that steals her own movie... yet it often feels more like a biopic set during the 1990's than the 1970's/1980's...

The director's partially to blame, making GIA seem a bit too much of exactly what it is: a risque cable movie (or one of those Don't Do Drugs Specials without any specific reasons behind her using) that sporadically almost-reaches big-screen potential (the documentary-style interview/interludes mirroring another doomed beauty flick, STAR 80)... meanwhile the lesbian scenes with Kim Dickens needed to evolve past cliche lipstick chic... although they did both have terrific chemistry in their build-up, and, overall, Jolie's almost too good here, not seeming like she's portraying an actual former niche celebrity but embracing the fact she's on the verge of becoming a revered beauty-icon herself: Or like she's rebooting Gia's life rather than factually reliving it... which isn't too shabby, either way. GRADE: B—

Kim Dickens and Angelina Jolie

James Haven and Angelina Jolie in GIA

White Shadow star Joan Pringle in GIA

MAESTRO (2023)

Fifty minutes into Bradley Cooper's MAESTRO, his directorial and starring-role biopic of composer Leonard Bernstein, he's discussing a possible book written about all his accomplishments, from teaching children on television to his best remembered work, West Side Story...

And yet we never got to witness any of it, instead  listening to he and classy wife Felicia Montealegre (a put-upon Carey Mulligan) within an intellectually-rambling romance from picnics to parties (in-between sporadic bisexual trysts) and not much else about the man that Cooper seems to have more fun portraying as a flamboyant and sophisticated, British-mannered, chain-smoking proto-beatnik than celebrating the legendary musical genius built right into the title... And aesthetically Cooper's cinematic influences... from LENNY to RAGING BULL to CAPOTE... are on full avant-garde display but with nothing behind it, really, except mere window dressing... with tinted glass. Grade: D

RICHARD JEWELL (2019)

All the negative reviews are mad at Clint Eastwood for portraying the media and one female reporter as being villains, and are blaming... get ready for this... Donald Trump and his supporters, somehow... The news-story here is about the 1996 Georgia Olympics bombing, when Trump was a New York City tycoon who the same pseudo-intellectuals that want his blood really admired... for all the money he donated to their causes... again and again... It must also be noted that anything produced by Leonardo "My car's electric unlike my super-yacht" DiCaprio (who almost co-starred) would be conservative, and it's crazy this is considered right wing, especially given the fact that every single political thriller since the 1960's have been catered to registered democrats, and most of these movies portray the FBI in a far crummier light than is displayed here...

Well here's something completely different: a negative review of Richard Jewell from someone who's not blaming Donald Trump: It's extremely dull and hardly covers the title character... a pathetic Paul Blartish security guard/cop wannabe blamed for the bombing... as having gone through a nightmare after being treated like a hero for spotting the explosive, and saving lives, because there's hardly any coverage of the good times when the media supposedly praised him... As for acting, the titular lead is very dull, yet even the negative reviewers are giving him singled-out props while Sam Rockwell goes through the motions as an underdog lawyer fighting the powers that be... Powers that really have no weight or significance here, fueled by a villainous female journalist who supposedly slept with an FBI agent for her big scoop... But when the reporter is portrayed as a cheap drunken skank from the get-go, and the agent is square-jawed Don Draper himself, it seems like just another sexual conquest for a really good looking guy (and Olivia Wilde is somehow made to look average here)...

In a nutshell, Richard Jewell doesn't pay favors to anyone: He and his mom (Kathy Bates) are as cookie-cutter cliche in their banal country-music-loving simplicity as the FBI and media are in their supposed pigheaded prowess, and, perhaps the mundane by-the-book approach in Eastwood's subtle (albeit lifeless) direction is purposeful... But for a supposedly suspenseful expose, there aren't any real thrills here, or twists, or turns, or urgency to matter beyond what feels more like a rehearsal/table-read than a motion picture. Rating: **

BORN AGAIN (1978)

Part Watergate political-historical biopic but mostly Christian propaganda that includes veteran actor (and our personal favorite) Dana Andrews quoting C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity to a somewhat selfish, partially greedy and supposedly only-coincidentally guilty Richard Nixon lawyer Chuck Coulson thrown into jail; and that's where the good stuff occurs, especially thanks to the always-intense blaxploitation ace Raymond St. Jacques, the tough guy in the federal prison...

Who initially bullies and then protects Coulsin, played by Dean Jones, usually cast in Disney flicks as their then-modern-day Jimmy Stewart; thus that kind of man-next-door quality keeps this character-study down-home and intriguing albeit one-sided and self-promoting yet never boring but not altogether great either but, for what can be called a 2-hour cinematic Alter Call (resembling a Television Movie-of-the-Week), BORN AGAIN fits both the title and purpose, nicely enough to pass the time since these kind of preachy melodramas can often feel like eternity. Rates: ***/12

THE BOSTON STRANGLER

year: 1968
rating: **

Director Richard Fleischer's Police Procedural biopic, using the multi-screen effect, only works until Tony Curtis is revealed as the real life killer, Albert DeSalvo, who, at the time this movie was made, was thought of as having multiple personalities...

When filming started DeSalvo had slyly escaped from the mental institution where he was to spend, most likely, the rest of his life. What's truly insane is the authorities thought a husband with two children and a full-time job would kill eleven women without knowing exactly what he was doing, and how or why he was doing it: The most effective scenes occur within each crime, sans the culprit. Meanwhile, Henry Fonda makes a literally weak/passive lead protagonist, replacing comparably effective and edgy, every-man detective George Kennedy, who started out on the killers' trail: one that eventually hits a prolonged dead end, and, progressive in the worst ways, THE BOSTON STRANGLER makes a psychic seem logical, a psychologist completely infallible, and this particular madman a victim. And an uninteresting one at that.