I think we can all agree what the Superstar movie proved that we could always use a little more of that Mary Katherine Gallagher sketch. Or, wait... I didn't see it, and neither did anyone else. So naturally they open the show with it. Yikes. But that's what you get when you bring back, to me, one of the least missed cast members of the last, oh, decade and a half. But Molly Shannon's got a movie (Year of the Dog) to plug, and I guess they want to help out friends of the show.
What worked: The return of Kristen Wiig's hair twisting desperate to be liked character, fringe candidate debate, MacGruber! (which rather cleverly evolved into a David Hasselhoff joke).
What didn't: Superstar Idol, Sally O'Malley at the Bing, Linkin Park (I've never cared for them at all), Weekend Update (it wasn't bad, for the most part, but the Molly Shannon "bad stand-up" segment derailed it and went on way too long), whatever Amy Poehler is calling that character that used to be Andy Richter's little sister on Conan, Tales from the Greatest Generation, Charli Coffee.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Saturday Night Live, Molly Shannon/Linkin Park
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Saturday Night TV
Scarlett Johansson and Bjork is an unusual combination. Early on, Scarlett looked really stuck on the cue cards, so I was worried that would be distracting the whole time, but it was only the first couple sketches. She did an ok job, the writing didn't do much for her though. In the monologue her top was barely holding her in, which was kinda nice... but is her singing voice really that low? She sounds like Princess Vespa in Spaceballs. A couple pretty good sketches, mostly weaker than usual. More thoughts after the jump.
Really lame opening, even with the Chuck Schumer cameo. Is there any reason they always open with the George Bush bit?
Roy Rules! ruled. Why is the digital short always so much funnier than everything else?
Kristin Wiig reprises her role with the reporter who gets distracted by her attraction to an interviewee. But what on earth was with the cat mauling at the end of the sketch? It really wasn't funny, and was extremely poorly executed, with the stick the cat was hung by going well into frame.
I've never been a Bjork fan, but you have to respect someone who's not afraid to go out and sound completely different. She mixes up her sound all the time, but never sounds like anyone else.
Weekend Update was pretty good. Some nice jokes, and the people other than the anchor were actually kinda funny for a change. Too often lately they've completely derailed the whole segment for me, but Will Forte's song wasn't bad at all.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Catching Up
A loooong weekend away from home. I caught a couple shows... Painkiller Jane was as bad as I'd heard it was. And SNL with Shia LaBeouf was pretty dull, except for the digital short (Dear Sister, featuring Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek"), and Sofa King. Also, I'm twice the age and half the X-chromosomes of Avril Lavigne's target demographic, so that didn't do much for me. The big thing I missed out on was the three hours over two nights premiere of Drive.
Spoilers for that after the jump:
Drive: A cross-country race run by a mysterious organization that took extreme measures to coax people into the race, I knew about. Clues about each stop on the way, sinister penalties for finishing last, I did not know. Three hours in, we've got plenty of mystery, and relatively exciting car chases and things. The effects aren't movie-quality, but they're passable. It doesn't seem as well-written as Tim Minnear's earlier efforts, but I think this is meant for a broader audience. Still, it's well above the Fast and the Furious-type dialogue that is normally associated with car stories.
So far we've met seven people (above), as far as we know, that work for the race officials, and we're familiar with several teams:
Nathan Fillion and Kristin Lehman play Alex and Corrina. Corrina was kidnapped 27 years ago for the race, and her parents died just shy of the finish line trying to win her back. Former semi-pro auto racer Alex is in it to win back his wife (Angel's Amy Acker) who was kidnapped by the powers that be. A cop (Law & Order's Richard Brooks) and Alex's sister (Katie Finneran from The Inside and Wonderfalls) are back in Nebraska looking into the disappearance of his wife and subsequent disappearance of him.
They have a leg up on the competition, since Corrina seems to know more about the race than anyone else, and has a USB drive with apparently info on the other racers. But the leg up isn't much help, since Alex apparently was the wheelman on a number of bank robberies and on the hook for some murders, and it looked like he was getting arrested, but it was just an excuse to get him out of his crappy truck and into his old racing car. 
Wendy Patrakas (Melanie Lynskey) just had a baby, who the race people took. It sounds like her husband is crazy, jeolous, a workaholic, and abusive. She kinda sucks at the whole racing thing, but she's obviously motivated. She ended up coming in last in the first leg, which earned her a gun and the assignment to "eliminate" Ivy (Taryn Manning). We don't know much about Ivy at this point, except that she was in New Orleans during Katrina, and apparently has no money. Wendy gets around her elimination task on a technicality by getting Ivy to join up with her.
Winston Salazar (Kevin Alejandro) just got out of jail. We have no idea what he did (or didn't do). His rich father abandoned his family when Winston was seven. After getting invited to the race, he goes to pick up some pocket money by stealing from his dad. But instead he finds his half brother, Sean, who didn't even know Winston existed. They team up, but Winston is on parole, so a bounty hunter is after him. He gets picked up, but Sean calls in his father's yes man and gets him out.
Elle and Rob Laird (Mircea Monroe and Riley Smith) are our only husband and wife team. He's in the Army, she wants him out. So she grabs his cell phone and deletes the message letting him know that his unit's being redeployed to Iraq. Which I guess makes him AWOL. They've probably gotten the least development so far, with a lot of the scenes featuring them focusing on showing off Elle's body, which I am all for.
John Trimble ("That Guy" Dylan Baker) is an Astrophysicist who's dying. The only thing keeping him alive are his meds, and he doesn't have enough to last the whole race, apparently. He's driving along with his daughter Violet (Emma Stone), who... is a teenager, but otherwise isn't remarkable in any way. But she and her father have a nice relationship, and it looks like Sean Salazar is hot for her, so I'm sure that'll show up later.
We leave off at a cliffhanger, where everyone (including us, we hope) is about to learn a lot about the race. I, for one, am excited.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Saturday Night TV
Saturday Night Live: Peyton Manning hosting this week, and he did a pretty admirable job. He's obviously not a professional actor, but had had fun with it. Mostly, he just played someone exactly like himself, except funnier.
I appreciate a guy who can make fun of himself, and Manning did a nice amount of it. He told a great joke in the monologue (full disclosure: I'm a Patriots fan), "What do Tom Brady and the circus have in common? They both have two more rings than you do," and they did a sketch where people used the phrase "pulling a Peyton Manning" to mean looking impressive until the stakes are high and then choking. 
I had to look up Carrie Underwood to figure out who she was. I guess that means I'm old and out of touch (and that I don't watch American Idol). But I quickly became a fan. Not so much of the music, but she's got nice legs and was wearing a tiny skirt. I'm easy to please.
Some highlights: the beginning of the halftime sketch, where Manning gave the best line of the show ("I just thought about going out there for the second half, and a little bit of pee came out."), the meat loaf/toilet car commercial, the couple drinking coffee, and Sen. Tim Calhoun on Weekend Update is always funny. But the absolute best part was the United Way ad. They could've filled the entire 90 minutes with Peyton Manning hitting kids with footballs, and I wouldn't have complained.
Lowlights: the middle of that halftime sketch with what sounded like a Herb Alpert song just dragged on forever, Bronx Beat is never funny, after 30 seconds it became pretty obvious that he wasn't going to throw that rock in the 300 sketch but it kept going for another two minutes, and Weekend Update. I liked Tim Calhoun as I said earlier, but two things stuck out. First, during the "Zoo News" piece, there were some good jokes in there, but Seth Myers read them like it was a race. I think there were commas in those sentences but he read it like they weren't there. Second, obviously since I didn't know Carrie Underwood, the Sanjaya sketch did nothing for me. I'd hear about him and the crying girl, but I can't say it did anything for me. And he was picked by the judges out of a very large talent pool, so even though he might be the worst singer out there, that still makes him a very good singer.
Shia LaBeouf with Avril Lavigne (hey, I've heard of her!) next time out, but that's not for a few weeks.
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Saturday Night TV
SNL continues a really erratic schedule, but it's new this week and next, before (I think) going on another hiatus:
- Hellboy: Blood and Iron: The second in the animated Hellboy series (after Sword of Storms) had a one-time-only airing on the Cartoon Network tonight. So if you missed it, you'll have to wait for the DVD. Like the first one, it wasn't extraordinary, but the animation was cool and the voice acting again featured much of the cast of the live-action movie. This one focused on Bruttenholm (which is apparently how the name pronounced "broom" is spelled), voiced by the great John Hurt, and vampires. And vampires are pretty cool.
They told the story in a pretty unusual manner, split between the present day and a flashback to events early in Bruttenholm's career, before he found Hellboy. What made it strange was that the story in the past was told in reverse, with each flashback taking place shortly before the previous one, while the action in the present moved forward. It was interesting, though I'm not sure it accomplished all that much. - Saturday Night Live: Julia Louis-Dreyfus wasn't bad, but she wasn't given much to work with. When you do a sketch about hot robot-on-robot sex, you're 99.9% of the way to getting me laughing, but somehow they still managed to drop the ball. And they brought out Deep House Dish yet again... either I'm just getting old and I'm not hip enough to get the sly commentary about the dance music scene, or the sketch is lame and it's always lame. Even Weekend Update was weak, with a lengthy boring St. Patrick's Day bit that didn't work, and the return of the Anna Nicole Smith trial judge, which I didn't like the first time. The Chris Rock intro and the Italian talk show weren't bad.
The highlight of the show to me was during the boom mic sketch, when the director suggested that Jason Sudeikis's character put the mic under the frame rather than above it, there was a segment of the audience that reacted with the sort of laugh reserved for especially dirty jokes. If they're like me, it's because they were expecting him to try to put the mic up her skirt, which would've been pretty funny, though I'm not sure they could show that on TV.
Snow Patrol was the musical guest, one of many this year that I'd never heard of (though I recognized one of their songs). They sounded ok, but pretty much exactly like dozens of other bands.
On the Tivo: Halfway Home, Jericho. Every review I read of October Road was negative, so I'm probably just going to delete it.
Caught a promo for Thank God You're Here, NBC's upcoming improv show, that looks pretty cool. It premieres April 9th.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Saturday Night TV
Rainn Wilson on SNL! I've been excited about this:
- SNL: The good:
- The opening CNN bit was funny, but a little sad, considering how close it's been to the truth.
- I'm glad they got the Office parody out of the way early, and that they kept it short.
- The singing along to Danny's Song sketch was hilarious, though... the ending was lame, but the rest was funny enough that I didn't care.
- Another good digital short, thought it went by so fast, I'm sure I missed some jokes. And again, they kept it short.
- The peeping sketch. Pretty weak material, but Rainn Wilson's darting eyes really sold it.
- The Arcade Fire. I've only vaguely heard of them, but they sounded pretty good.
The bad:- The weird German-type people are never any good.
- White Possum Scream. Rainn Wilson drinking Dr. Pepper like that was funny, as was the Dunston Checks Out poster. The rest was very un-funny.
I also did end up seeing Las Vegas from yesterday. As a commenter pointed out, they had some plot twists of a more serious nature, in addition to the standard goofiness.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Last Night's TV
Not much on Saturday Night. SNL, and I've been watching the digitally remastered Star Trek original series (which I won't write about, cause there's already plenty on the net about Star Trek:
- SNL: When the first sketch out of the monologue is the Bronx morning show one, you know you're in trouble. Forrest Whitaker is a pretty good singer, which was a pleasant surprise, but otherwise he brought nothing to the table. He wasn't too awful - he stayed mostly off the cue cards, at least. The only highlights to me were the Weekend Update bit with Billy-O the astronaut (especially the line about Top Gun's "intricate high fives"), the digital short (Andy popping into frame), and the closer (the incredibly weird Sloth documentary). For some reason whenever they do something that's completely off the wall, I love it.
I watched Nashville on TCM, and haven't written about it yet. If I get any veg out time in before animation stuff on FOX tonight, I'll work on Buffy/Angel (I never watched them when they were new, but I've borrowed the DVDs... I'm about halfway through season 6 of Buffy/season 3 of Angel). Episode-by-episode writing for those would be way too time consuming, so I might do season reviews instead.
