How I'm Living Now: October 18

With mostly a lot to say about 'Saturday Night'

I saw a tweet a month or more ago that got me thinking. It was whenever latest there was some news or gossip item about Lorne Michaels not stepping down from his position as the Executive Producer of Saturday Night Live. The gist of the post was: another old guy not stepping aside to let the next generation take over.

It got me thinking because I was like, what? When people make that comment, they’re talking about elected officials I think approximately 100% of the time; they’re talking about the people who oversee public works and, like, the banks. They’re referring to institutions that are above the people who work for it, where a continuation of skills and expertise into the next generation is imperative to survival of civilization, am I wrong here?

So, then I thought, derisively, is Saturday Night Live too big to fail? It’s Lorne Michaels’ show, that he created and ruled like a fiedom for multiple generations. Why would he need to give up his own show? Who cares if Lorne Michaels won’t step aside for a fiftysomething?

And then I thought, wait, but actually, is Saturday Night Live too big to fail? Currently in its 50th season, there can be no question that for the past half century it has been the entertainment industry’s most successful and highest profile incubator of comedians and comedic writers and directors. Is it possible that it is functionally an arts institution that needs to be able to survive and exist without Lorne Michaels?

Well, it’s an interesting question, but the answer is no lol. The loss would certainly change the landscape of comedy in the future, it would absolutely be a seismic shift in the entertainment industry. But the vacuum wouldn’t remain one for long, another brand would emerge. In fact, keeping the SNL brand with new leadership might be a very bad idea, it might restrict new voices from being truly themselves; why not allow a Groundlings or UCB sketch comedy series, or a new group altogether, have a crack at it.

So, while the question that prompted this journey was in fact inane, it did lead me on a riveting thought exercise while I was in a cannabis-induced hyperfixated state.

But, you know who should not have a crack at building the new Saturday Night Live? Jason Reitman, Academy-Award nominated writer-director of Saturday Night, a movie about the 90 minutes before the series premiere of the storied television series Saturday Night Live, which due to contractual reasons had to be called, in the show’s first two seasons, simply, Saturday Night—now in theaters.

Saturday Night opens with a famous quote of Lorne Michaels’: “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready, the show goes on because it’s 11:30.” Someone near me in the sparsely populated theater went “mmm” and this movie became my enemy at once. We’re going to canonize the wisdom of Lorne fucking Michaels in 2024? Fucking kill me.

Like many millennial teens who had access to Comedy Central and E! in the 90s and 00s, I became obsessed with the original cast of Saturday Night Live through the viewing of ad-supported reruns, so I have a working knowledge¹ of who all the players are. And for the most part, the casting in this film is just heinous. The women are all done dirty (I’m gay so this is a focal point for me): Larraine Newman and Gilda Radner are basically set dressing, there to perform jokes about quick changes in the background, to make eyes at Dan Aykroyd, or to calm the Tasmanian devil John Belushi enough to go on with the the show. Even Jane Curtin, who delivers a brief ass monologue about how she was cast solely because she is a “hot mom” type, has no material beyond that 15 seconds.

As the film unfolded before me, I watched through my lens of hatred and incredulity, and through the film’s own lens of misogyny, applying it to every face and behavior I saw.

ACTORS WHO MORTALLY OFFENDED ME IN SATURDAY NIGHT (in alphabetical order):

• Nicholas Braun as Jim Henson

• Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner

• Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster

• J.K. Simmons as Milton Berle

• Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase

ACTORS WHO WERE SERVICEABLE IN SATURDAY NIGHT:

• Nicholas Braun as Andy Kaufman

• Emily Fairn as Laraine Newman

• Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels

• Kim Matula as Jane Curtin

• LaMorne Morris as Garrett Morris

• Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd

ACTORS WHO MIRACULOUSLY FOUND A WAY TO BRING SOMETHING TO THE TABLE IN SATURDAY NIGHT:

• Andrew Barth Feldman as Neil Levy (?)

• Cooper Hoffman as Dick Ebersol (despite being a decade younger than he’s supposed to be!)

• Nicholas Podany as Billy Crystal (he has 70 seconds of screen time and the only emotional moment that lands in the film)

• Matt Wood as John Belushi

Saturday Night is like watching someone who loves Aaron Sorkin try to do Aaron Sorkin, but do it even worse than Aaron Sorkin does. They’re yelling platitudes and talking fast! There are fires to put out everywhere, so we’d better keep walking and talking! I’m in an open marriage and my wife is going home with Dan Aykroyd after the show! [Cathy cartoon voice] Ayk!

By the end, when Lorne Michaels cornily explains his show is “a night out in New York City, meeting a girl and getting lucky in a phone booth” I couldn’t help but think of Liz Lemon’s “masterpiece” eye roll. Because that’s how I felt. I was so dazed leaving the theater, stumbling out onto Sunset Blvd. as the sun was actually setting, I got all the way to my car before realizing I had left my phone in the theater—a device I’m usually conjoined to all waking moments of the day.

I’ve said basically nothing but I’ve also said all I want to say, so let’s get to everything else I watched this week:

Television!

Disclaimer (new episodes Fridays on Apple TV+)

I absentmindedly wrote the title as “Disclosure.” God, I wish this was Disclosure. I am a fairweather fan of Alfonso Cuarón; I think most of his movies are very good. It is interesting kind of when a director who developed their signature style on movies with a large scope, try to use that same style on something much smaller. But it’s not good. It doesn’t work. And I don’t like seeing Cate Blanchett have to prostrate herself in front of Sacha Baron Cohen who her character is alleged to have cheated on some fifteen years ago. Don’t apologize to him, Cate! [Bill the Butcher voice] He ain’t earned it. Straight people are so boring and annoying about monogamy. Grow up and just fuck people other than your husband!

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry)

A movie I’ve seen a couple dozen times. It holds up, imo. In recent years, people have criticized the writing for Kate Winslet’s character of Clementine being a manic pixie dream girl, or whatever the criticism is, but I don’t think any character is written as fully fledged? And I don’t think that’s a flaw. I think they are all consistently archetypal in an interesting and dramatically satisfying way. Again: I am a millennial.

Death on the Nile (1978, John Guillermin)

I didn’t care for Peter Ustinov’s Hercule Poirot, I guess I’m an Albert Finney man but I don’t really have a horse in this race, but I mostly enjoyed this movie due to the amount of elderly women in it, and because I already know what it’s about because I saw the Armie Hammer / Gal Gadot version on 70mm after several large beers. Bette Davis, Maggie Smith, and Angela Lansbury are all funny as fuck in this movie, and they kept me laughing. Smith keeps yanking Davis out of her chair and physically pushes her around. Lansbury is a drunk. Fun!

The Lady in the Van (2015, Nicholas Hytner)

This movie sucks. Somehow not enough Maggie Smith in it, despite being first-billed and the titular character. She, of course, does amazing work with what she’s given, but the movie is turgid and stupid. But I’m the most stupid—this was a rewatch.

The Deer Hunter (1978, Michael Cimino)

Another movie I hadn’t seen in several years that really holds up. The first hour, showing what life is like in the idyllic mountains of Pennsylvania,² moves with life and excitement about the possibilities of the future. It also invites you to behold also the beauty of nature, the beauty of community, the beauty of Catholicism (unironic! Sometimes people can be normal about religion!), and then suddenly we are prisoners in Vietnam, and what follows is an hour of utter torment. The juxtaposition between the two modes heightens both, so that Meryl Streep is even more beautiful, and war is even more harrowing. These are the two polar extremes of beauty and evil in this world: 29-year-old Meryl Streep on one end of the spectrum and Russian roulette for fun and money during wartime on the other.

Red Rooms (2023, Pascal Plante)

Several smart oomfs logged Red Rooms in such a way that I thought, I simply must see this movie, most notably from Fran Magazine’s Boyfriend-in-Chief Phil. I was not really vibing with the movie at first (there is too much courtroom drama—I beg of filmmakers, please stop making courtroom dramas, you cannot make it interesting to me, a single viewer out of 10 billion people walking this earth) but as we get to know our protagonist and her motives, I became thrillingly invested, and the movie produced probably the most horrifying images in any movie released this year. The only movie on today’s viewing diary that I’ve thought about every day since watching.

Nothing But Trouble (1990, Dan Aykroyd)

Coincidentally watched Dan Aykroyd’s sole directorial effort the same week I would watch Saturday Night. I’ve been planning to do a ranking of all of Demi Moore’s Razzie Award nominations, but I don’t know if I can watch the final four after this. I never think she is bad, which is sort of the point of the proposed post, but the movies are really just so bad. Mostly I was on my phone during this.

Frantic (1988, Roman Polanski)

Watching my Polanski blindspots over the past two years has been unfortunately an extremely fruitful artistic project for me. I basically love every single one, to varying degrees. Frantic was no exception, grabbing you by the balls from the jump as Harrison Ford’s wife Betty Buckley suddenly disappears after they arrive in Paris for a medical conference. Friend of the newsletter Jake Bart put it best: 

Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)

After I got home from Saturday Night, I was desperate for a palate cleanser, so I rewatched Psycho after a suggestion from the Normal Newsletter’s Matt Erspamer. I was extremely stoned, and I felt like I was watching the movie for the first time. It is one of the most rock ‘n’ roll movies ever made by a major Hollywood studio and it’s kind of the greatest movie ever made. As Hitchcock aged, he deliberately alienated and mocked the audience more and more, and Psycho is one of the peaks of that project. Hitchcock said: I’m going to make the ugliest movie, it’s going to look like television, in fact I’ll use my television crew, and I’m going to use B-actors, and I’m going to show a toilet, and it’s not going to be in color, and you’re still going to eat it up. And yet all of its crassness and ugliness enhances the story of Norman Bates, a vice grip of a movie that tightens its grip until finally revealing the most frightening image in any movie ever made, Norman Bates in his mother’s dress, wielding a knife, grinning madly, a bald bulb swinging to and fro, casting him alternately in light and shadow. Never gets old!

^ you can’t caption a video on Substack dot com like you can a still image—but FYI this is me watching Rachel Sennott act.

Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)

I don’t know about you, but I can never just watch one Hitchcock. Rear Window is, for me, the most purely entertaining of Hitchcock’s films, the antithesis to Psycho’s alienating strategies. I find that there are no new pleasures to discover in Rear Window after seeing it some few dozen times, but the introduction of Grace Kelly, leaning over a sleeping James Stewart, remains one of the post powerful and glamorous star entrances ever! I really don’t think I’m being hyperbolic at all in this post, by the way.

Now and Then (1995, Lesli Linka Glatter)

While this is not one of Demi Moore’s Razzie nominated films, I still decided to watch it during DemiFest 2024 because it’s a movie that my sister and her friends watched a hundred times. I never liked it then, and I wondered if it was just, like, my fear of being called “gay” that caused me not to like the movie as a child. Well, I’m gay now, and I still didn’t like it.

The Secret Garden (1993, Agnieszka Holland)

Deranged picture. I decided to watch this after Now and Then to make a double feature of movies my sister watched a ton as a child. This one I watched with her frequently, and all of the big emotional moments came to me as if in a distant dream as they unfolded before me. The children are all creepy, sometimes for the better but usually for the worse, and I really don’t like seeing Maggie Smith being so stubbornly wrong. I want her stubbornness used for good! Not to keep the pale boy in bed when he is perfectly healthy! Ultimately, I wanted the children to die, but I didn’t hate the watch.

Hot Guys Whose Pictures I Looked At

New Cillian pics

This one is my favorite

Shawn Mendes from Interview Magazine photoshoot where he looks like he is in the war while also giving whore

1. I’m being modest. I’m a rabid fan of the original cast.

2. This had me googling “are the Appalachians in Pennsylvania? What mountain ranges are in Pennsylvania? Since when does Pennsylvania look so beautiful.” I am from California.)