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[realjeffl]

Movie Review: Saturday Night

Director: Jason Reitman

Runtime: 1h 49m

D-

Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!

And with those iconic words first spoken by Chevy Chase back in 1975 the SNL legend was born.

50 years later we have the major motion picture about that first night, Saturday Night.

The movie takes the audience through the chaos, frustration, and almost not aired first episode. The first half of the movie is like a long tracking shot through the corridors and backstage of preparation.

The second half slows down a bit to go deeper into the fact that SNL was chosen to fail due to a contract dispute with Johnny Carson and Lorne Michaels being a nobody that was being bet on to not succeed.

The problem with this movie is it never really decides what it wants to be. It’s either too all-over-the-place to try and throw you into the chaos which doesn’t work at all and instead is an anxiety inducing mess or it doesn’t go deep enough to explode any one character or issue.

On top of that, the sheer schmaltz of trying to throw in legendary skits during the rehearsals leading up to 11:30pm is cringe-inducing and is fairly insulting truth be told.

Saturday Night had such potential but instead it felt like an awful hangover on Sunday morning.

[realjeffl]

Eric is a truly original story about a man named Vincent played by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Vincent is the creator of a show called, Good Morning Sunshine, a Sesame Street style show in which he creates, stories, scripts...and puppets.

Vincent's marriage to his wife Cassie (played by Gaby Hoffman), is on the rocks. Scratch that, it has hit the rocks hard. They are viscerally fighting (again) the night before their son Edgar disappears.

What ensues is a story of mystery, mayhem, and whodunit wormholes that the viewer is taken down, quite literally.

As Vincent descends into a frantic frustration he begins to see and talk to his son's drawing-come-to-life puppet, Eric, who is a hard-nosed, grisly creation who tells Vincent the things about himself that he doesn't want to hear.

Eric, is a six episode limited series that is both interesting and a bit stretched to thin at the same time.

It is obviously a unique take on the child disappearance storyline but it sometimes can't seem to decide what it is - a a thriller, a drama, a mystery. Although it weaves together at the end, it just seems a bit forced albeit in a believable way.

C