It’s difficult to conceptualize now, with it being such an institution, that Saturday Night Live was once cutting-edge. Nearly fifty years on, it has fallen into tedium, barely anything on the show can be considered truly original, daring, or groundbreaking -and you could make the argument it is less relevant than ever as the sole standard-bearer of American sketch comedy, with fairly meagre political satire, and a cast who with less prospects in a comedy-depleted media landscape are less likely to break out beyond its parameters. But when it was formed, it represented a new and radical kind of television comedy, a nexus-point in the counter-culture driven by some of the most distinct young talents of the era waiting to break out. And it’s that nostalgia that director Jason Reitman and his writing partner Gil Kenan feed on in Saturday Night , a movie chronicling the chaotic night and enormous stakes of the franchise’s first ever show on October 11 th , 1975. And the circumstances of th
It’s wild to see, late in a U.S. Presidential election cycle, a biopic on one of the candidates that plays like a Scorsese crime drama, featuring scenes of blackmail, spousal abuse, gay orgies, and family backstabbing. It’s even wilder to know how little hyperbole is in such scenes; but then such is the character of Donald Trump -or at least the character, as this movie argues, that was moulded by his mentor Roy Cohn. Trump and his allies have unsurprisingly endeavoured to suppress The Apprentice since its Cannes debut -especially given the timing of its release and particularly damning portrait of the former and potentially future President, as it chronicles the formation of the ruthless tactics and zero-sum-game philosophy that have informed so much of his business and political careers. The fact of the movie’s distribution should not be taken for granted in light of this -because it doesn’t just aspire to tell the story of Trump but of the America that he has created. So much of it