(15) 109 mins
ONCE you’ve seen the first ever Saturday Night Live sketch you’ll wonder how the show lasted a week let alone half a century.
The skit featuring the late, great John Belushi learning English before having a heart attack hasn’t aged well.
Even back in October 1975 it couldn’t have been fresh because Monty Python had already popularised such nonsensical gags.
Fortunately, this riotous comedy drama mainly tells the story of the couple of hours before the show went live rather than recreating the episode.
The main character is Lorne Michaels, played by Gabriel LaBelle, who is not only the producer of Saturday Night Live, but also a script writer and comedian.
His job is to keep everything together, which isn’t easy when Belushi (Matt Wood) doesn’t want to dress up as a bumble bee and Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith) thinks he’s the star of the show.
There are more sketches than they have time for, which means Lorne has to bruise a lot of egos by shortening the acts or dropping some altogether.
The talents vying for air time included Billy Crystal and Dan Aykroyd.
Wood and Smith look and feel so like Belushi and Chase, you’d almost believe you were in their company.
The other challenge is convincing NBC TV executive David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) to air the show.
The two-faced Tebet talks about encouraging new talent, while in fact wanting to protect the interests of ageing host Johnny Carson, whose Tonight Show was threatened by the new kids on the block.
In between there are some brilliant cameos, most notably JK Simmons as “Mr Television” Milton Berle, whose “party trick” is to reveal how big he is in the manhood department.
Swirling around these human resources headaches are crashing lights and stoned staff.
Fortunately, Lorne does have the calm support of writer girlfriend Rosie Shuster (Rachel Sennott).
This romance could have been better developed, but the ticking clock element of this drama provides more than enough tension.
And Saturday Night the movie certainly raised a lot more laughs than a recent Saturday Night Live hosted by Timothee Chalamet.
Just for once, the story behind a comedy show is funnier than the real thing.
(12A) 97mins
PANSY is the type of person who can start an argument in an empty room – and leave the walls trembling.
Whether she’s at the supermarket or at the doctor’s surgery, director Mike Leigh’s latest character study finds someone to fire her two barrels of anger at.
A customer is told to “shut her fat hole”, while a GP is dismissed as “a mouse with glasses squeaking at me”.
Pansy is the complete opposite to the director’s upbeat Poppy in his 2008 movie Happy-Go-Lucky.
Both, for me, were difficult to spend too much time watching.
That is no slight on actress Marianne Jean- Baptiste, whose performance as Pansy is so furious it could leave you with PTSD.
The superb acting is not the problem with Leigh’s latest kitchen-sink drama set in modern London.
My issue with Hard Truths is that various characters, scenes and potential plot lines appear and then go nowhere.
The film is apparently a comment on the stresses of post-Covid Britain, but you wouldn’t know that from the story, which centres on the deeply depressed Pansy.
The unpalatable reality is that Hard Truths is not the film to drive away any January blues.
(15) 97mins
IF you’ve seen the trailer for Companion, you not only know the central twist, but pretty much the entire plot.
If you don’t know what this bloody comedy set in the near future is about yet, I’m not going to spoil it for you.
It starts off with a voiceover as Iris (Sophie Thatcher) tells the audience that the two happiest days in her life were when she met Josh (Jack Quaid) and “the day I killed him”.
I went into the screening clueless, having no idea what was so off about the relationship between this initially picture-perfect looking couple.
The sweet-natured Iris starts off needy and anxious, while Josh is clearly not so infatuated with her.
Finding out how and why she kills him is a lot of fun.
There is also a wonderfully hammy performance from Rupert Friend as a Russian billionaire, who has invited Josh and Iris to stay for the weekend, plenty of cartoonish deaths and some good gags.
There is also a thought- provoking message here beneath all the action, but that’s not what Companion is here for.
As the film goes on, the plot becomes increasingly ridiculous, but director Drew Hancock clearly doesn’t want us to take any of it too seriously.
Simply unplug your brain and enjoy.
