Tag: Saturday Night Live

Writer’s Desk: Deadlines Help

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Writers like to complain. It’s one of our favorite pastimes. We particularly enjoy griping about deadlines. How unreasonable they are, how foolish we were to agree to them, how we couldn’t possibly get everything done before them, and so on.

But, against our nature as it might be, there are times when we should embrace the deadline.

Consider Saturday Night Live. Every week while in season, the writers ponder, pitch, write, rewrite, throw ideas into the garbage can in disgust, fish those ideas out later and dust them off, and generally burn the candle at every possible end to put a show together by the end of the week. As anybody who has watched the show over the years can attest, the end product is not perfect. But it never could be. Because endless time can be its own kind of trap.

SNL founder and creative mind Lorne Michaels famously put it this way:

The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.

Be thankful for the deadline. If not for that, you might never finish writing.

Screening Room: ‘Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-Documentary, Publishing / Media1 Comment

'National Lampoon': Funny people (Magnolia)
‘Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon’: Funny people (Magnolia)

Natlamp73Remember magazines? National Lampoon was one of the best. Beyond serving as something of a thinking man’s Mad, it also fostered that upswell of talent coming out of the Chicago comedy improv scene in the 1970s and midwifed them to stardom at Saturday Night Live. Sure, that ultimately led to Coneheads the movie, but we can probably lay that more at Lorne Michaels’ feet.

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon is playing now in limited release; my review is at PopMatters:

People who only know National Lampoon as that odd possessive sitting atop posters for Animal House andVacation might be surprised by some details provided by Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon. They might not have realized the depth of talent the comedy magazine cultivated. Or they might be surprised learn this monthly publication had a circulation of one million. Or that Chevy Chase was once considered a comedy genius…

Here’s the trailer:

Now Playing: ‘Girl Most Likely’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

Kristen Wiig and Annete Bening in 'Girl Most Likely'.
Kristen Wiig and Annete Bening in ‘Girl Most Likely’.

girlmostlikelyposter1Every so often a former SNL performer finds their way to a career outside sketch comedy. Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, and so on. But there’s an even longer list of those who found that their talents just didn’t translate well into different mediums. One new addition to that list just might be Kristen Wiig, whose new comedy Girl Most Likely is out in theaters now. To her credit, she’s far from the worst thing about the the movie.

My review is at Film Racket; here’s part of it:

As the star of the flimsy, dreary debacle that is Girl Most Likely, Kristen Wiig joins the august pantheon of modern actresses forced to debase and humiliate themselves for ninety minutes or so of pop-song-scored OMG embarrassments. Her Imogene is another in a long line of female screen neurotics who are brought low by an inability to get out of their own head before being rescued by a patient, doe-eyed, and dark-haired dreamboat with a Crest Whitening smile. Michelle Morgan’s manic script — which cruises along on derivative and mean-spirited cliche before detouring into are-they-joking inanity in the last section — barely situates Imogene before it starts to destroy her; this may be an irrelevant problem, though, since she’s such an unpleasant piece of work that more time in her company wouldn’t have created more sympathy…

You can see the trailer here: