Celebrating 40 Years of Stunning Mediocrity.

The American comedy institution SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE continues its tradition of not being funny, by throwing a 40th Anniversary Special and not being funny.

SNL 40 is not only Not Funny, it’s embarrassing, pathetic and painful. Why do these people put themselves through this? Why do they put US through this? Why do audiences keep watching? Excepting a few quality seasons during its formative years, and a handful of good gags and entertaining personalities through its history, SNL has never been a prime cut; longevity seems to be counting more towards SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE’s comedy legacy than actual quality.

SNL 40, broadcast by NBC on Sunday February 15, 2015, touted as “Comedy’s Biggest Stars Come Home,” boasts a studio audience that consists of everybody who is anybody (from Spielberg down), brings together past alumni, past hosts, shows montages of classic sketches and bits, only has time for a few musical numbers, showcases veteran cast re-doing classic bits, and retains an overall sense of undeserved mutual cock-stroking.

I’m not going to outline a laundry list of bits; in this overlong show, the bits themselves are irrelevant. It’s the overarching impact of this drudgerous wankfest; the cognitive dissonance of continually hearing how “good” it is and yet witnessing exactly the opposite. Bits which are poorly written and badly rehearsed, amateur timing from supposed professionals, forced laughter, titters where there should be guffaws, and sometimes, those uncomfortable silences into which your career spirals never to be resurrected again… We view this whole shenanigan with hands over our faces, peeking through the gaps in our fingers.

It reminds me of the recent Monty Python reunion shows at the O2 arena (Jun 2014: Monty Python Live (Almost)); though that tour was a nostalgic success, even an artistic and commercial success, it was a complete failure in its attempt to recapture the timing and verve and urgency of youth. Which is what reunion shows like that – and this SNL one – are all about. Recapturing our youth. (And of course, selling advertising and merch to us in the process.) To the young or uninitiated, these shows will be a success or failure purely depending on NOW. To we who lived our youth through those original times, these shows succeed or fail on how well they recapture it. And let’s face it, they can’t recapture it. They will always only remain “failed attempts.” But it’s not just that metaphysical youth aspect – it’s the fact that when an old person tries to do something they did when they were young, it just doesn’t look right or read as well as it did when in their prime. It’s a terrible, sad fact of life.

Dan Aykroyd cannot possibly recapture the original “flavor” of his Bass-O-Matic sketch from the 70s. But he tries valiantly. And fails. In one of SNL 40’s first sketches, Aykroyd appears with that cheese-eating grin. He looks old. Really old. And fat. Camera pulls back and we see he is holding up a dead fish, a bass…

Silence.

Not even crickets. It’s just an old fat guy holding a fish. Now one would think that after all the lengths they’ve just gone to, of bashing us with the message that SNL is some kind of mythical laugh factory, that seeing the opening to the “classic” Bass-O-Matic sketch would elicit a cheer of recognition from the audience.

Silence. Because the studio audience (not the old stars, but the civilians) are too young to recognize this 35-year-old sketch! It was never one of the best sketches, but at least the performance in its heyday had a young, vital guy delivering his lines fitfully in a Pythonesque lightning strike. Now it’s just an old fat guy holding a fish. (At least with the 2014 Python shows, when Cleese came on with his dead parrot, stating, “I would like to register a complaint!” the audience’s rousing roar of recognition drowned out the pathos. Here, it was just pathos. This was devil’s territory from the get-go.) There was no way Aykroyd could attain the verve and urgency and timing of his youth. His speech was too slow for comfort, he missed putting one of the fish into the blender, he turned on the blender and it froze… His fake smile went on for miles, but the flop sweat on his soul was glistening hot…

You ask, “Why don’t they just pack it up?” Because this is what they do! What else CAN they do? This is how they made their bones. But recapturing the magic is definitely out of the question after a certain time…

Chris Rock gives a prolonged tribute to Eddie Murphy, who has gone the way of the dodo. The last quality thing he did was …um… uh… Then Eddie himself steps out to raucous applause and proceeds to do two minutes of SNL tradition (i.e. see paragraph 1).

The opening dance number with the somehow-talented Jimmy Fallon and ever-talented Justin Timberlake is spiffy. No complaints there; it retains that just-above-mediocre level that SNL sometimes attains on its absolute best nights.

Then the monologue with old hand Steve Martin (long since Not Funny himself, but somehow squeezing some last driplets of humor from his dead soul). During the monologue, Martin is beset on all sides by superstars who want to host, including Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin, Chris Rock, Peyton Manning, Billy Crystal, Paul McCartney and Paul Simon… and then producer Lorne Michaels makes one of his many missteps, in his quest to attract a younger, more current audience (it’s a well-known fact that Michaels has final say on all decisions, good and bad, and all the artists cringe and bow to his every whim, as per WAYNE’S WORLD): Into this lion’s den of icons, Lorne decides to trot out… Miley Cyrus. Wait– Miley Cyrus?! Yes, that class-less hooker whore cunt Miley Cyrus shares the stage with the above legends who have done something useful with their lives. (No, tell us what you really think of Miley Cyrus, Poffy?) God knows how long she had to burnish Lorne’s perineum with that ball-licking trollop tongue to score this spot over other performers closer to the human race.

McCartney tanked. Introduced by Gollum– I mean, Keith Richards, the Beatle’s minstrel, the songster, the legend – bombed horribly. In the first seconds of Maybe I’m Amazed we could hear his voice is non-existent. And it went downhill. Now I’ve even closed the gaps in my fingers. I don’t want to watch. I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to live. At the time of writing, you cannot even find this performance on YouTube – you have to go deep into the TV station’s archives to find it – which means everyone involved (from management to McCartney himself) unanimously agree that it was so bad, it needed the hiring of pro hackers to restrict this video from being posted on YouTube at all costs. They will fail, of course, because YouTube is a behemoth that will eat all of us alive and screaming in the end.

People clapped. You have to clap, right? But now you’re not clapping because you were blown away by the performance or inspired or even mildly impressed (unlike that artistic inspirational perfection of George Harrison and Paul Simon doing Here Comes The Sun and Homeward Bound on SNL in 1976); you’re clapping in pity, that a 75 year old man can kinda sing a Paul McCartney song with a band and everything. Isn’t that special? He gets so excited when they let him out of the home and the boys let him play with them, it’s good for him, great-granddad needs to make some new friends…

The saddest thing is that of McCartney’s tens of thousands of times performing this song, when it hit the atmosphere crackling like a million suns, this SNL 40 abomination (when it surfaces in mainstream social media) is going to be the most codified, the most batted about the internet like cats and tits, commented on and analyzed and critiqued by this generation of twitter twats. Weep for the death of legends. Weep for the death of youth. Weep for Gollum who lost his Precious.

Some apologists might mitigate, Well, a couple of things were good (Billy Crystal asking, “You are Steve Martin, right?; a reasonably enjoyable “digital short” from Sandler and Sandberg, Will Ferrell’s Jeopardy, etc.). Of course a couple of things were good – these are professional comedians, and a stopped clock is right twice a day. But only a couple of things, in a show that is supposedly THE comedy lodestar of the United States? If you were making automobiles or heart monitors, this kind of percentage would be entirely unacceptable.

If SNL 40 had kept it to nanosecond montages of old bits, it could have salvaged a shred of dignity. Instead, each personality dragging their feet onto that supposedly hallowed stage just prolonged an agony that wasn’t going to go away with the constant sucking of Lorne Michaels’ dick.

Here’s to the next 40 years of not being funny.

END

Whole Lotta Bruv.

Three innovative guitarists three generations apart are brought together to talk guitar, live guitar and play guitar: Jack White, dynamo revolutionary red meat raw talent; Jimmy Page, who, along with Ritchie Blackmore, carved from caged lightning every riff that rock has ever known, and The Edge, who wears a nice wool cap.

Written and directed by Davis Guggenheim (AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, 2006) IT MIGHT GET LOUD is thankfully not a mutual knob-gobble, as the awkward segments that show the three guitarists pretending interest in one another’s war stories is interspersed with the histories of each player and their approaches to music, mayhem, and making sweet love to their axe-a-billies.

The introduction to each guitarist speaks volumes – we go from The Edge onstage pounding through one of his teeth-grating clinki-linki-linki rhythms, to Jack White’s old school blues bombast on piano, to the quiet majesty of Jimmy Page coaxing the subtleties of Ramble On from a mighty Les Paul (“light and shade, whisper to the thunder”), from dulcet tones to the rude rock section, which cancels out everything The Edge has ever played in his life.

You are probably getting an idea of where The Edge ranks in this trio.

Taken as read that Jimmy Page is GOD… accomplished session musician since his teens, from jingles to film music (GOLDFINGER, DEATH WISH II), from The Kinks to The Yardbirds, to the revered Led Zeppelin; from a raven-haired wizard in tight trousers to a white-maned elder statesman of rock replete with Clive Owen hardguy longcoat…

We see Jimmy as a young posh British schoolkid on his first television broadcast playing skiffle. In answer to the host asking him, “Are you going to play skiffle when you get out of school?” he says, “No, I’m going to do biological research.” And if even half of Led Zeppelin’s backstage mythos and road tales involving nubile young wenches are true, I’d say Jimmy’s life has definitely been devoted wholeheartedly to “doing biological research.”

I was no Jack White fan before this documentary, which opened my eyes to the boy’s fearless talent; we see some scorching lead work in The Raconteurs, we see him building a “guitar” from a plank of wood and wire; we hear his creative philosophies (“Pick a fight with the guitar – and win!” “If the organ is three steps away from the mic, put it four steps away – make me work harder to get to it on time,” “When you’re digging deeper into rock and roll, you’re on a freight train headed straight for the blues”); his bravery as an American musician is unassailable, not least for going onstage with The White Stripes with simply himself, a guitar and a drummer wife who can’t quite keep time. Definitely the Linda Eastman of the band, the best things about Meg White’s drumming are her 36Ds.

White bleeds his pure unadulterated passion at us from the screen; passion for his music, his lyrics, his message, his guitars; passion for simply playing; passion for the performance, for the art of rock; passion for the unreachable, passion for the unknown. He’s a born Musician and creator of worlds, like Jimmy Page. The Edge is a guy from a school band that got lucky.

Profiling The Edge actually worked against him – it reveals how poon useless he is as a guitarist. (Even as I reproach him, credit goes to his brave stance in eschewing conventional riff rock in favor of that mind-numbing clinki-linki style which has made him millions – and it’s a powerful visual seeing any person onstage before thousands; it kinda seems like they deserve it, at least for the work they’ve put in to get there and stay there. And I do love the guitar’s raunch in U2’s Discotheque.)

Edge (aka David Howell Evans) does have a few interesting things to say, such as “stripping down chords to their barest essentials” and… and, uh… yeah, that stripping-down-chords thing should distract ’em for another decade while I fiddle around over here with my glorified Quadraverb.

It’s not that I begrudge Edge his effects; everyone uses effects, Page and White included. I myself loved to plug sonic distortion pedals through my already-hardened keyboard to make it zoom like a guitar; and Page shows us one of his favorite songs, Link Wray’s Rumble (featured on PULP FICTION) where Wray can be heard turning up Leslie vibrato to add icing to his sound – but the Edge goes beyond all this and uses effects not as icing, but as the basis of his whole sound, nay, his whole career, and can’t travel anywhere without his technician and effects rack halfway up his Irish arse. Please, just put down the Memory Man and play a song!

He is in this docu because he pushes the boundaries of new sounds from an old instrument. If that’s the case, then I vote we don’t consider him a “guitarist” but an innovator – obviously because the more time he spends knob-fiddling, the less time he can devote to being an artisan. I know that the more time I spend watching movies, the less time I can devote to being a pianist and topless dancer.

Poffy Zofo

The three outline the places and times they grew up in, which ultimately affected their outlook and playing. We see old clips of Zep, Stripes, U2. We see snippets of The Jam, The Buzzcocks, The Ramones, as well as visits with Son House, Lonnie Donegan, Blind Gary Davis, and even Spinal Tap!

The Edge: “When I watched SPINAL TAP, I didn’t laugh, I wept, it was so close to the truth.” I remember back in ’84, Gene Simmons had exactly the same reaction. I imagine every major commercial musician who held his job and art close to his heart, and who was ensconced in the culture of the period would have been slapped in the nuts the same way, made to stand on the outside looking in at the strangely satirical state that their art had arrived at.

Page visits Headley Grange, where the mythic Led Zeppelin IV was carved from runes, playing medieval mandolin on The Battle For Evermore and showing the recording room for When The Levee Breaks; White traverses blood-gutters in a ramshackle studio where we see him lay down an original song as it falls from his head; The Edge visits his old school where he plays barre chords and sings to a locker.

A grimacing embarrassment when The Edge is showing Jimmy Page the riff to I Will Follow. It’s as embarrassing as, well, let me think… it’s about as embarrassing as if The Edge were to show Jimmy Page the riff to I Will Follow. After Page has just dropped the swirling otherworldliness of Kashmir on the party, after he has driven through the bluesy brashness of In My Time of Dying – here is this wool-capped novice plucking a repetitive two-chord motif like he’s actually “showing Jimmy Page” something.

I feel like cringing into a corner and burning U2 records. And wool caps.

When Page blasts into the Whole Lotta Love riff, Jack White actually takes his guitar from around his own neck as if to bow down before the god of thunder and pledge his first born, while The Edge stands gape-mouthed in dismay, thinking, ‘How is he doing that without effects pedals?’

Three warriors from three countries, three different attacks, brothers in arms and axes, a very cool docu-movie muso-mentary.

END

La Dumba.

Laugh Hard.

Musicians: this one’s for us.

WALK HARD is not for Guitar Hero fakers or karaoke jackasses or talentless DJs with the audacity to call their fade-ups and fade-downs “mixing.” Let me say it again: WALK HARD is for MUSICIANS; for we who have lived the road, beaten the boards, spanked the groupies, trashed the dressing room, fart-filled the studio, fed the beast our day-job dollar, and slapped the roadies and called them Susan.

Cuke Hard

The public won’t get WALK HARD as deeply as musicians will. And I don’t care. Cherish it, Musicians. Hug it and pet it and call it George.

After the two formulaic, Hollywood-drenched biopics, RAY and WALK THE LINE, set the standard and simultaneously lowered the bar for musician biographies, WALK HARD takes every single cliché from those glossy turkeys and parties with a penis in your face.

John C. Reilly is fictional songwriter-guitarist Dewey Cox, who rises to superstardom on the wings of cliché. Cliché so battering and obvious, we will never look at musician biopics with a straight face again, especially those featuring the seminal artists of the 50’s who rose from dance halls to superstardom – Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly. They ALL look like spoof biopics now!

Dewey finds he is talented at a young age, soon after slicing his brother in half with a machete, Monty Python style, who telegraphs the tragedy: “Everything’s fine when you have such a long life in front of you!” Later, Dewey’s father (tough-as-nails Raymond J. Barry) would constantly lament, “The wrong keed died!”

John C. Reilly lives Dewey Cox, performing all his comedic songs himself, which are actually enjoyable and catchy country/rock and roll tunes. We follow him from his big break in a colored club “where people come to dance erotically,” to touring with Elvis and Jerry Lee, to immediate radio airplay with his hit Walk Hard (“recorded just 35 minutes ago by Dewey Cox”). Dewey meets The Beatles (Jack Black as Paul, Justin Long as George, Paul Rudd as John), experiments with musical styles from Dylan to Bowie; on through the 70s he hosts a TV show and marries Cheryl Tiegs (playing herself, taking the name Cheryl Cox-Tiegs – yeah, say it out loud). In the 80s, Dewey succumbs to mind-altering drugs while trying to compose a magnum opus with ethnic orchestras, trampolines, farm animals and fruit. He even takes a leaf from his friend Will Ferrell’s book and runs naked through the streets during a freakout.

WALK HARD will be compared to the progenitor of this rocku-mockumentary genre, SPINAL TAP, as WALK-HARD’s makers also display actual hands-on, penis-on knowledge of their target.

Writer-director Jake Kasdan and co-writer Judd Apatow ladle out every single vignette that musician biopic screenwriters have grown lazy on – from teens at the dance warming to Dewey’s high school band and jiggling in ways that make a priest yell, “devil’s music,” to the record producer admonishing Dewey then suddenly loving his song (a riotous John Michael Higgins cameo, “…and if somehow you are able to sing a song now with these boys whom you haven’t even met… but I’m telling you right now, I don’t think it’s going to happen… I’ll give you 15 seconds”), to the whining wife in curlers (Kristen Wiig) cradling three babies, constantly telling Dewey he’ll “never make it” – even whilst he is on the road supporting a number one album. With a penis in his face.

Musicians know these scenes from their own lives, and how Hollywood has compressed them to nut-squeezing idiocy. Kasdan and Apatow display a virtuoso’s knowledge of their subject, down to making the instrument-playing look authentic (a pet peeve of all musicians watching musician movies). The script is as taut as a guitar string and sings like a Les Paul plugged through a Marshall stack on 11.

Johnny Cash and Ray Charles would be spinning in their graves – if they were not laughing so hard.

Slap a roadie for me. With your cock.

END

Quorum of Stinkus.

Stunt, stunt, stunt, crash. Stunt, stunt, stunt, crash. Explosion.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE, directed by Marc Foster like a speed freak, and edited by Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson like a chicken fight in a monkey house, makes THE BOURNE IDENTITY look like MY DINNER WITH ANDRE.

Cucumber, Poffy the Cucumber

As I watched the opening car chase grind metal, and the subsequent foot chase beat streets through an Italian town during a horse race, one question kept surfacing: Did I accidentally walk into TRANSPORTER 3?

QUANTUM OF SOLACE exists only for its next popcorn chase sequence only to show off its next stunt, with editing that will maim your optic nerves. Your eyes will start hurting long before you realize there’s nothing onscreen worth watching.

Daniel Craig, still chiseled like a Grecian statue, still super-cool and super-cruel, is listed as playing Ian Fleming’s superspy character, James Bond.

But is it still Bond? Having recently re-acquainted myself with two of Pierce Brosnan’s outings (GOLDENEYE and TOMORROW NEVER DIES), I see that Brosnan (a perfect Bond, I might add) never colored so far outside the lines of the character that he became not just unrecognizable, but indistinguishable from the morass of other taut-buttocked man-toys glutting the action hero landscape. That’s the tragedy here – Craig could be Jason Statham or Clive Owen or Jet Li; the Bond franchise might have been resurrected/reimagined in CASINO ROYALE, but there is not enough “essence of Bond” left by venturing so far outside the box in QUANTUM.

There is still the suaveness, sure, but the infamous Bond gadgets? Not a trace, except maybe the soaring height of computer technology displayed by the whole MI6 organization. Aston Martin? Only a banged up version in the opening car chase. Flamboyant villain? Well, he’s indeterminately Euro with designs on absolute power. Ironic banter? Nope. Quips? Nope. Sex with leading lady? Nope – instead, a glorified extra. Even the catchphrase, “Bond. James Bond” is absent. And the laughable Bond death-traps where – like the 1960s Batman – he is left to die in some contraption with a countdown that allows him just enough time to find an improbable escape with no one watching? Bond actually turns the table on this one, leaving the villain in the desert with only a can of motor oil to sustain him.

Written by the talented Paul Haggis, the Evil Plot in this Bond film is congruent with today’s morally muddy politics, where a shady “green” entrepreneur, Gordon Greene (Mathieu Amalric), deals hand-in-glove with the CIA and the British government, who both admit, “if we didn’t do business with villains we wouldn’t be doing business at all.” Of course, Greene’s ultimate aim is power over others – in this case, monopolizing the water supply in Bolivia, using “environmentalism” as a cover.

For those not paying attention, there are the eye-straining fight scenes and chase scenes to keep you amused: car chase, boat chase, plane chase, moped chase, foot chase across rooftops (where’ve I seen that before? Oh yeh – the last Bond film!), wholesale destruction following in the wake of Bond and his pursuers.

Meanwhile, that wrinkled old man in charge of MI6, Judi Dench, goes swishing about doubting Bond’s loyalties because he is mooning over a chick who got murdered in the last film. So Bond goes rogue long enough to plonk a newbie bimbo by the name of Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton), then finds her dead like the chick in GOLDFINGER, covered in oil instead of gold. (Black gold?, heh heh–Waitaminute! Even if you were dipped in crude oil like a shrimp cocktail, wouldn’t it just slide off? How does it cake her body like black syrup?)

And the leading lady – nay, Bond Girl – Olga Kurylenko, doesn’t even schtup Bond! Isn’t that the POINT of being a Bond Girl?! Detached to the point of boring, Kurylenko’s ice queen character is ironic, playing some kind of double-agent with a burn scar on her back that I couldn’t stop looking at, tooling about a searing desertscape, trapped in a hotel fire – yet generating not one iota of heat. Let’s face it: Bond’s universe is no place for a woman too independent. Our primal instincts felt the old magic when dippy Fields bantered with Bond, but that misogynistic fun was not to last. Excuse the pun, but – 18 million cracks, my arse!

Why does everyone moan about the title? Does anyone know what quantum means outside of physicists and Scott Bakula? A quantum is an “amount,” a discrete “packet” of something, especially used in physics to denote the smallest physical quantity that can exist independently. (From imdb: According to Henry Chancellor in his book James Bond – The Man and His World, “Quantum of Solace” relates to the necessary iota of emotion that is needed between lovers.)

Now tenuously link this with Bond seeking revenge for his last bébé and the villainous organization named Quantum. Thank the junkets we don’t have to view the film for this info, which takes us from Haiti, to Italy, Bolivia, Austria, London, Russia, and leaves us north of Eye-Strain.

QUANTUM opens with the good ole sexploitation gimmick of sand dunes as naked women, Alicia Keys and Jack White singing, Another Way to Die; closes with the gun barrel motif and classic Bond theme music.

Just like the last film, Bond’s healing abilities are like Wolverine: every little face cut – healed by the next scene. In CASINO ROYALE, he plonked Vesper Lynn mere days after his mandacious torture – can the franchise heal itself as quickly as Wolverine Bond’s ballsac?

END