Saturday Night

Last weekend, Saturday Night, a story about the first episode of SNL, was released in theaters. Saturday Night centers around the 90 minutes before the airing of the first Saturday Night Live episode. It follows the cast and crew as they attempt to pull together the show and convince NBC to broadcast it on TV. This was a surprise movie for me as it was not on my radar until I saw the trailer a couple of months ago. Since then, I have heard a lot of solid buzz about it and was very interested to see how it would turn out.

I had a lot of fun with this movie. The movie takes an interesting approach of having the story take place in real-time 90 minutes before airing. Because of this, you can feel all of the chaos and tension throughout the entire run time. Any time somebody is wasting time, you can feel the stress as that is one less minute they have to get the show together. The chaos is pretty much nonstop until the final moments but still makes for a very engaging story. Amidst the chaos, there are still quite a few funny moments sprinkled to help lighten the tension that organically fit in the story. The best part of the movie was the casting. So many of these actors fit so well into their roles. The actor that plays Chevy Chase is perfect and the standout performance. You totally think that he is the real Chevy Chase. His look and mannerisms just match him perfectly. While he is the standout, many of the other actors achieve the same level of perfection. People are playing Dan Ackroyd, Billy Chrystal, Jim Henson, and John Belushi and each one nails their respective roles. If you want to know about some solid up-and-coming actors just take a look at the cast of this movie. I hope many of these actors go far. Even though the cast is filled to the brim, it never feels overstuffed. Each actor gets their own 3-4 minutes to shine and gets their only little moment or payoff.

The main problem I have is that you do need to do a fair amount of homework to see this movie. If you didn't grow up watching this SNL cast, like me, you may not know who some of these actors are. The movie doesn't really take the time to introduce all of the characters and just operates under the assumption that you can recognize who they are. So for someone like me who wasn't alive in 1975, I had trouble identifying and keeping track of who certain people were.

Overall, this is a very fun, fast-paced movie. That keeps the energy running from beginning to end. As long as you have some basic understanding of SNL and some of the big-name cast members of the time (you at least need to know who John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Dan Ackroyd are), you will have a great time with this movie.

Score: 8.5/10 Grade: A- Recommendation: Check it out