‘SNL’ review: Emmy-winning mediocrity on the NBC show’s 43rd season premiere
October 1, 2017 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News
The cold open of the Season 43 premiere of “Saturday Night Live” wrapped with the president (Alec Baldwin) draping his arm around the shoulders of Sen. Chuck Schumer (Alex Moffat) explaining: “We’re both New Yorkers, we enjoy a good slice, we never go to Times Square and we both love saying ‘Live from New York it’s …’
(insert never-ending sigh here)
This is your Emmy-winning political comedy, folks.
Cutting short a weekend of golf, Baldwin’s Trump says he returned to the Oval Office because “sometimes when you’re president you have make sacrifices, so I skipped the back nine.”
After a day of Trump’s real world tweets denigrating Puerto Rico — a U.S. territory — for having the temerity to expect survival assistance from its own country, “SNL” responded by … well, having the script quote the president nearly verbatim from a few days ago:
“I don’t know if you know this but you’re in an island in the water. The ocean water. Big ocean with fishies and bubbles and turtles that bite. We want to help you but we have to take care of America first.”
I want to make the argument that merely quoting the president’s words flat out — underscoring how absurd and outrageous they are — is a form of political comedy. But somehow “SNL” bungles this too, never fully committing to the idea.
(reminder: that sigh is still going)
Ryan Gosling, who arrived for his monologue in a burgundy non-sequitur of a suit-and-sweater combo, looking like he just walked off the set of HBO’s 70s-era Times Square exquisite sleaze-a-thon “The Deuce”:
• “Weekend Update” anchor Michael Che called the president a “cheap cracker” and it will be the subject of some debate — verboten or not? — but it was without question the strongest piece of writing of the night (in terms of force and intent) in regards to Trump and his bruised ego tweets about the mayor of San Juan not bowing and scraping enough in her pleas for help. Here’s Che:
“Was she nasty to you? How nasty? Are you shaking? Do you want to go smoke a Virginia Slim until your hand stops moving? This isn’t that complicated, man, it’s hurricane relief, these people need help — you just did this for white people, twice. Do the same thing. So go tell Melania to go put on her flood heels, get some bottled water, some food, pack up some extra Atlanta Falcons Super Bowl T-shirts and write them a check with our money, you cheap cracker.”
Let’s address this straight on: Yes, cracker is a pejorative but let’s not pretend it works to reinforce oppression, as the N-word does. As an insult, cracker does not threaten the power dynamic that has always existed in our country, where the entire social and political structure is built on white supremacy and privilege.
• I actually liked Gosling’s monologue acknowledging the (now old! still true!) observation that, yes, it was pretty ridiculous that he — a white kid from Canada — was positioned as the savior of jazz in last year’s Oscar nominee “La La Land.”
Sitting down to fake play the piano, he free associated: “Jazz was born in New Orleans, or as it’s correctly pronounced” — pause (and that pause was everything) — “Nerlins.” That made me laugh out loud. Hat tip to whoever wrote the joke. “And then from Nerlins it moved on to Chicagie and then to N-Y-C City. And let me tell ya, jazz was the thing. Jazz was where it was at. And then it almost died — and I saved it.”
All that great self-deprecating energy ended on a sour note when Emma Stone turned up in a cameo to inform him that no, he didn’t save jazz: “We saved jazz.” Nothing like a white woman striding on stage to claim the creativity of black people as her own! I get it — “SNL” was looking to satirize that too (I hope) but nothing about her presence or delivery felt like a comedic point being made. But hey, a movie star showed up for a cameo and apparently that’s enough.
• We got a recycle of the show’s “Close Encounter” alien abduction sketch that first premiered when Gosling hosted nearly two years ago. The whole thing is designed to see which performer breaks first, right? To describe her own abduction, Kate McKinnon’s character demonstrated on Gosling, grabbing and manhandling his rear end over and over again, putting her face right up in there and yes, Gosling barely kept it together.
He can be such an intense actor that it really is charming when he breaks, which he did a few times throughout the show.
• Alex Moffat introduced a new character on “Weekend Update” called Guy Who Bought a Boat, which is basically a version of the obnoxious preppy guy that was a staple villain in 80s teen movies.
He was joined by his cousin, Guy Who Just Joined Soho House (Gosling), and together they boasted about their lifestyles while continually mentioning their terrible sexual prowess.
Any sketch that has Gosling (sweater tied around his shoulders, collar popped, Ray-Bans on) utter the words “I have a shameful shvantz” is OK by me. The self-satisfied grin he delivered with that line is what really sold it. As an aside he mentioned that the pair had picked up a little Spanish during their “semesty-a-bro-bro in Barcelonzo.” And also: “I’m terrible at sex!”
• There wasn’t much to see of the new cast members, though Chris Redd (one of the new additions from Chicago) did show up briefly in a hilariously overwrought digital short with Gosling as a guy obsessed with the laziness of the “Avatar” logo.
“He just highlighted ‘Avatar,’ clicked the drop down menu and then he just randomly selected Papyrus,” he rants to his therapist of the poster’s graphic designer, “like a thoughtless child just wandering by a garden, yanking leaves along the way.” It’s such a focused and pointless thing to center a digital short around and I love it for that.
