SNL50 - In Search of More Cowbell

Everything Old is Old Again

Saturday Night Live, the comedic cultural cornerstone, celebrated its 50th anniversary this past Sunday night with a three-and-half-hour celebratory episode.

The SNL50 show was a messy mishmash of music and sketches from different eras that accurately portrayed the overarching uneven narrative of the franchise as it paid tribute to itself.

I’ve been watching SNL from the just about the beginning and have seen the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Sunday’s SNL50 was neither of those, which makes it exactly what it should be for an anniversary show…passable.

Most of the prominent SNL players from the show’s long history were there with some notable exceptions. Of course, there have been some all-time greats who have gone on to their eternal reward much too soon, people like John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, and Jan Hooks. But notable absences on stage beyond the dearly departed were iconic SNL stars like Chevy Chase, Dan Akroyd, Billy Crystal, Dana Carvey and Bill Hader.

There were some very big comedy stars there though.

Eddie Murphy was like a tiger re-released into the jungle…he devoured every scene he inhabited with a level of funny ferocity and fury that only he can muster.

Murphy is the most talented man to have ever been on the show and seeing him unleashed back in his element with the added incentive of competition against his peers, made for comedy gold in two vibrant sketches.

Will Ferrell, who is maybe number two on the all-time SNL list behind Murphy for out and out comedic chops, did not fare so well. He was his usual gregarious and goofy self, but his rhythm and timing seemed off and he was out of sync all night.

While Murphy and Ferrell are the top two performers in SNL history, my personal favorite, Bill Murray, crushed his lone appearance when he ranked the top Weekend Update anchors of all time. Murray is the master of timing and he toyed with the audience and with Weekend Update host Colin Jost in glorious fashion. (As an aside…my favorites in the show’s history are in no particular order - John Belushi, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Martin Short, Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader)

The rest of the night was bumpy.

Steve Martin’s opening monologue was subdued and somewhat staccato, as Martin never fully grasped the material and was not able to read the cue cards with any vigor.

Tom Hanks stepped into a Black Jeopardy sketch midway through to replace Eddie Murphy…never a wise move…especially when Murphy had already stolen the sketch in the first 30 seconds. Hanks was uncomfortably bad but he was put in an unwinnable situation.

Other sketches, like the Lawrence Welk sketch, the wedding party sketch, the Broadway musical sketch and the alien abduction sketch, were pretty weak.

The Welk sketch was just chaotic and never fully coalesced as Will Ferrell was just a bit off and the bits fell flat. That sketch is usually very funny but it was much too awkwardly written and performed here to be decent.

The Wedding Party sketch just isn’t that funny to begin with and cramming it into a big show like this felt foolish. It also ran on forever and never hit its stride.

I’ve never been much of a fan of Kate McKinnon and find her “alien abduction” character to be decidedly one and done material, so reprising that flaccid character for the 50th anniversary seemed a stretch too, even with the addition of Meryl Streep.

I must admit that for the most part I really don’t get the John Mulaney thing…and that continued Sunday night as Mulaney’s big musical comedy number seemed like a muddled mess of Broadway inside jokes that misfired.

There was one interesting John Mulaney moment in the show and that was when he interjected into Steve Martin’s monologue with a joke about how difficult guest hosts are and that of the nearly 1,000 that the show has had, it is shocking that only two have committed murder. The joke was funny…and was obviously intended to be directed at O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake…but Alec Baldwin was in the studio and conspicuously absent from sketches until he made a late appearance introducing a video clip later on in the show…and I couldn’t help but wonder how uncomfortable that joke made him.

One final thing comedy wise…I know people love Adam Sandler, but I find him so egregiously unfunny and comedically pedestrian as to be criminal. I think Sandler, who only has two gears – idiotically infantile and atomic levels of shmaltz, has set the art of comedy back centuries in his career, so when he showed up to play one of his god-awful songs…this time a saccharine one, I rolled my eyes and cringed. Others feel different and think the song was very moving…but the only thing it moved on me was my bowels.

SNL has been a showcase for musical acts during the entirety of its run, and it had four musical performances Sunday night to celebrate that fact.

The music Sunday night was…well…it just was.

The show opened with the corpse of Paul Simon singing his hauntingly melancholy hit “Homeward Bound” with the luminous Sabrina Carpenter. Simon looks and sounds like he’s been soaking in a formaldehyde bath for the last fifteen years, while Sabrina Carpenter is so inconceivably, sublimely gorgeous, she seems like she was created in an anime lab somewhere.

Carpenter got the first laugh of the night when in reply to Paul Simon saying he first played “Homeward Bound” on SNL in 1976, she blurted out, “I wasn’t alive then…and neither were my parents”.

As for the song itself, Paul Simon simply can’t even pretend to sing anymore, which is sad, but thankfully Sabrina Carpenter, who is a pop princess - but there is no doubting that she has an exquisite voice and a charming stage presence, is a versatile and thoughtful duet partner and she carried the song without grandstanding…no small feat.

The second musical act was Miley Cyrus, who is the antithesis of Sabrina Carpenter. Why the hell is she famous again? The classless Cyrus is such a toxic combination of odd traits that don’t ever seem to gel at all…at least in my eyes. But apparently people love her.

Miley’s rendition of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” (made famous by Sinead O’Connor’s stunning cover) with Brittany Howard was devoid of everything that made Sinead’s version so great…namely artistic depth and soul.

Sinead was a walking wound, an Irish female Christ crying out to her father from the cross “why have you forsaken me?” with every song she inhabited. Miley Cyrus is a pop princess nepo baby who sings with the unsubtle zeal of a trailer park meth head prostitute barking at the moon while searching for a lost pack of menthol cigarettes.

For the third musical break Li’l Wayne performed with The Roots but I skipped that shitshow entirely because, to be frank, I think hip hop/rap is a grotesque, artless and thoughtless excuse for music, it is nothing more than a marketed minstrel show and noise machine that is so beyond awful and so asinine as to be lower in artistic value than month-old crocodile piss.

Speaking of old crocodile piss…the final musical number of the evening went to Paul McCartney, who closed the show by performing “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End”. Notice I didn’t say he sang those songs because what McCartney was doing doesn’t rise to the level of singing.

Like his elder by a year Paul Simon, McCartney looks and sounds like he’s two thousand years old and unfortunately, he has completely lost his singing voice.

It was odd watching McCartney, who resembles a cool grandmother at her grandson’s wedding trying to keep up with the young people. It was cute at first but as it went on it became more and more uncomfortable as the possibility of the second to last Beatle dropping dead of natural causes on SNL became more and more possible, if not probable.

Ultimately, the fact that SNL has survived 50 years is incredibly impressive. In a corporatized entertainment industry, any entity, nevermind a comedic one, surviving more than a few years is reason to celebrate.

That SNL has, through some very, very lean years, been able to stay, if not funny, at least alive, is one of the more miraculous things to ever happen in television.

The show has, through sheer force of will (mostly Lorne Michaels’ will), been able to stay in the conversation for half a century even when it lacked talent, skill, insight and comedic chops.

The current cast is as dull and devoid of star power, charisma, comedy talent and vitality, as any cast in the show’s long history, but somehow SNL persists…and will for at least the foreseeable future.

The bottom-line regarding SNL50 is that the show was sometimes funny, sometimes cringy, sometimes exciting and sometimes boring…just like almost every other episode of SNL over the last half century.

As for the bigger picture regarding SNL...the fact that Kenan Thompson, who is deathly allergic to being even remotely funny and brings absolutely nothing to the comedy table, is the longest running cast member in SNL history…and is still in the cast…speaks to the Sahara level talent drought the show is currently enduring.

The reality is that, to paraphrase former Boston Celtics head coach, and current St John’s head basketball coach, Rick Pitino, “John Belushi, Dan Akroyd, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Norm Macdonald, Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, ain’t walking through that door. “

No, they ain’t…so SNL is gonna have to work really, really hard to survive long enough to see its 60th anniversary. As much as the show consistently disappoints me…I have to admit I’m rooting for it to make it to its next milestone, if for no other reason than to see a reinvigorated Eddie Murphy unleashed once again.

©2025

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 79 - The Greatest Beer Run Ever

On this episode, Barry and I grab our magical dufflebag filled with a never-ending yet mysteriously weightless supply of beer and head into a war zone to discuss The Greatest Beer Run Ever, the new Peter Farrelly movie currently streaming on Apple TV. Topics discussed include awful acting, bad movies about great stories, and the curse of endless and empty streaming content.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 79 - The Greatest Beer Run Ever

Thanks for listening!

©2022

The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An unforgettable true story turned into a completely forgettable motion picture.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever is the amazing, nearly unbelievable, true story of John “Chickie” Donohue, a seemingly dim-witted, ne’er do well merchant mariner from Inwood in New York City, who decides to show his support by traveling to Vietnam in 1968 to deliver beer to his neighborhood buddies serving in the war.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever, which is written and directed by Peter Farrelly and stars Zac Efron and is currently streaming on Apple TV +, is a really great story…but unfortunately, it’s a bad movie.

Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary) won a Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscar four years ago for Green Book, his much-maligned movie on race relations, which was also set in New York City in the 1960’s and dealt with a conservative seeing the light and embracing a more progressive vision.

Green Book wasn’t as bad as the interminably aggrieved victimhood brigade would have you believe, but it also definitely wasn’t Best Picture material (although with the laughable CODA winning the award last year who the hell knows what a Best Picture worthy movie is anymore). Green Book was basically a well-crafted, well-acted, rather simple-minded movie about hope for humanity, no wonder it was so hated in our current awful age.

With The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Farrelly seems to, in the wake of the Green Book criticisms, be trying to either bolster his much tarnished liberal bona fides or give a mea culpa for his perceived sins against the new woke religion. Whatever he’s trying to do…he fails miserably.

Green Book, for all its shortcomings, worked as a piece of middlebrow entertainment masquerading as upper middle-class art, because it featured two really terrific actors, Viggo Mortenson and Mahershala Ali (who won a Best Supporting Actor for his work). The Greatest Beer Run Ever is not so blessed, as it stars poor Zac Efron.

Efron seems like a nice guy, and I have absolutely no animus towards him whatsoever and wish him nothing but success. But the truth is he’s an extremely limited actor and those limitations are laid bare in this film.

Efron’s Chickie is like a more handsome, street-smart Forest Gump who stumbles through history oblivious to his own buffoonery. As one Sergeant says upon meeting Chickie in a war zone, “don’t worry about him, some people are just too stupid to get killed.”

As for Efron, he’s a good-looking kid (“kid” – he’s 34!) but he’s utterly devoid of charisma and magnetism. He almost seems to be trying to hide in front of the camera. Emotionally he’s a black hole from which no life or light escapes. And his dismal New Yawk accent is come and go for the first third of the film and then disappears completely for no apparent reason.

To be clear, Efron isn’t the only bad actor in the movie. The entire supporting cast, with two notable exceptions, are simply dreadful.  The egregiously amateurish cast are either over-the-top caricatures or underwhelming to the point of invisibility.

In particular, Chickie’s group of friends in New York are portrayed by a collection of the worst actors I can remember seeing in a mainstream movie and their accents are less New York than they are a rancid stew of Providence, Boston and Maine. I won’t name any of them out of some twisted sense of compassion, but holy shit they are embarrassingly bad.

The two notable exceptions regarding the abysmal acting are Bill Murray as The Colonel, a World War II vet who runs the local bar, and Russell Crowe, as a journalist in Vietnam. Murray and Crowe are not particularly exceptional in their roles, but whenever they are on-screen a sense of relief comes over the viewer as they know at least they’re in the hands of professionals. Murray and Crowe feel at home on the screen, whereas everyone else, most notably Zac Efron, does not.

To be fair to Efron, Farelly’s script and his direction are no help either as they’re utterly atrocious.

There are major plot points and dramatic moments throughout the movie that need to be earned but simply never are, like when Chickie makes the decision to go to Vietnam, it just sort of happens…and everything, particularly the crucial emotional beats, are as vacuous as that.

Another grating thing about the movie is that a major plot point is Chickie must carry a bevy of beers (Pabst Blue Ribbon cans) in a duffle bag across the ocean and all over Vietnam. Beers are heavy, but Chickie’s wondrous bag always seems nearly weightless and empty, but he continuously pulls beer after beer after beer out of it like it’s a magic hat.

If that bag were realistic, and Chickie had to lug it around and decide between dumping out beers or staying true to his mission, then the story and his burden would take on great meaning. The duffle bag literally could’ve been Chickie’s (and America’s) cross to bear across the globe for the sin of the Vietnam war…but instead it’s just a ticky-tack prop that draws viewers out of the reality of this astounding true story.

Another major issue is that Farrelly’s tone through much of the movie is whimsical, and it undermines the horror of the war we see unfolding before us and it all feels…unseemly. There’s a scene like this at the front lines in Vietnam which is so poorly choreographed and directed, and tonally off-kilter, that I found it repulsive.

What’s so grating about The Greatest Beer Run Ever is that it really could have, and should have, been great.

As I watched I kept thinking of how amazing this film would’ve been if it were made in the 1970’s, when the topic, a conservative ‘Road to Damascus’ moment regarding the crime and calamity that was the Vietnam war, would have more cultural resonance, meaning and impact. Imagine a movie like that directed by someone like Hal Ashby and starring Jack Nicholson, I mean God-damn…THAT would’ve been worth seeing!

But instead, we get this rather pathetic modern-day effort from Farrelly and Efron that feels almost instantaneously forgettable.  

To be fair, there are a few sequences that I thought were well done, most notably when Chickie runs into a little Vietnamese girl in a field and tries to interact with her. The scene is shot without sound with music playing over it and it’s easily the best and most profound scene in the film. Another interesting visual is what I will call “the falling-man” shot…which was very reminiscent of 9-11 and therefore was loaded with uncomfortable but insightful symbolism.

What is most interesting to me about the rather uninteresting The Greatest Beer Run Ever though, is that Farrelly was attempting to make somewhat of an anti-war movie in an age when anti-war movies are so rare as to be extinct. The reason for this is two-fold…first, the Pentagon and intelligence community control Hollywood and the messages about the military and war that it produces – and anti-war sentiment is not on their agenda. This manifests in movies and tv shows like Top Gun: Maverick and Seal Team getting made and movies like Oliver Stone’s long planned project on the My Lai massacre not finding funding. Secondly, the anti-war movement in America, along with Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party and the rest of the populist movements of both left and right, have been successfully co-opted and crushed by the establishment, resulting in the anti-war movement being virtually non-existent today.  

Anti-war sentiment is now anathema in America, as liberals – long the vanguard in anti-war movements, have been so easily conditioned to demand blood lust, most notably against Russia. The same liberals I marched with against the Iraq war in 2003 are now ignoring the War in Yemen and demanding all-out war in Ukraine – up to and including nuclear war, and unthinkingly regurgitate vapid establishment propaganda like children reciting their A-B-C’s.

If you apply logic and dare to question establishment propaganda, like the obvious inanities of the Ghost of Kiev, or the Snake Island buffoonery, or the less obvious but equally dubious claims of the Bucha massacre, or the supposed Russian rape camps, or you speak out against the U.S. escalating the war by sending billions upon billions of dollars to Ukraine (in the form of weaponry) and sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines, you’ll be reflexively tarred and feathered as a shill or stooge for Putin.

People have become deathly allergic to context (and thinking), so if you point out the fact that the U.S. instigated the illegal coup in Ukraine in 2014 ,and later broke the Minsk Peace agreements, and point out the fact that Ukraine killed 14,000 ethnic Russians (who were Ukrainian citizens) in the Donbas in the eight years after the coup, and that the Ukrainian government is riddled with fascists who banned the Russian language and shut down media outlets and opposing political parties, you’re just a useful idiot on Putin’s payroll.

This sort of shallow, simple-minded, historically illiterate, Manichean, knee-jerk jackassery used to be what liberals called out on the right and righteously fought against, but now liberals act exactly like flag-waving, McCarthy-ite right-wingers demanding all those with opposing views slavishly obey the establishment line or be branded a traitor or Russian sympathizer, or both. These empty-headed, emotionalist liberal fools are afflicted with the same disease they used to fight against, and are completely blind to their reactionist Russo-phobic conditioning.

The co-opting of the anti-war left by neo-con war mongers and neo-liberal corporatists is a calamity and will be catastrophic for the health of our nation, and may well lead to another world war and all of us to a fiery death.

On that less than pleasant note, let’s return to an equally unpleasant but much less important topic…The Greatest Beer Run Ever.

In more skilled and gifted-hands The Greatest Beer Run Ever could have made salient points on these weighty and vital issues and held a mirror up to reveal the madness that has engulfed America and its anti-anti-war discourse and actions. But unfortunately, Peter Farrelly lacks the needed craft, talent and courage to make such a meaningful movie, and instead churns out this flaccid, flimsy, D-level nonsense that will come and go with no one noticing.

The bottom line is that The Greatest Beer Run ever is a missed opportunity, and you would be wise to miss it too.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 52 - Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Who you gonna call? Well, Barry and I of course! On this episode your intrepid hosts bust some ghosts as we grapple with Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Topics discussed include lessons on how not to restart a franchise, the magic of Paul Rudd and mini Stay-Puff Marshmellow Men, and the sheer genius of Bill Murray and Harold Ramis.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 52 - Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Thanks for listening!

©2021