September 5 and Saturday Night: Two Reviews for the Price of One!!

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

September 5: 4 out of 5 stars – SEE IT.

Saturday Night: 1.5 out of 5 stars – SKIP IT.

Last year two films came out that dealt with the behind-the-scenes drama of major events in television history, and I think it useful to review them both together…a two for one if you will.

September 5 dramatized ABC’s coverage of the kidnapping and killing of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and Saturday Night chronicles the drama surrounding the premiere of Saturday Night Live in 1975.

Contrasting and comparing these films is useful because they both highlight the possibilities and the pitfalls of this very specific genre – the tv movie, or more accurately – the movie about tv.

Let’s start with September 5, which is directed by Tim Fehlbaum and written by Fehlbaum and Moritz Binder. The film was released on December 13th, 2024 and is currently streaming on Paramount+. It stars Peter Sarsgaard, as Roone Arledge – president of ABC Sports, Ben Chaplin as Marvin Bader – head of operations at ABC Sports, and John Magaro as Geoffrey Mason – head of ABC control room in Munich.

September 5 is an extraordinarily effective and affecting movie that is able to build and maintain dramatic tension, and believability, despite audiences already knowing how the story ends.

Director Fehlbaum, along with cinematographer Markus Forderer, are able to create a vivid reality in the claustrophobic confines of the ABC Sports control room in Munich as globe changing events are taking place a mere hundred yards or so from their location.

Fehlbaum never gives in to the temptation to break from the control room perspective and give a glimpse into the hostage situation or elsewhere. Everything we as viewers see is what Arledge, Bader and Magaro are seeing in the control room.

Fehlbaum also makes a very wise choice in his direction of actors, namely he keeps the performance style minimalist – there are no big dramatic speeches, no emoting, just realism of regular people doing their important jobs under extreme pressure….pros being pros. This approach makes it feel like you’re watching things actually unfold and not a movie, which heightens the drama and the emotional impact of the tragic events ABC is covering.

Another key to the film’s success is Hans Weibrich’s editing, which is subtle but tight, and keeps the film at a compelling pace and a captivating run time of 93 minutes.

September 5 is a real gem of a film – masterfully crafted and directed towards adults, the type so rarely made nowadays, and I highly recommend it…so much so that I think you should subscribe or get a free week to Paramount + just to watch it.

The drama covered in September 5 of ABC’s coverage of the massacre of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team is important because the decisions made in that control room still resonate in our culture today. For example, the decision to use the word “terrorist” to describe the Black September militant group who committed to kidnapping and killing – as opposed to say “commando” or “militant” or the just as loaded “freedom fighter”. This choice set up the paradigm under which the Middle East in general, and Israel in particular, would be covered by the media for the next fifty plus years, and continues to this day.

Which brings us to another television event that still resonates fifty years later, and that is the birth of Saturday Night Live, which is dramatized in Jason Reitman’s film Saturday Night.

Saturday Night hit theatres on September 27, 2024, and is now available to stream on Netflix. The film, which is directed and co-written by Jason Reitman, tells the tale of the wild and whacky events surrounding Saturday Night Live’s premiere on October 11, 1975.

The film follows Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) as he scrambles to put out a multitude of fires – which include out of control creative egos, corporate pressure and union resistance, not to mention the culture clash between old school television people and the young rebels Michaels has gathered for his SNL team.

There are lots of very familiar faces here…like Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Akroyd, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin, Andy Kaufman, Billy Crystal, Jim Henson, George Carlin and Billy Preston. For the most part, the actors playing these icons are, not surprisingly, less than a shadow of the stars they are portraying.

The one exception is Cory Michael Smith, who is quite good as Chevy Chase. Others, like Matt Wood as John Belushi, and Nicholas Braun as both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson, are brutally bad.

Gabriel LaBelle, who plays Lorne Michael and who previously played Steven Spielberg in The Fabelmans – quite the power players, is much too young for his role here and lacks the charisma and charm to carry this movie for its bloated 109-minute run time.

Another problem with Saturday Night is that it tries to build tension through music and pacing, but it all falls very flat. It has no life to it, no energy, just a bunch of watered-down Aaron Sorkin-esque walk and talks that are a tsunami of sound and fury signifying nothing.

The actions of the characters in the film run counter to the drama building because none of them seem particularly frantic about going live in less than an hour. The most moronic of sequences involves Lorne Michaels leaving the studio with like ten minutes to go before airtime and walking to the skating rink at 30 Rock, where he has a talk with Gilda Radner and John Belushi. What makes this scene even dumber is that mere moments before Michaels gets there, Gilda Radner gives a melancholy speech to Belushi about how she feels like she’s in the future looking back at this momentous occasion…which of course is supposed to be moving since both Radner and Belushi died much too young…but it just feels contrived and manipulative and takes you out of the story even more than everything else.

Another gigantic issue with the film is that Reitner decides to make a pseudo-comedy about very funny people…which if you’ve ever spent even a millisecond with a comedian you’d know they are the most miserable and existentially burdened humans on the planet. Comedians are funny when they perform, and diabolically dramatic and depressed when they don’t…and Reitman never captures the suffocating gravity of that truth.

Instead, the Saturday Night just flits and flirts from one flaccid bit to another where something supposedly momentous occurs and then something else and then there’s this other thing and then the show starts and everything works out. Yawn.

I am sure it is no coincidence that this film came out the same year that SNL had its 50th anniversary, but the movie fails in every respect to make anyone care about that first show, or to elucidate why it mattered and still does today.

Saturday Night is exactly what you shouldn’t do when making a movie about the behind the scenes of a television event, and September 5 is exactly what you should when making a movie about the behind the scenes of a television event. Where September 5 is precise, meticulous, and contained, Saturday Night is vague, frivolous and dramatically scattered.

I watched the two films on back-to-back nights and it made me really appreciate the craftsmanship and artistry Tim Fehlbaum put into September 5, and the lack of detail and skill of Jason Reitman gave to Saturday Night.

The bottom line is this…September 5 is one of the best films of last year and you should definitely check it out…and Saturday Night is instantly forgettable and not worth a moment of your time.

©2025

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