BEFORE: This one wasn't part of the original plan, but now that I've switched things around, and found some other people appearing in these documentaries that are not listed on the IMDB, it became possible to drop this one in here. Or maybe it was always possible, and I just missed it. But sometimes the decision gets taken from my hands - in this case I was watching "Gilbert" on Hulu, and when it was done, the streaming service cued up the next film, which was "Love, Gilda". I'd already decided I wasn't going to include this one here, maybe I'd save it for next year, though it WAS very thematically related to what I've been watching this week.
But stopping the film means getting up from the recliner, because the Playstation controller doesn't reach that far - so I let the film run, switched the TV input to the cable box and came back later to disconnect from Hulu - and that's when I saw writer Alan Zweibel being interviewed, and I remembered him distinctly from the last TWO films, so there's my connection. All I'd need to do would be to confirm that there's a solid link to tomorrow's film - wow, that was easy - and suddenly this film is back on the list. So writer Alan Zweibel carries over from "Gilbert", and two other people carry over via archive footage.
Now, this means I'm going to have to delete THREE films from the schedule for the latter third of this year, but I think I can do that. I already had two movies marked for elimination that could be jettisoned without breaking the chain, three's a little tougher but I think I found five instances where an actor appeared three times in a row, and I could just take out the middle one without interrupting the flow. It's just a matter of prioirities - is it more important to stay on a theme here, or to have three films with Joaquin Phoenix in a row in August, instead of two? Well, my ruling is to re-insert this film here, because this also puts a much more important film on the 3,300 mark. And this also turns Documentary Month into a chain of 30 films instead of 29, and 30 is a full month, 29 is not.
THE PLOT: Weaving together recently discovered audiotapes, rare home movies and interviews with her friends, this documentary offers a unique window into the honest and whimsical world of comedienne Gilda Radner as she looks back and reflects on her life and career.
AFTER: I saw a couple rock music documentaries that took this sort of approach, like one about Jimi Hendrix ("Voodoo Child") that had Bootsy Collins reading excerpts from his own journals. This one invites (mostly) female comedians to read excerpts from Gilda's journals, and they all seem to find something meaningful in them, because as I've already seen this past week, most comedians have the same anxieties - the fear that they're not funny enough, not attractive enough, not thin enough, not good enough. Mostly they all started performing for their parents, and got enough encouragement to continue, despite family tragedies or societal awkwardness. It's like our society has a bunch of filters in place, and people who exhibit enough weirdness or pass certain personality tests all end up on "Saturday Night Live" - yeah, that seems about right.
But as long as SNL has been around, it wasn't ALWAYS there - so we're going back tonight to the onset of the long-running show, and I've seen this seminal moment before, in at least two other movies, when Lorne Michaels recruited most of the cast and writing staff from the National Lampoon radio show, and moved them all across town to NBC's new show "Saturday Night" (the "Live" came later, it was being used at the time by a sports show hosted by Howard Cosell.)
Did we, at the time, ever think that the show would last 40 years, and have over 150 cast members come and go? SNL had so many "off" years during the 1980's and '90's that it always seemed like it might be on the edge of cancellation (because it was) but it turns out that with ensemble comedies, all you have to do is fire everyone on staff, bring in a new team and the network will probably give you another chance - because who the hell is watching TV late on a Saturday, anyway? Mediocre ratings are probably the best you can hope for then, and the cult that built up around the show guaranteed slightly-above mediocre ratings nearly all the time.
But I keep coming back to the original cast - I thought I'd seen a film like this before, but the release date here is 2018, so this is really a new take. And yeah, there's information about Gilda that I didn't know before, like I didn't know that she was chubby as a kid, and I didn't know about her struggles with eating disorders in the 1970's. I didn't know that she dated most of the male cast of SNL at the time, off and on - that she couldn't go to see "Ghostbusters" because most of the main cast was made up of her ex-boyfriends. I should probably read that behind-the-scenes tell-all about the original SNL cast, it seems like that would be very informative.
I'd seen the movie "Gilda Live", of course, but that was so long ago, I was probably just a young kid and missed all the adult subtext. That might be worth another look if it's streaming somewhere. Back in those days the cast of SNL took the summer off - or maybe did some stage work, but nowadays it's a chance for the cast to film five or six movies that will be released throughout the next year. Gilda didn't jump right into a movie career after SNL, but it did eventually happen when she met Gene Wilder. Whatever movie cred she got from "Hanky Panky" got negated by "Haunted Honeymoon", unfortunately. Then of course her battles with ovarian cancer are recounted here, and while this is yet another comedian who left Planet Earth much too soon, at least there was some positive change that resulted with the formation of the Gilda's Club network of cancer support centers, and a program at Cedars-Sinai to screen high-risk candidates, to prevent other people from being misdiagnosed, as she was.
There's no telling what this Emmy & Grammy winner could have gone on to do - she was scheduled to return to SNL as a host, but this was cancelled due to a writer's strike. She could have been an EGOT contender, if cancer hadn't taken her away too soon.
Also starring Chevy Chase (last seen in "Life Itself"), Bill Hader (last seen in "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them"), Melissa McCarthy (last seen in "Ghostbusters"), Lorne Michaels (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Laraine Newman (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Amy Poehler (last seen in "Envy"), Maya Rudolph (last seen in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Paul Shaffer (last seen in "20 Feet from Stardom"), Martin Short (last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), Cecily Strong (last seen in "The Meddler"), Tracey Ullman (last seen in "The Queen"), Anne Beatts, Janis Hirsch, Michael F. Radner, Stephen Schwartz, Rosie Shuster, Jordan Walker-Pearlman, with archive footage of Gilda Radner (also last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Dan Aykroyd (ditto), Jane Curtin (ditto), Garrett Morris (ditto), Harold Ramis (ditto), Gene Wilder (also last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Charlie Chaplin (ditto), Rob Reiner (ditto), Harry Shearer (ditto), Bea Arthur, Lucille Ball (last seen in "Follow the Fleet"), John Belushi (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Steve Martin (ditto), Candice Bergen (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)"), John Candy (also last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), Tom Snyder (ditto), Lynda Carter (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Brian Doyle-Murray (last seen in "Club Paradise"), Joe Flaherty (ditto), Al Franken (last seen in "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power"), Teri Garr (last seen in "The Conversation"), Merv Griffin (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Debbie Harry (last seen in "Quiet Riot; Well, Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), Hugh Hefner (last seen in "Gilbert"), David Letterman (ditto), Buck Henry (last seen in "Town & Country"), Madeline Kahn (last seen in "Paper Moon"), Eugene Levy (last heard in "Finding Dory"), Bill Murray (last seen in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), Michael O'Donoghue (last seen in "Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon"), Jonathan Pryce (last seen in "Woman in Gold"), Bill Russell, Garry Shandling (last seen in "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work"), Lily Tomlin (ditto), G.E. Smith, Patti Smith (last seen in "Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall"), Vivian Vance.
RATING: 6 out of 10 neurotic poems
No comments:
Post a Comment