Kyle Mooney's Saturday Morning All-Star Hits (Netflix) Review

It's hard to find a better word (or rather compound word) to describe this then Kyle Mooneyesque. The SNL comedian has cultivated a very specific brand of nostalgia-based parody from the late 80s and early 90s and it's extra meaningful if you grew up on TGIF or Fox's Saturday morning block.

Each of the eight episodes follows a series of cartoons. There's one following the heroics of two professional athletes who live in the shadows of their more famous brother (Robin Lopez or Jarron Collins must finally be seen!) and are unusually violent that has shades of the 90s X-Men cartoons. Another has a dinosaur (based on Denver the Last Dinosaur) who gets suicidally depressed in the first episode.

The show is framed by two twin brothers cosplaying as Saved by the Bell extras who talk like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and even make up their own words like "zwaaz" (likely, a play on the turtles adding "cowabunga" in the vernacular). There are also public service announcements that highlight, well-- the ineffectiveness of 90s public service announcements (think DARE) if nothing else, previews of live action films (extremely softball plugs) and promotional tie-ins that are hilariously obvious but not too different from today's corporate synergy.

Then the show begins to get more serialized in a way that Kyle Mooney's SNL sketches never have the capacity to be. This is why this show exists.

One of the less overtly funny shows (based off Thundercats and He-Man) starts to get a better gimmick when one of the twins, Skip, gets a one-line cameo. Similar to how Jaleel White famously wreaked havoc on the rest of the cast's air time on "Modern Family" through accidentally hitting upon the show's catch phrase "Did I Do That?", Skip instantly gets catapulted as the face of the show and spearheads a live action film. Meanwhile, his brother gets left in the dust. On top of that there's a casually played out murder behind the scenes.

It would be all very dark and complex if it wasn't filtered through the "cowabunga" air-guitar-shredding cheeriness of 90s TV.

As opposed to broad and aggressive (Mike Meyers), random (Lonely Island), or exploring the "what if"s and meandering on tangents (Seth MacFarland), Kyle Mooney's style of parody is an intricately-constructed recreation with glaring holes. It's the juxtaposition that's the joke and while many reviews say he might not be for everyone, there's a lot to appreciate.

The Supersappy Quartet Trailer

One of my favorite internet videos is by comedy duo Britannick mocking Oscar movies in one trailer that incorporates everything from Good Will Hunting to Dances with Wolves to Rain Man to Dead Poets Society to Love Story to...hell, even Silver Linings Playbook:

I recently saw the film Quartet and found it very sweet and endearing but it took me a while to overcome the residue of the trailer. Here is the trailer:

Now the film looks kind of exciting in a way and has a lot of feel-good moments. It was through watching the trailer that I decided to watch the actual film so technically the trailer did its job. At the same time, it seems like the trailer through every possible cliche it could. 

Look, there's Tom Courtenay teaching an inner-city black kid to appreciate music! And look, that guy is old but can still be sexually attracted to people. Maybe that old guy will successfully romance that woman half her age! And maybe Maggie Smith will release her tough exterior to show the beauty within! And the film is joyful because both the guy and the girl are kissing Tom Courtenay simultaneously. And grumpy Tom Courtenay is smiling!

The film is actually really good, though. It's a bit cliched and sappy, but generally earns its heartfelt moments and three of the four lead actors are really good in it. The exception is the Billy Connolly character who really is kind of one-note as the horny old man comic relief. 

What the writer's room on SNL might have looked like this past week, based on the end result

A transcript of the show, or at least a summary of it's highlights can be seen at http://snltranscripts.jt.org/:

"Ok, let's start off with you, writer #1" (Kind of stumped)
"That Suze Orman Show skit killed let's do that again."
"Um, ok. How about you, writer #2"
"Well, I was thinking of a skit where everyone stares at a couple of attractive girls at a resturaunt"
"Um, okay, and then what......"
"Oh, that's pretty much it. but they'll have really funny expressions"
"Oh, jesus christ, where did we hire you from?....um (humoring him), yeah we'll get back to you if we don't ahve any better ideas"
"Andy?"
"Oh, well, just another digital short, this time, i was thinking of people walking around with no pants, and here's the added twist, well, pretend that this is an acceptable thing in society" (immature writers in the room laugh...head writer knows that anything that says Digital Short in front of it regardless of how retarded the idea is, will sell, so he jut shrugs and moves along)
"Ok, next" "How about Shia dressed up as a woman"
"Um, hasn't that been done before by Antonio Banderas, Jake Gyllenhall, Justin Timberlake?" "Yeah, but this won't be in the monologue"
"Um, sounds kind of like it's been done before"
"Ok, what if we get Amy Poehler to do a funny voice"
"Ehhh, I don't know"
"You know, we'll try to introduce a catch phrase like "Funky fresh" which Amy Poehler will use to describe her daughters"
"Yeah, but how does it make it any funnier?"
"Well, if Amy Poehler says it funny enough, we'll turn it into a catch phrase like "Making copies" and "That's the ticket" and just keep recycling that skit, and i won't have to come up with any new ideas all year....oops, did i say that out loud?"
"Ohhhhh, i see we're you're coming from. Next"
[Writer presents the one good original idea in the show: A parody of The Match Game intertwined with a murder mystery]
"Nice. What have you got Bruce?"
"Well, guys, me and Bill have been thinking a lot and we all know how Keenan Thomas acts great as a full-of-himself doofus. What if we talk that character he always does and use it as a skit about a guy in the scared straight program...."
"You know, I liked it better when Chris Farley did it. But it seems like a slow week, we'll get back to it if we have no new ideas"
[Head writer goes around the room and no one has any better ideas] "Ok, Bill and Bruce, you guys are in. Let's do that staring thing because it sounds like the easiest thing to pull off, and hmmmm....which recurring skit hasn't appeared in a while, find the script of that Italian TV show host and pretty much retype it word for word....ok, what are we, 5 minutes short...add some MacGruber sketches and..."
"Hey, I was wondering if my MacGruber sketch could involve an ending other than the factory blowing up. Maybe, i can write it for a full five or six minutes"
"Hmmmm....Nah, let's run it into the ground a little more. The audience finds it funny, let's just stick with what works. Tell you what though, try to find a new angle on it. Maybe Shia Le Bouf is his son or something, I don't know. Work with it"

The downfall of humor II: Mel Brooks

What I find interesting is that in the 1970's the two major comic autuers (if i'm wrong about this and missing someone, feel free to correct me) were Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. People who put "Spaceballs" on a list of best stupid comedies would be surprised to know that Mel Brooks was actually considered a very respectable filmmaker by the critical community. Of his first 4 films, 3 (The Producers, Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles) are on the AFI's list of top 100 comedies of all time, and all of them ranking in the top 13.
His first film "The Producers" (1968) which was a humongous critical and commercial success on Broadway this past decade, put him on the scene and his next big hits were both made in the same year, 1974: "Young Frankenstein" and "Blazing Saddles."

I researched Young Frankenstein's critical reception for a project in a film class a couple of years ago and that got great reviews from the New York Times, LA Times, and Long Island's Newsday. Frankenstein and Producers were comically intelligent films but didn't really push the envelope of the border between high-brow and low-brow entertainment that much. Young Frankenstein established Brooks as a master of parody: the genre of choice for pretty much the rest of his career. But Young Frankenstein was not really very low-brow at all. It had no bathroom humor and had sexual situations but used those in a way that evokes the innocent mix-ups of a screwball comedy. It also didn't go for cheap one-liners. Its subtlety was in its attention to detail in mimicking the original movies and perversing it ever so slightly.

Blazing Saddles was a different story. It was still relatively intelligent with its humor and a film academic could appreciate its clever metacinematic ending in which a brawl in a Western town spills over onto a studio lot and a movie villain tries to escape his own fate by going into a movie theater. It was also just plain hillarious and jam-packed with laughs that left audiences and critics defenseless. At the same time, the movie repeatedly dipped into crude humor and had the potential to be offensive in the way that his later films would soon follow the pattern of. It's possible for a movie to both deliver intelligent humor and be really stupid at the same time and I would give a good review to Blazing Saddles for its intelligent humor but I would be doing so because its pros outweigh the cons.

I didn't neccessarily like the dumb humor and that's where his movies have increasingly followed to. I have a theory that because of the decline of critical respect for Brook's films and because he was one of the leading comic filmmakers of his day, he played a large role in what makes comedy less respectable today.

For Your Consideration review

Christopher Guest and company return to the big screen with a haphazard film that will be just enough to appease the die-hard fans of their unique comedy style but will be unlikely to gain any new converts.

Guest, formerly of Saturday Night Live and Rob Reiner’s cult hit This is Spinal Tap (which he cowrote) , has made a small yet exciting ripple in comedy in the last decade with a new breed of improvisational mockumentary-style comedy. With a recurring stock of actors that includes Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Bob Balaban, Catherine O’Hara, Michael McKean, Parker Posey and the like, his films work as astute parodies of such obscure subjects as community theater (1997’s Waiting for Guffman), dog shows (2000’s Best in Show) and folk music (2003’s A Mighty Wind).
In contrast, the film’s target of parody, Oscar hype, doesn’t work as well because it’s blaringly obvious to everyone how silly the Oscar process is. While praise should be given to Guest for willingness to experiment with a winning formula, the movie suffers a little for these changes. The movie foregoes the mocumentary-style and because the characters’ internal monologue doesn’t get expressed on-screen as much, the movie doesn’t convince us as much that it’s in its own jokes. The jokes from these characters are so wonderfully subtle that you need to be hit on the head with them, and the fake interviews take care of that function.

Lastly, the movie at only 86 minutes, does not give itself enough time for its characters to develop. With such limited screentime, some characters have their moments: Newcomers Richard Kind and Sandrah Oh had an entertaining scene and Bob Balaban and Fred McKean work nicely as a pair of screenwriters, but it was hard to get to know anyone’s idiosyncracies, which is usually where the humor lies in these films. If Fred Willard was any different from his announcer personality in Best in Show, there certainly wasn’t enough time to find out. Perhaps the deleted scenes in the DVD extras will show us what Fred Willard and the rest of the cast were really all about, but until then the version in the theater feels like an incomplete draft.