Jeff’s Wacky SNL Review: Billie Eilish/Billie Eilish

December 12, 2021

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SNL: Billie Eilish, Kate McKinnon (CREDIT: NBC/Screenshot)

The eighth episode of Saturday Night Live Season 47 features the same person as both host and musical guest, and that person is Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell (or just Billie Eilish, for short). This is the first time this season that the same person has been both host and MG. If you were worried that this sort of double duty was never going to happen again, then that was quite an overreaction.

Last episode, I listed the sketches in order of running time, from longest to shortest, so this time I will go from shortest to longest.

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That’s Auntertainment! Episode 38: Our Favorite Christmas Movies of All Time

December 12, 2021

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(Photo by Herbert Dorfman/Corbis via Getty Images)

Santa Claus has made a lot of Christmas movies over the years, and Aunt Beth and Jeff are finally ready to reveal their favorites.

P.S. ‘Benedetta,’ I Love You

December 10, 2021

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Benedetta (CREDIT: IFC Films/Screenshot)

Starring: Virginie Efira, Daphne Patakia, Charlotte Rampling, Lambert Wilson

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Running Time: 131 Minutes

Rating: Unrated

Release Date: December 3, 2021 (Theaters)

What do you do when you have a crush on a nun? If you’re like me, you write a review about her movie. I don’t know if Benedetta’s visions of the Messiah are genuine, but I’m pretty sure that this particular bride of Christ does indeed have superpower. If she says something’s gonna happen, then it’s gonna happen! Definitely be careful around her. She’s quite dangerous, and a bit more wrathful than I would recommend. But oh boy, if she’s on your side, you know you’ve got something special in store.

Grade: Bullseye in the Stigmata

Entertainment To-Do List: Week of 12/10/21

December 10, 2021

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SATURDAY MORNING ALL STAR HITS! (CREDIT: Netflix)

Every week, I list all the upcoming (or recently released) movies, TV shows, albums, podcasts, etc. that I believe are worth checking out.

Movies
–National Champions (Theaters)
–Red Rocket (Theaters)
–West Side Story (Theaters) – Remake.

TV
–Saturday Morning All Star Hits! Season 1 (December 10 on Netflix) – Kyle Mooney does his thing.
–American Auto Series Premiere (December 13 on NBC) – Starring Ana Gasteyer. (Or should that be “Ana Gas Tire” in this case?)
–MacGruber Series Premiere (December 16 on NBC) – Is it sponsored by Pepsi?
–South Park: Post COVID: The Return of COVID (December 16 on Paramount+)

Music
-Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Barn

‘National Champions’ Presents Its Melodramatic Case for Student-Athlete Compensation

December 9, 2021

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National Champions (CREDIT: Scott Garfield/Courtesy of STX Films)

Starring: Stephan James, J.K. Simmons, Alexander Ludwig, Lil Rel Howery, Tim Blake Nelson, Andrew Bachelor, Jeffrey Donovan, David Koechner, Kristin Chenoweth, Timothy Olyphant, Uzo Aduba

Director: Ric Roman Waugh

Running Time: 116 Minutes

Rating: R for Big Boy Executive Language

Release Date: December 10, 2021 (Theaters)

National Champions is certainly timely, as the subject of student-athlete compensation has made its way up to the Supreme Court, and players are now permitted to financially benefit from their name, image, and likeness. But I don’t imagine that this conflict will play out in real life anywhere near as operatically it does in this movie. That’s not a criticism! I’m in the theater to be entertained, not to confirm that they get all the facts straight. And for the most part, I was thrilled, amused, and riveted.

Stephan James is at the center of it all as star quarterback LeMarcus James. James (the actor) played Jesse Owens in his breakthrough role, so he’s building up a bit of a resume of athletes who take a historical stand. LeMarcus is a senior playing his last college game in the looming title bout who’s also the presumptive number one pick in the upcoming NFL draft. But he’s calling an audible, as he announces that he’s boycotting the game unless and until the NCAA agrees to recognize varsity athletes as employees and pay them accordingly. He’s got about three days to convince his teammates and his opponents to join him, while also ducking out of the way of his coach (J.K. Simmons), various college football administrators and executives, and the NCAA’s ruthless outside counsel representative (Uzo Aduba).

Director Ric Roman Waugh and screenwriter Adam Mervis (adapting his own play of the same name) have painted a massively cynical portrait of the state of college athletics. Some of their tsk-tsking is well-founded, but my god, is it breathtakingly overwrought. It kinda has to be, considering that pretty much every line of dialogue frames everyone’s decision in life-or-death stakes. This could be a formula for unbearable soul crushing, but thankfully the premise has to allow at least a hint of optimism to poke its way in throughout. That lightness helps us realize that the ridiculousness of all the melodrama is a plus, as laughing at the moral righteousness of this exploitative system is a healthy reaction.

One other noteworthy observation before I go: several real-life athletes and sportscasters appear as themselves, which would add some authenticity, but that’s undercut by the lack of real-life branding. The teams in the championship game are from fictional schools, and ESPN (or any other sports network for that matter) is never once mentioned. I’d argue that the fakeness is weirdly the right choice (though I imagine it actually wasn’t a choice at all); this isn’t the real world after all, but a slightly heightened version of it.

National Champions is Recommended If You Like: Over-the-top line deliveries, Sports movies without any sports, Kristen Chenoweth performances without any singing

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Salaries

‘Red Rocket’ Puts It All on Display, and To That I Say: ‘Okay!’

December 8, 2021

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Red Rocket (CREDIT: A24)

Starring: Simon Rex, Suzanna Son, Bree Elrod, Brenda Deiss, Judy Hill, Brittany Rodriguez, Ethan Darbone, Shih-Ching Tsou, Marlon Lambert

Director: Sean Baker

Running Time: 128 Minutes

Rating: R for Getting Physical

Release Date: December 10, 2021 (Theaters)

Adult entertainment – or “pornography,” if you will – has become much more democratized and much less stigmatized in this here 21st century. And overall, I think as a society we’re better off for these developments. Greater openness means that the people who have been involved in the industry are much less likely to find their livelihoods ruined by alienation and/or abuse. Instead, they’re more likely to be seen as the human beings that they are. And that’s certainly the truth in Red Rocket, the latest from the very humanistic writer-director Sean Baker.

This is the down-and-out saga of Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), a formerly bigshot porn star who’s squandered whatever fortune he once had, so he takes the bus back to his sleepy Texas hometown and tries to weasel his way back into living with his estranged wife Lexi (Bree Elrod) and mother-in-law Lil (Brenda Deiss). The ladies initially want nothing to do with him, but he wins them over when he starts to make plenty of bank selling weed. Meanwhile, he’s looking for an angle to get back in front of the camera. The best plan he can come up with for doing that is by romancing the local teenage donut store cashier, who everybody calls by her nickname Strawberry (Suzanna Son). The age of consent in Texas is 17, so Mikey’s in the clear legally, but he’s transgressing pretty much every other ethical consideration. And yet despite everything, I found myself hoping that things would work out for him.

A lot of that has to do with the pitch-perfect casting of Rex, whom you might remember as a 90s MTV VJ or for playing Dorkus Supremes in the Scary Movie flicks. (He also even had his own short-lived pornography career when he was struggling for cash in his much younger days.) His specialty is underdogs who endure the full weight of the cosmos hilariously crashing into them, and yet they hop right back up smiling and ready to take it all again. A lot of Mikey’s tragedy is of his own making, but he still has that same never-say-die Rex-ian energy.

Objectively, I can’t approve of about 75% of what Mikey does in Red Rocket. Indeed, I can’t approve of how close he gets to Strawberry, even if she is genuinely charmed by him. Nor can I approve of the way he yanks Lexi hither and thither; she’s hardly perfect herself, but nobody deserves a runaround like that from their spouse, estranged or otherwise. And I certainly can’t approve of the way he abandons his neighbor in one crucial climactic moment that blows up the whole story. And yet, I still want to know: what’s next for Mikey Saber?

Red Rocket is Recommended If You Like: “Bye Bye Bye,” Pop culture footnotes, The underdog

Grade: 4.5 out of 5 Strawberries

‘Being the Ricardos’ Has Some ‘Splainin’ to Do

December 7, 2021

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Being the Ricardos (CREDIT: Glen Wilson/Amazon Content Services LLC)

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Javier Bardem, J.K. Simmons, Nina Arianda, Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat, Jake Lacy, John Rubinstein, Linda Lavin, Clark Gregg, Nelson Franklin, Robert Pine, Christopher Denham

Director: Aaron Sorkin

Running Time: 125 Minutes

Rating: R for Language That the Censors Usually Don’t Allow You to Say

Release Date: December 10, 2021 (Theaters)/December 21, 2021 (Amazon Prime Video)

What is Being the Ricardos all about? I mean that both in terms of this movie’s plot and in the ontological sense. If Aaron Sorkin is to be believed, it’s a combination of kinda-sorta being exposed as a Communist, marital strife, and a fight to control the creative direction of I Love Lucy. Any one of those topics would be enough to center a movie around. But in the movie that we’ve got, they’re all kind of fighting for attention. I suppose these matters can all co-exist, but they don’t do so particularly gracefully in this case. The relationship and professional conflicts feel genuine but standard-issue, while the red scare pretty much fizzles out immediately. (Maybe that was the point?)

It must be said that Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem really don’t look or sound anything like Lucy and Desi. This did not bother me at all! In fact, I think I prefer this anti-accuracy approach in a biopic. These aren’t the real people after all, but representations of those real people. So why not make them characters of their own that can stand outside the historical document? Alas, I suspect that Kidman and Bardem actually were trying to achieve something close to mimicry. It all kind of gets stuck in the unremarkable middle.

One thing about this movie that I did kind of like is the series of interviews from some unspecified future date that serve to frame the 1950s scenes. Tony Hale, Jake Lacy, and Alia Shawkat play a few of the Lucy writers, while their older versions are filled in by John Rubinstein, Ronny Cox, and Linda Lavin, respectively. The check-ins with the senior crew are a little surreal (probably accidentally [or perhaps not?]), thanks to how little is explained about their circumstances. Like, where are these people? What year is it supposed to be? (None of the real-life versions are still alive anymore.) Is this supposed to be for some sort of documentary? Are they being held hostage? I DON’T want to know the answers to any of these questions!

Being the Ricardos is Recommended If You Like: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Wahhhhs

Did I Wolf Down ‘Wolf’?

December 5, 2021

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Wolf (CREDIT: Focus Features)

Starring: George MacKay, Lily-Rose Depp, Paddy Considine, Eileen Walsh

Director: Nathalie Biancheri

Running Time: 98 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: December 3, 2021 (Theaters)

Wolf is basically what I’ve been waiting for ever since I started reviewing movies by asking myself if I wanted to do what’s being offered in the title. This is a movie about a human man who believes that he’s a wolf! Do I also want to be a wolf, even if only for a little while? That might be fun, but that’s not exactly what this movie is really about … or is it? Jacob (George MacKay) sure looks like a Homo sapien, as do all of his fellow patients at the facility where they’re being treated for species identity disorder. But there are moments that really make you wonder if a lupine soul somehow did find its way into a human vessel. Alas, the abusive tactics reminiscent of troubled youth programs practiced by the facility’s director aren’t likely to help us find any answers. Anyway, I quite enjoyed Wolf introducing me to a whole new world and would have liked to have been able to explore it even more (the ending’s a little abrupt).

Grade: 7 Howls out of 10 Whiskers

That’s Auntertainment! Mini-Episode: Aunt Beth Tells Jeff to Listen to ‘The Traveler’

December 5, 2021

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In case you weren’t aware, Jeff loves the blues. Aunt Beth decided that he should listen to some Kenny Wayne Shepherd, so it might be safe to say that she already knows that he loves the blues.

Subscribe to That’s Auntertaiment!‘s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thatsauntertainment

Thank You, ‘Resident Evil,’ I Do Feel Welcomed to Raccoon City

December 4, 2021

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CREDIT: Sony Pictures/Screenshot

Starring: Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper, Avan Jogia, Donal Logue, Neal McDonough

Director: Johannes Roberts

Running Time: 107 Minutes

Rating: R

Release Date: November 24, 2021 (Theaters)

As far as Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City goes, I’d really like to talk about the acting. Particularly, the performances of the “With” guy and the “And” guy. I’m talking Donal Logue and Neal McDonough, baby!

When you have an unabashed genre flick like this one, you need guys who can deliver exactly what’s asked of them without any winking or second-guessing. And that’s precisely what they provide. Also, let’s talk about McDonough’s hair. He usually keeps it pretty cropped, but when he first shows up, he’s got quite the set of locks. I was like, “Who is that? I know I recognize that face and that voice.” When I realized who it was, I was more than a little blown away.

All the other main players held my attention well enough. I don’t have any strong attachment to the Resident Evil franchise, but somehow I have a soft spot for its cinematic efforts.

Grade: Occasional Zombie Dog Eyes

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