The SNL Summer Scorecard
For many years now, Saturday Night Live has been a 12-month, year-round affair. That is to say that during each summer hiatus of the television show, the program’s breakout stars take their sketch comedy selves to the big screen and milk it for all it’s worth.
After Baby Mama kicked things off in box office style in April with one-time Weekend Update co-anchors Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the front end of this summer is all about former big-time male stars of Lorne Michaels’ likely never to be cancelled franchise. We’ve got Adam Sandler as a goofy Mossad mousse man, Mike Myers playing a New Age second banana and Eddie Murphy doing another one of his multiple character deals (though why they changed the title of his latest from Starship Dave to Meet Dave is beyond me). Based on the evidence of the first two films and the promise of the third, Advantage Sandler.
Meanwhile, over on HBO, in a very welcome return, Myers’ partner in SNL crime Dana Carvey, who jumped into the recent MTV Movie Awards for a Wayne’s World revisit, debuted this past weekend a Santa Clara taped comedy special entitled “Squatting Monkeys Tell No Lies”. Tackling everything from a group of Presidents worshipping at the Reagan oracle to the touchy-feely methods of today’s parents, Carvey is in fine form, and though his film career is deader than a doornail (how is it that no one has yet hired Carvey to do the lead voiceover in a big animated feature?), he seems perfectly content.
Current Digital Short wizard Andy Samberg is doing his best to hit it out of the park in a long-form narrative, but this summer’s voiceover work in Space Chimps likely will be, at best, a ground rule double. But that’s fine; Samberg, via this, last year’s Hot Rod and next summer’s Ivan Reitman produced offering I Love You, Man, is slowly but surely trying to find his way to the Sandler sandlot. And while the musical version of Sandler’s 1988 hit The Wedding Singer departed Broadway in 2006, it is currently touring the U.S. as well as the U.K..
For Will Ferrell, in a summer that began with the June 3rd DVD release of Semi-Pro and continues with the July 25th theatrical release of Step Brothers, the big question is whether he, in partnership once again with fellow curly haired doofus John C. Reilly, can put a stop to the nasty and growing backlash. Thanks to a string of less than memorable recent comedies, the second best ever SNL George Bush imitator has many fans riled. ‘Please stop making movies! Please, for the love of God!!!! Just take the money you’ve made and live out the rest of your life in happy retirement, I beg of you!...’ pleads IMDB poster pstachio. Adds ssmith01 a little later in the same thread: ‘Heath Ledger dies and this useless jackass spews out four or five movies a year. This is how I know there’s no god.’ Ouch.
This explains why Ferrell, with his newest effort, has fallen back in step with producer Judd Apatow, his partner on previous efforts such as Anchorman and Talladega Nights. It’s certainly working for his SNL fraternity brother Bill Hader who, on the heels of Knocked Up, Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, will pop up this August in The Pineapple Express. If anyone can rejuvenate the Ferrell onscreen shtick, it’s Apatow (and director Adam McKay).
For me, the best SNL news of all this summer was the confirmation that Jimmy Fallon is essentially getting out of the movie business, where he has had miserable luck, so as to take over the Conan O’Brien 12:30 a.m. hot seat in 2009. And don’t just take my word for it; here, again on IMDB, is how one poster (yamcofarms) frames Fallon’s upcoming fall comedy-drama The Year of Getting to Know Us: ‘I saw the world premiere of this film at Sundance and it is seriously one of the five worst films I have seen in my lifetime.’ Double ouch.
From:
http://www.filmstew.com/showBlog.aspx?blog_id=1379
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