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‘Saturday Night’ Review: Jason Reitman Finds the Right Ensemble to Capture the Lunacy From Which ‘SNL’ Was Born
Jason Reitman has written a love letter to a TV institution, but also includes the drugs, egos and setbacks that nearly killed 'Saturday Night Live.'
The research is one thing, but Reitman — whose father Ivan directed his fair share of “SNL” legends, and who always dreamed of writing for the show — sets a foolhardy challenge for himself in finding sufficiently funny people to play some of TV’s most beloved cut-ups. What then-30-year-old Michaels understood — and LaBelle captures, alongside a sense of near-crippling panic — was that younger audiences wanted something that spoke to them, even if meant testing the limits of NBC’s Standards department (represented here by Catherine Curtin, whose humorless censor lands the film’s biggest laughs). Reitman chronicles a turning point in television that reshaped America’s sense of humor — one that had been forecast by countercultural breakouts like Lenny Bruce, Cheech and Chong and the show’s first host, George Carlin (Matthew Rhys).
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