Today’s Ramblings

Classic SNL Recap - Season 14, Episode 10

It’s always a special treat when an SNL host who is best known as an intense dramatic actor comes aboard and shows a strong comedic side. Beyond the obvious history with Christopher Walken, I have fond memories of shows hosted by the likes of Edward Norton and Jessica Chastain, who both aced the assignment. But to me, no one has ever topped John Malkovich. He has hosted the show 3 times; this was his debut.

But first, the cold open. This episode aired on January 21, 1989 which was the day after George Bush’s inauguration and the day before Super Bowl XXIII, so the show combined both events. It was set in the winning locker room (the Nostradamuses in the writers room correctly predicted a 49ers victory, although they were a little off on the final score) and showed Kevin Nealon as Bill Walsh received the then-obligatory congratulatory phone call from the President. Dana Carvey’s Bush made the standard joke about how he could use the SF defense to help him take on Congress, but the call was interrupted by Phil Hartman’s Reagan, assuming that because he was POTUS during the season & playoffs he had dibs on making the call. He relented and let Bush take the first turn, but the call was drowned out by Reagan’s loud humming and by his shouting towards Nancy in another room. “I’m on the phone! With Bill Walsh! The football coach!”

That wasn’t the only inaugural related sketch. In one piece Nancy Reagan (Jan Hooks) and Barbara Bush (Hartman) were having tea in the White House, where Reagan was making snarky comments about how Bush had “improperly” rearranged the room decor. She finally placed a death grip on a door handle before Secret Service agents had to drag her out. In addition, there was an Update bit showing Dan Quayle (Carvey) taking the oath of office, unable to remember more than one word at a time. Props to Nora Dunn, who perfectly replicated Marilyn Quayle’s Stepford Wife facial expressions.

Now, on to Malkovich. I know I’m in the minority on this, but to me Ryan Gosling’s giggle fest got very old very quickly. Look at John Malkovich instead. He played his roles here with the same intensity that he would give to a Tennessee Williams play. He remained in character all the way, never once cracking an inappropriate smile. A perfect example is the Johnny Canal sketch. He portrayed a frontiersman presenting his proposal to the President of a system of canals that would connect every single village in the US to every other. The look on his face as the cabinet members pointed out the logistics of such a project was worth the price of admission.

One of the recurring sketches from this era was a parody of the old Lifetime talk show Attitudes. In this one Malkovich portrayed their guest, a man known for creating sculptures out of driftwood. The top sketch, however, was the one in which he played a British lord who will not be mocked! It’s another perfect example of how no one else could have played it as well as he did. It’s also notable that a fresh face showed up in this sketch. This episode served as the SNL debut of Mike Myers. (Ben Stiller was still yet to join, but since the next episode I’ll discuss will be the season finale, by which time Stiller had already left the show, this means that I will have completely passed by the complete Ben Stiller era in these writeups.)

John Malkovich made for a perfect host. He is a great actor, but also an odd one. He is fully aware that he comes across as a strange guy, and he steers right into that skid. Well done.

SNL returns this weekend with new episodes, so I will once again go back to rewatching old episodes only in weeks when the current show is airing a rerun. So it will be a few weeks until I recap the season 14 finale, hosted by Steve Martin. On a related note, I’m also going to adjust my schedule and write up my thoughts on new episodes on Wednesdays rather than on Mondays. That way I don’t feel as much pressure to watch it over the course of the weekend and it maintains Wednesday as SNL Day in this newsletter. Please make a note of it.

Reviewing Olympic Sports

Football (Soccer) - I basically do the same thing following every major competition, whether it’s the Olympics or the World Cup. I watch more soccer than I generally do, and I try to convince myself that I need to carve out more time for myself to follow the sport and learn to appreciate it more. As an example, I only have a rudimentary grasp of strategy, so when I hear the commentators discuss different formation strategies, it means nothing to me. Never mind the offsides rule. For all of the jokes people make about nil-nil scores, a tight match is like a great pitchers duel in baseball. Scoring opportunities are so exciting, and a great goal is a thing of beauty.

As you may have noticed, it’s difficult for me to be a casual fan of a sport. I tend to follow sports intensely; trying to learn as much as I can about a sport’s history. So whenever I pledge to find an EPL team to follow or to pay more attention to the NWSL, I soon realize that I just don’t have the available storage space in my head for another sport. As a result I’ll ride the same carousel that I always do when the next men’s & women’s World Cups take place. I’ll watch games, enjoy the action, and then set the sport aside until the next big event takes place.

As far as Olympic football goes, the two tournaments are vastly different, largely due to the (euphemistically stated) who is bigger rivalry between FIFA and IOC. These are arguably the two most corrupt sporting bodies in the world, which is saying a lot. FIFA wants to protect the World Cup at all costs, so the men’s tournament is an under-23 one, with a small handful of roster spots per nation available for players above the magic age. In contrast, all players are eligible to compete in the women’s tournament. Would the men’s tournament be better if the likes of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo been available to play for their national teams through multiple Olympic cycles in the same way that generational talents such as Mia Hamm and Marta have participated in multiple women’s tournaments? It’s a pointless argument because it’s doubtful that FIFA would ever give in, but just imagine an alternate Earth in which Pele could have posed with 3 or 4 gold medals draped around his neck.

Golf - Now, this is a sport that I never watch & barely follow, so I certainly wasn’t going to pay much attention to it in the Olympics. So, I’ll be brief. Golf’s trajectory as an Olympic sport has been similar to that of tennis. In its introduction many of the top players seemed ambivalent. They didn’t come up in the sport with Olympic ambition, so there was a sense of “this is just another tournament.” It took a few cycles for it to become a tournament that players feel like they must win to complete their career - just look at how emotional Scottie Scheffler was when he won gold in Paris.

I’ll pose this question to golf fans - does it lose something when Olympic golf is a standard 4 round, stroke play tournament? Would it stand out more from regular tour play if a different format was used; either match play or some sort of team competition? I’m curious to know what people would think.

Farewell To Oakland

The A’s wrap up the season this weekend in Seattle, which means that their current series against Texas will be their final games in Oakland. It’s a sad end to the franchise’s time in the Bay Area. Next stop Sacramento, where they will play in a minor league park, on an artificial turf surface in a city where triple digit summer temperatures are all too common. Not ideal. How did owner John Fisher say farewell to the fans?

The statement is tone deaf, to say the least. Setting aside the fact that he spelled Loma Prieta incorrectly, this open letter is an insult to the fanbase. Does anyone really believe when he claims that he really, really, really tried to make it work in Oakland? He must have had his fingers crossed behind his back when he drafted this statement. Shame on John Fisher and all of his enablers. (Cough, Rob Manfred)

On a related note, man the Pirates look like a chickens*** organization. Rowdy Tellez was due a $200,000 bonus once he hit 425 plate appearances. He was up to 421, and Pittsburgh DFA’d him in the season’s final week. Now, it’s not is if he was having a particularly good season, but that was still such a weak move.

JD & Mercury

A couple of recent deaths merit noting. Singer/songwriter JD Souther passed away last week. One of the leading forces in the country rock movement he first made his mark as part of The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band. He rarely had major commercial success on his own, but he did have a pair of Top 15 hits in the late 70’s/early 80’s with You’re Only Lonely and his duet with James Taylor, Her Town Too. It was his work with The Eagles that gave him his biggest success. He was a co-writer on several of their classics, such as Best Of My Love, New Kid In Town, and Heartache Tonight. These songs among others led to his induction into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame. He continued to collaborate with Don Henley in the latter’s solo career, and he was one of the many musicians in the classic concert special Roy Orbison: A Black & White Night, which can be regularly seen during PBS pledge drives. Souther was 79.

Former Dolphins running back Mercury Morris also died this week. He was part of their famed backfield with Larry Csonka and Jim Kiick when they won back to back Super Bowl titles, including their 14-0 season in 1972 as they became the only team in the Super Bowl era to finish undefeated in both the regular and postseason. That team has always had a collective chip on its shoulder, feeling that despite the accomplishment they have often been ranked below the great Steelers or Packers dynasties when the greatest NFL teams of all time are listed. It’s true that they benefitted from a relatively easy schedule that year, but it’s also true that no other team, such as the 2007 Patriots who also ran the table before losing in the Super Bowl, finished a year unblemished.

This helped perpetuate the myth of the Dolphins supposedly sharing a collective champagne toast whenever the last undefeated team picks up their first loss in any given season. Morris in particular relished playing the villain; he was usually quick to shoot down the allegations of those champagne parties, but he also starred in commercials that playfully poked the bear when those 2007 Pats threatened the record. Morris was obviously playing the wrestling heel with tongue firmly in cheek. It should also be noted that he briefly served prison time on a drug trafficking conviction; he went on to become a motivational speaker. Morris was 77.

TV Of the 21st Century - Alias

Alias was a show that really went off the rails in its later seasons, but not for the usual reasons. The longer the show went on, the more convoluted its underlying mythology became. It was starting to give me headaches. I suppose it would have been easy to simply pass off all of the quests to obtain Renaissance era artifacts as nothing more than a series of Macguffins. Still, it was much more complicated than it needed to be.

That’s especially true because the initial concept was so simple. The legend is that in an interview JJ Abrams made a passing reference that one plot he was planning for the second season of Felicity would be the revelation that she was actually a spy. He then realized that beyond his silly joke there was potential there. What if an All-American looking young woman was in fact a CIA agent? Enter Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow.

The pilot episode introduced the premise. It began with scenes of Sydney being tortured by the bad guys which led to flashbacks that showed her recruitment into and training by the CIA. Over the course of the episode she outwits and overpowers her captors, immediately demonstrating that she is much tougher than she looks. We soon learn that her main mission was to infiltrate SD6, a rogue subdivision within the agency. She learns that her father Jack (Victor Garber) is also a double agent trying to take down SD6.

Alias had a wonderful array of supporting characters. There were several fellow agents who assisted her - Marshall the tech wiz, and Marcus the older agent (played by classic Guy Who Always Elevates His Material Carl Lumbly) who served as a bit of a father figure. Not to mention her two civilian best friends: Francie, as well as Will (Bradley Cooper!) a rising investigative journalist who was starting to get dangerously close to learning the real story.

The show was of course held together by the lead character, and Garner was an absolute revelation. She has an extremely expressive face, and she conveyed the complete range of emotions. She could show fear, determination, empathy, pain, concern, and everything else. Her wide array of wigs and disguises as she fulfilled her assignments was the show’s signature characteristic. Her finest moment likely came when she discovered SPOILER ALERT that Francie had been murdered and replaced by an evil doppelgänger. The climactic sequence in that storyline was heartbreaking.

I also have to give the show credit for a finale that actually tied up the seemingly infinite number of loose ends without getting too bonkers. The chief villain (Ron Rifkin) got his final comeuppance in a spectacular way. SPOILER ALERT He had obtained immortality (just go with it) and when Sydney finally defeated him he wound up buried beneath tons of rubble from which he had no hope of digging himself out. Because he was immortal he could not die, so his fate was to spend eternity buried alive.

At its best Alias was a thrilling show, as long as you don’t spend too much time trying to make sense out of everything. Surrender yourself to the borderline insanity and it’s a rewarding experience.

Closing Laughs

That does it for today, have a great day everyone and thanks again for your participation. See you all again on Friday. Be sure to pack a sweater.