TTH 6/17/26

Classic SNL Recap - Season 30, Episode 10

This episode was the one and only time that Paul Giamatti has hosted SNL, and he unsurprisingly was excellent. He went with the strategy to treat each sketch as an acting challenge and not as a comedy challenge. His patented slow burn was perfect for many of the premises.

This episode ran on January 22, 2005, or 2 days after George W. Bush’s second inauguration. In the cold open Tina Fey and Amy Poehler portrayed Barbara and Jenna Bush returning to their bedroom after a night of debauchery at the various inaugural balls. (Jenna drunkenly made out with Dick Cheney’s daughter. She confirmed that it was NOT the gay daughter, the other one.) They also shared their secret “twin” language, which was little more than Pig Latin, but was still too complex for their father (Will Forte) to decode.

One of the other big news items of that week was Condeleeza Rice’s confirmation hearings for Secretary Of State. Maya Rudolph portrayed Rice, but the star of the sketch was Seth Meyers as John Kerry, back at his Senate seat. Rather than ask questions of Rice, he spent most of his time lamenting the fact that his own inauguration would have been awesome. He had already booked Bob Dylan, and Savion Glover was also scheduled to bring both the noise and the funk.

This show also took place shortly after the Golden Globes, a ceremony in which Jamie Foxx defeated Giamatti for Best Actor In a Comedy. He alluded to that disappointment in his monologue, and doubled down in a sketch in which he and his date (Rachel Dratch) stepped into a limo at evening’s end. The driver (Finesse Mitchell) at first mistook him for Rob Schneider, and even after being corrected was still unable to place him, being unfamiliar with any of Giamatti’s movies. When Giamatti finally names a movie that the driver recognizes - Saving Private Ryan - he is asked, “Were you Ryan?” “No!” “Were you the guy who saved him?” “No!” “Then I don’t know who you are.” The driver then went on to say how Foxx’s acceptance speech at the Globes brought everyone to tears, and that no actor competing against him has any shot this award season.

There was a blizzard in the Northeast on show night, and there was a running gag throughout Update in which Amy and Tina kept on throwing it back to Dratch who was supposedly outside the studio to provide storm updates. As stagehands bombarded her with stage snow, she begged to be let back indoors while the temperature bug on screen continued to drop. The anchors, who were sipping hot chocolate out of oversized mugs, refused, reminding her that it was her responsibility as a reporter to provide important information to the audience.

There was an odd sketch which was a TV Land broadcast of a lost variety show from the 1970’s, filled with many of the bizarre performers which were so prevalent on the variety shows from that era. I only bring it up because one of those performers was a gospel singer portrayed by Kenan Thompson, a singer with many of the same mannerisms that he would use a few years later when he created Diondre Cole for What’s Up With That?

I also kind of liked the sketch in which Giamatti was a financial planner helping out a potential new client (Dratch) as a fellow employee in the background (Forte) continuously screamed “oh, no!” into his phone. There was also a sketch about a celebrity gossip series on the BBC. The premise concerned the tortured puns that the presenters would incorporate into their stories to add a little sizzle. A little of it went a long way, but it became sadly timely because Horatio Sanz portrayed the British equivalent of Gene Shalit here. (See below.)

Overall this was just an outstanding episode. Paul Giamatti may be a certified Serious Actor, but there is also something about his vibe which brings a light hearted feel to even his most serious roles. The guy is genuinely an A-level talent, and he brought his A-game to SNL. Well done. Next week I will cover the season finale, hosted by Lindsay Lohan.

Last Thoughts On NBA 25/26

I have a couple more brief points about the NBA Finals that I didn’t have room for on Monday. The first involves James Dolan. For all of his many faults, he has always done a good job of keeping Knicks alumni as part of the family. I had almost as much fun searching for former Knicks in the stands than I did searching for the many celebrity fans in attendance. So many great Knicks from the past were conspicuous by their presence in MSG. With one glaring exception.

The relationship between Dolan and Charles Oakley has been strained to say the least, culminating in the moment years ago when MSG security dragged him out in handcuffs, alleging that he was causing a ruckus. The lawsuits associated with that incident were eventually settled, and Oakley’s ban from MSG has since been lifted, but he refuses to return until Dolan apologizes. I am not holding my breath for that apology. The one advantage to the Knicks clinching the series on the road is that Oak was in attendance for that game, and he got to share in the moment along with his old teammates. It’s unfortunate that he is estranged from the team; he means so much to Knicks fans. This is not a PR battle that Dolan can win; is it too much to hope that he can be the bigger man and use this moment to reconcile with Oakley?

The NBA in general is a hotbed of hot takes, but it seems that this year’s playoffs has inspired a disproportionate number. Because star players are so vital to a team’s success, reputations have become collateral damage in the Ringz Culture mentality. It sometimes gets so ridiculous that the discourse sounds as if there are only 3 good players in the league at any one time; the rest are all pretenders to the throne. Sure, this guy is good, but without a championship, what is he really worth?

There has been a lot of overreaction this year. All-NBA players Jalen Duran and Chet Holmgren both had fairly atrocious performances. That’s one thing, neither of those men has put together a large body of work yet, so it’s too early to say if in either case it was simply a bad series or if something lacking in their game has been exposed. What I found ridiculous was the criticism thrown towards more established stars. I won’t single out one specific font of hot takes; I will simply say that his name rhymes with Kendrick Perkins. He actually said at one point that the Nuggets’ loss proves that Nikola Jokić is a fraud. Really?

Which leads us once again to the Spurs. They were on a great roll, until they were not. I don’t think for a moment that their loss in the Finals exposed any sort of underlying deficiency. They came up against a team which has been playoff tested; this was uncharted territory for the young Spurs. They learned what virtually every championship team goes through; playoff experience is vital. The only way to learn what it takes to win those 16 games is to take that punch and learn from the experience. I am still 100% certain that this is a core capable of winning multiple championships. They lost in 5 games, but did not have a franchise scarring Nick Anderson moment. They will be back, and they will be hungry.

He Loved It!

When I wrote about Rex Reed’s death a few weeks ago I had mentioned that at the peak of his national visibility he was America’s second most famous movie critic, behind only Gene Shalit. Well, now Shalit has followed Reed into the Great Movie Theater In the Sky. It is pretty amazing that Shalit became a TV star. With his mop of hair, bushy mustache, and relative lack of polish, he was almost the antithesis of what anyone would picture a TV personality should look or sound like. He made up for it with an exuberant personality and a penchant for clever wordplay.

His chief shtick was to incorporate puns from the movie’s titles into his reviews. He also knew how to draw the attention of studios’ public relations teams by including phrases certain to be used for pull quotes on movie posters. He wouldn’t give in-depth critiques in the way that Siskel & Ebert did, he was more of a “get to the point” guy, and he rarely panned the movies that he was reviewing. His proclamations of “I loved it!” was practically his trademark. I’ll leave that up to others to decide if this was an editorial decision to make sure that stars would continue to appear on the Today Show without any tension caused by a bad review.

His distinctive look and style made him easy to parody. Eugene Levy used to portray him on SCTV, and one of my favorite SNL sketches was an All About Eve parody set in the Today Show studio. Jon Lovitz played Shalit, spitting out a litany of reviews. “It would be a crime to miss Crimes and Misdemeanors. I loved it!” “It should be, When Billy Met Oscar! I loved it!”

Shalit was the film critic on The Today Show for more than 35 years. He died late last week at the age of 100.

The Science Fiction Movie Pantheon - The Thing

Sometimes it takes longer than it should for a great film to be recognized. There are few better examples than The Thing. It was a box office failure upon its initial release and it wasn’t much of a critical darling either. The special effects were too graphic for many people to stomach, and a movie this nihilistic didn’t exactly fit into the zeitgeist during the summer of E.T. It did have its share of admirers, however, and a cult audience slowly developed. It is now properly judged as a true masterpiece. All it took was patience, and that’s apropos being that the titular creature had been buried in Antarctica for thousands of years. Thankfully it did not take quite that long for The Thing to finally, and deservedly, find its audience.

Directed by John Carpenter in the middle of his golden age, the film was a remake of a sci-fi classic from the 1950’s, which was itself based on a novella written in the 1930’s. This version of the story was set at an American research station in Antarctica. As the characters - played by a veritable cornucopia of That Guys - are introduced, it’s apparent that they have been on assignment long enough that the annoyances which are inevitable when a group of men are isolated in a desolate setting have started to emerge, but they are all professionals committed to their tasks so they make do.

Suddenly, they see a team from a nearby Norwegian station chasing and attempting to kill a fleeing husky. They wind up accidentally blowing themselves up in the attempt, and the Americans place that dog in the kennel along with their own sled dogs. Big mistake, as it turns out. Assuming the Norwegians have gone stir crazy, the Americans send a small team back to their station to further investigate what caused them to act like this. They discover that all of the scientists stationed there are dead and that the team had dug up what appears to have been an alien spaceship which had been buried in the permafrost for centuries.

The Americans learn too late that the dog was not a dog, it was the alien. The species had the ability to morph into any living being, so as the creature runs roughshod throughout the base, there is no way of knowing who is human and who is alien. The “who can you trust” trope plays out here. In one of the most tension filled scenes imaginable, the blood of each man is tested to see who is in fact human. You knew that for dramatic purposes it would be dragged out as long as possible, and the scene was so perfectly staged.

The film at the time was infamous for how graphic the makeup effects were; many of them were borderline nauseating. Geez, the scene with the defibrillator. Admittedly it is probably not a good idea to have eaten before watching this movie. It is noteworthy that this was released in 1982, or shortly before CGI became common. Everything shown here was handmade, and the devotion to the craft gave the situation an air of authenticity.

Kurt Russell was Carpenter’s go-to lead actor for a period, and he was well-cast as the man who asserts himself as the leader in the fight against the creature. There were plenty of other familiar faces seen here, such as Wilford Brimley when he only looked about a decade older than his real life age, as opposed to a few years later when he was the oldest looking 50 year old man on the planet. This was also the first major film role for certified Coolest Man In the World, Keith David.

Without giving out any spoilers as to who was killed and when, the alien picks off the crew one by one throughout the movie. Eventually the last survivors come to the conclusion that they can not risk the alien finding its way to civilization. Their only recourse would be to sacrifice themselves by blowing up the station; that would mean that they would freeze to death, but it would also kill the creature as it could not survive in the harsh elements either. The ending was ambiguous; it was likely that one of the last men standing was the alien, but which one was it?

The Thing is one of those rare movies which is so good that it gets better each time that I re-view it. Just for fun, take a look at a list of movies that came out in the summer of 1982. You will find classic after classic, an almost ridiculous list of great movies which have stood the test of time. The Thing can hold its own with the best of them.

Closing Laughs

That is enough for today. Thanks for tuning in, and have a great day everyone. Make sure to be kind to those around you. See you again on Friday.