Eugene Lee: Production Designer for SNL

Posted on January 10, 2017 at 4:01 pm

Eugene Lee has designed sets for “Saturday Night Live’ since the very beginning in 1975. He spoke to the UK’s Creative Review about creating the look of the sketches and how technology and expectations have changed in 41 years.

Lee says the SNL team has just four days to prepare the show and construct sets. Every Wednesday, he takes the train from Rhode Island (where he lives) to New York (where the show is broadcast) and spends the afternoon reading through scripts submitted by writers. Once the producers have decided which scripts they’d like to use, Lee and his team will work with the writers and actors to devise each set.

“We go and talk to the writers and actors and try to work out what they see in the set,” he explains. “If the script says there’s a restaurant, we’ll say, ‘what kind of restaurant? Is it high class? Is it elegant? Does it have red chequered tablecloths?’…. SNL is best when there’s great writing – if a sketch doesn’t have that, then it’s a fail – so we listen to the writers and they tell us what they think.

Slate’s 2016 Movie Club

Posted on January 6, 2017 at 8:00 am

I look forward to Slate’s annual movie club roundup of critics discussing the best and worst of the year.

Slate’s own Dana Stevens points out that there was only one title on all four participants’ top ten lists for the year, Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight.” She says, “‘Moonlight’s’ commercial and critical success—the near-universal recognition of its hard-to-define specialness—was one of the cracks in the wall that allowed light (that liquid Miami moonlight) to shine into this sometimes pitch-dark year.” Mark Harris calls it “a beautifully accomplished work that takes seminar-room issues of race, class, sexuality, and identity and transforms them into something artistic, sexy, tragic, wrenching, human, and fully American.”

I am more interested in the discussions and debates about particular movies than in the effort to look for themes in the movies that were released or popular in any individual year or consider them as a reflection on our times. But I did like Brooks Barnes’ essay in the New York Times about how in the tumultuous year all of the top box office films were fantasies.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

A Scholarly (Yes!) Look at Ferris Bueller

Posted on January 4, 2017 at 8:00 am

I’m a fan of Steve Almond’s writing, and really enjoyed his take on “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” especially his discussion of the relationship between Ferris (Matthew Broderick) and Cameron (Alan Ruck).

Hughes could have simply cast as a straight man for Ferris. But he does something far more compelling: he renders the pair as a psychological dyad. Ferris is fearless, larger-than-life. He has internalized the unconditional love of his parents and skips through his days in a self-assured reverie. He is what every teenage guy dreams of being: a raging, narcissistic id who gets away with it. Cameron is an actual teenager: alienated from his parents, painfully insecure, angry, depressed.

It is the tension between these two that drives the action.

He puts the story into context as more than a lighthearted wish fulfillment.

Hughes performed an astounding ontological feat. He lured viewers into embracing his film as an escapist farce, then hit them with a pitch-perfect exploration of teen angst. He snuck genuine art past the multiplex censors.

He writes about the scene where Cameron argues with himself about whether he will do as his friend Ferris asks and leave home for a “day off.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdcFYNe9U7A

The sequence lasts barely a minute. It is an astonishing piece of physical humor, an emotional ballet worthy of Chaplin. Hell, it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever seen, period. Because it’s not just funny, it’s heartbreaking. We are watching a kid utterly crippled by his own conflicted impulses, torn between outrage and obedience.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

The Worst Films of 2016

Posted on December 30, 2016 at 6:00 am

These films are not just bad; they are awful. Avoid at all costs.

Mother’s Day
The Wild Life
Norm of the North
The Boss
Alice Through the Looking Glass
Gods of Egypt
Huntsman: Winter’s War
Tarzan
London Has Fallen
Why Him?

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

SPOILER ALERT: Rogue One Secrets

Posted on December 17, 2016 at 7:47 pm

For hard-core “Star Wars” fans only! SPOILER ALERT!

From Slashfilm: What the differences between the trailer and the finished film show us about the reshoots. Particularly interesting is the decision to soften Jyn’s character.

Most of this dialogue compiled from various trailers is very different. Jyn’s troublemaker backstory is mostly removed from the finished film. Her responses are more antagonistic and somewhat snarky. We had heard that the reshoots reworked the Jyn character to make her less arrogant and abrasive and more empathetic, and it appears this is true.

And, as you might imagine, there are a couple of very detailed lists of the Easter eggs and references to other “Star Wars” stories, including The Verge, Den of Geek, and Screen Rant.

And CinemaBlend has an intriguing theory on how “Rogue One” relates to the flashback sequence in “Force Awakens.”

These are the fan sites you are looking for.