Word: radner
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...E.S.T. Place: your living room or mine. During the mid-1970s, Saturday night meant one thing only for glassy-eyed millions of the TV generation: Saturday Night Live. In each installment, a guest host and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players (Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray et al.) teetered on the cutting edge of comedy chaos. The humor was topical, hip, manic, risky, urban and wildly uneven. It was guerrilla television and it radicalized American comedy...
Among the other players, Catherine Colinvaux as an "idiot" successfully steals the show without uttering a line. Her wide-eyed vacant expressions and spastic contortions, reminiscent of Gilda Radner's depiction of a mentally disturbed child on the defunct "old" Saturday Night Live, graciously upstage the sorry plot unfolding around...
...blitzed-out party guy. The other group-the inspired mimics who hid themselves behind the galaxy of comic characters they portrayed-looked both stretched and cramped when, in a movie, they were required to inhabit only one personality. From Sid Caesar and Carol Burnett to Lily Tomlin, Gilda Radner and Aykroyd, these performers had enough energy and scarifying talent to burst out of the small screen, but lacked the strong, smooth identities that Hollywood could package as star quality...
...lumbering across the screen to their designated mark. Context is all. To use only snippets from these movies, as It Came from Hollywood does, is to deprive them of their paper-thin texture. In an attempt at the That's Entertainment of bad films, five comic actors-Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, and Cheech and Chong-introduce segments about gorillas, musicals, reefers, mixed-up teens and the mesmerizing oeuvre of the Poverty Row Stroheim, Edward D. Wood...
...illogical and is without the kind of inventive startlements that make logic irrelevant to pleasure. Director Sidney Poitier is always cutting to some chase or other, all of which he handles with glum professionalism. But it is disheartening that a star team with the potential brilliance of Wilder and Radner had to take off on such an ungainly turkey...