Bruno Mars on Saturday Night Live

A few observations on this week of Saturday Night Live. The cold open this week again featured a look at a Presidential debate, this one being the second held last week. It was funny in a different way than the first debate parody which we saw earlier in the season.

In this round the folks asking the question became part of the humor, the debate having been held on Long Island made for some easy to mock characters just in the asking of the question. For all the accolades Jay Pharoah gets for his performance on Obama the real star of these skits is Jason Sudekis, his take on Obama while not physically as similar is spot on with his speaking patters. When Sudekis as Romney says " Candy, Candy, Candy just let me make three more points" he is Mitt Romney. Perhaps the standout moment of the skit however, was the wry observation of when a voter asks what they two will do to keep AK-47's out the hands of the wrong people and both the fictitious candidates quickly agreed that the answer to that was " Nothing, Absolutely Nothing."

Tom Hanks as he is often want to do hung around Saturday night and appeared in a couple of skits. It must be nice for both sides, clearly Hanks has an open invitation to show up whenever he feels like it, and what a good day it must be for Lorne Michaels when he walks in the door.

The star of the show was, unequivocally, Mr. Mars. When he came out to do the monologue the first thing that I noticed was how incredibly short he is. This man is tiny, both small and short. He talked a bit about being the host and the musical guest and away the show went.

Mars appeared in a Pandora music skit that showed off his range and an incredible range it is, he sang a few lines of six different singes and did it amazingly well. Mars cannot not be listened to and not make one think of Michael Jackson. He is an amazing singer. His second performance of the night, of a song I have not yet heard, called Crazy Lost Girls, or something like that, was amazing. I assume that it is on a forthcoming album.

Another win was the short called Sad Clown featuring Mars and a return to the tunnel ride at an amusement park that breaks down leaving the amniatronic figures to menace those on the ride. Hanks made a special appearance in this role and it was solid.

There were misses, Weekend update wss subpar, I never find Stefan to be that funny and the Brad Pitt themed commercials did not strike gold.

Still another great week for SNL, they are on a roll.

Tree of Life

This 2011 Terrence Malick film was very polarizing. When the movie debuted at the Cannes Film Festival it received loud cheers and loud boos at the same time. That in a sentence sums up a Terrence Malick movie.

This movie starred Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain as a young couple in Texas in the early nineteen sixties. As their family grows we meet Jack and RL their first two sons and the movie centers mostly on Jack, his adolescence, and his growing anger at his father.

The movie begins with a long sequence which most have taken as Malick's history of the universe. We see the Big Bang, we see life on earth develop and then from space we see some kind of asteroid hitting the Earth.

Soon enough we meet the O'Brien's, first names never mentioned. Their young family is growing and they like any young couple are captivated their small children. Mr O Brien, played effectively by Brad Pitt is an engineer. As the boys grow he does his best to be a good father, he is frustrated with his choices, never having pursued his love of music, and feeling beaten down by his job. To soothe his ego he files patents for inventions.

As the boys grow up Jack, his oldest, begins to have anger and frustration with his father, feeling him to be a bully, a man who dominates him in a way he does not appreciate. This seems to be beyond the normal frustration of the normal father-son relationship.

The movie is told in more of a vignette than a time lined story. Much of what we see is as if we were looking in the window and the scenes change rapidly. Jessica Chastain as Mrs O' Bren is wonderful. She is one of those actresses that in watching her you feel like you know her, or have seen her in many movies prior, she is very much able to present in a way you connect with. In this family Mrs O' Brien is a spiritual person, she is the nurturer to the boys and tries to be the balance of her husband. At one point in the movie, Mr. O'Brien goes on a long business trip and the family dynamic changes. What begins as lightheartedness and fun becomes a time of rebellion. Young Jack starts to get in trouble and does some things for which he feels terribly guilty.

At times in the movie we see an adult Jack working in an office building. Sean Penn plays the older Jack as he has a phone conversation with his father which centers on an argument about the death of his little brother, the middle son, RL, who died in Vietnam.

Eventually the family leaves Texas as Mr O' Brien gets a transfer. He and Jack have a talk which is semi re-conciliatory. Mr O' Brien wants Jack to make better decisions, to pursue his passion, and he also worries about if he is a good enough person. Doubting yourself seems to be present even in this man who is a pretty solid version of what the mid 20th century Father was supposed to be.

As the movie ends older Jack has a vision where he meets his Dead brother on a beach, and feels his Mother, at the age she was when he was young, reconciling the loss of her son to her God.

The movie was visually strong, with interesting scenes. The alienation between father and son is pretty typical and the story shows scenes from a suburban childhood many can identify with.

The dream scenes and life creation scenes are interesting but do not really do much to advance the story. For me this film seems to lack a chromosome that binds it all together. It is like watching a sequence of short films, some work together to bring a conclusion and some do not.

Still it is a brave film, ambitious if nothing else.

Moneyball

When my wife is interested in a sports movie it is a rare thing but as this movie was heavily promoted it did gain her interest. So last weekend we did go see the new film starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill.

Based on a book by Micheal Lewis the book examines the Oakland A's baseball team early in the last decade and the methodology they used to consistently put a winning team on the filed with a limited budget.

Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane the reknown GM who was perhaps the first G M to embrace sabermetrics fully. Overcoming objections from perhaps everyone in his organization Beane sees this as the only way to keep the team competitive after losing Jason Giambi, Johnny Damon and others in one off season.

Pitt is likable in this movie, this in itself is a plus as I do not usually have much good to say about his acting but in this movie he works well. Jonah Hill plays a compostite character, mostly based on Beane's assistant Paul Depodesta. A nerdy kill out of Yale who feels he has found a formula devoid of the attachment to old school statistics such as RBI's and Batting Average.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman has a scene stealing role as Oakland manager Art Howe who hear now in 2011 is not happy with the way he is portrayed in the movie but what seems beyond doubt is he and Beane consistently clashed over the use of sabermetrics in building and managing the team.

In this new world numbers like OBP are more important. As we now know that was just the beginning. Now we have OPS and WARP as numbers that mean more than we may never know in making teams.

This is a good movie. It is interesting. Still if one does not care for baseball it is hard to see the personality of Pitt carrying it to great heights.