SATURDAY NIGHT


* I"m going to spend my Saturday night in, but fear not! This isn't for nerdy reasons! It's time for my annual reading of Live From New York: An Oral History of Saturday Night Live, by Tom Shales and J.A. Miller. It doesn't get much better than a behind-the-scenes look at SNL from just about everyone who was ever on the show. I've limited myself to reading it just once per year in order to keep in fresh, since it would be a shame to get so used to it that it loses its edge like...well, any number of SNL recurring characters, ironically.

* There has been so much made about Jennifer Love Hewitt going topless that when she finally does do it in a movie, it won't possibly live up to the hype. I mean, she has a nice pair of breasts. Let's not even kid ourselves about that. But it's funny how she is such an object of desire and speculation simply because she's never finally busted them out on-screen. Really, why should she? She hasn't made a good movie or had a good role in years, but still holds a special place in the cultural zeitgeist of horny men by being the forbidden fruit.

* Two great links for all you sports fans out there...

The great Pro Football Talk site recently unveiled their still-growing All-Seinfeld NFL team. Some big laughs from comparing NFL personalities to Seinfeld personalities. I think my favorites were Ron Jaworski = George when he buys ladies' glasses, and Dick Vermeil = Bette Midler's understudy in Rochelle Rochelle

http://www.profootballtalk.com/All-SeinfeldTeam.htm


It's not often you find a post that seems like it's written solely to appeal to me. Well, besides the posts on this site, that is. But this one has it all --- sports, comics, movies and the Office, all wrapped up into one. Enjoy!

http://www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com/?p=3700


* Sunshine was pretty good. It's sort of like a poor man's 2001, though since I didn't like 2001, perhaps that analogy doesn't quite fit. It was a great example of situation-based suspense for the first two-thirds of the film, as the crew has to logically deal with the problems that arise from their mission. The final third of Sunshine is a bit lesser, as it sort of devolves into more of a conventional thriller, but overall the movie is well worth seeing. I helped that I like a lot of the actors in the cast (Rose Byrne, Cliff Curtis, Michelle Yeoh, Scarecrow) and I'm generally a fan of director Danny Boyle.

Out of curiosity, I looked at the Wikipedia entry for the film and it's pretty hilarious. There's a big long section about the research that Boyle and his screenwriter did in the year of writing and conceiving the idea, then another big section about consulting with NASA scientists to get facts right, then a section about what the actors were instructed to do and a lot of the filmmaking process and how the effects and sets were painstakingly developed.

Then, at the bottom of the page, it notes that the film stiffed at the box office and critics didn't really like it. Oh well.